Hindemith: Concerto for Clarinet
and Orchestra; Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet; Sonata for Clarinet and
Piano. Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Kirk Trevor (Concerto);
Ida Kavafian and Theodore Arm, violins, Steven Tenenbom, viola, and Fred
Sherry, cello (Quintet); Yehudi
Wyner, piano (Sonata). Navona.
$16.99.
The Lyric Clarinet: Vocal Works
Arranged for Clarinet and Piano. F. Gerard Errante, clarinet; Philip
Fortenberry, Voltaire Verzosa and D. Gause, pianists. Ravello. $12.99.
Brian Noyes: Points of Decision;
Shadows of Memory. Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Petr Vronský (Points); St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra conducted by
Vladimir Lande (Shadows). Navona.
$14.99.
Marty Regan: Selected Works for
Japanese Instruments, Volume 3—Scattering Light, Scattering Flowers.
Navona. $14.99.
Gráinne Mulvey: Akanos
and Other Works. Navona. $16.99.
The tone, timbre and range
of the clarinet, from its highest register to its chalumeau depths, make the
instrument a particularly adept one for imitating an idealized version of the
human voice. And the clarinet’s fluidity – when it is expertly played –
enhances the feeling of listening to warm and beautiful singing, at least when
that is the experience a composer is trying to evoke. It would be exaggerating
to suggest that Hindemith sought vocal-like beauty in his works for clarinet –
he was more concerned with counterpoint and structural elements than with the instrument’s
sound for its own sake – but Richard Stoltzman certainly extracts all the
feeling that is present in the Concerto,
Quintet and Sonata on a new
Navona CD. Stoltzman has excellent breath control and produces a fine, even
tone from his instrument, which cuts through Hindemith’s sometimes-dense
scoring while at the same time fitting neatly into the sonic world that the
composer sought to create. The Concerto,
which Hindemith originally wrote for Benny Goodman, comes across particularly
well here, with especially effective contrast between the third and fourth
movements – which are marked not with tempo indications but with moods (ruhig, “quiet,” and heiter, “cheerful”). The five-movement Quintet is also very well performed, the musicians emphasizing its
rather craggy construction, which still sounds remarkably modern for a work
written in 1923 (although Hindemith revised it in 1954). The structure here is
quite striking, the fifth movement being an exact retrograde of the first and
the third, a pastiche of Ländler
tunes, requiring the clarinetist to switch between B-flat and E-flat
instruments. Stoltzman is adept at this, and equally so with the demands of the
Sonata, in a performance that has
particularly interesting resonance: pianist Yehudi Wyner was a student of
Hindemith and then a teacher of Stoltzman – and is himself a composer. The
result of this Stoltzman/Wyner collaboration is a tightly knit performance that
progresses with intelligence all the way from the seriousness of the first
movement to the good-natured unpretentiousness of the finale.
The vocal and lyrical
qualities of the clarinet are made more explicit on a Ravello CD featuring F.
Gerard Errante and offering clarinet-and-piano transcriptions of works
originally written for voice. The musical mixture here of classical songs (from
the French and German traditions), songs from North and South America, and one
work from the avant-garde (a piece called lunar
lace by D. Gause, who provides Errante’s piano accompaniment on that single
track) is a somewhat uneasy one. Errante’s playing is uniformly fine, but the
interest level of the music is decidedly mixed, resulting in a (+++) rating for
the disc. The French-song arrangements, three from Debussy and four from
Poulenc, come off best: they are warm, plaintive and emotionally involving by
turns. The German lieder – three by
Brahms, two by Schumann and one by Schubert – are less successful, the absence
of the voice being felt more keenly even though the clarinet’s lines are quite
expressive. All the classical songs are well accompanied by Voltaire Verzosa,
while Philip Fortenberry is the pianist for the North and South American songs
– two of the former and four of the latter (including three South American ones
by Carlos Guastavino), plus a final track combining Alberto Ginastera’s Triste with Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns.. All these songs are
affecting, if somewhat on the superficial side, and certainly Errante’s lovely
clarinet tone provides a pleasant sound in the absence of voice – but the more-popular
music relies for its effect on the singer’s words, not the composer’s
contribution, and without those words, there is a formulaic quality to the song
transcriptions that renders them less than fully involving. This is a CD
offering fine clarinet playing in the service of music that does not always
deserve this level of attention and attentiveness.
The clarinet is simply part
of the orchestral fabric on a new Navona CD featuring the music of Brian Noyes,
but here too the music involves words replaced, in a sense, with instruments.
The words in this case are those of English poet John Clare (1794-1863), known
as the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” because of his social class and the area
where he lived. Clare led an unhappy life and suffered from what we would now
call depression, as well as from alcoholism; he voluntarily went into an asylum
in 1837. But in 1841, in the grip of several delusions, he escaped from medical
care and walked 80 miles to his home area, where he wrongly believed he had two
wives, one being his actual wife and the other a woman who was no longer alive.
Noyes finds this period of Clare’s life, which the poet wrote about in Journey Out of Essex, fascinating, and
it forms the basis of both Points of
Decision and Shadows of Memory.
These are purely orchestral works, but both are intended to evoke the words as
well as the feelings of Clare. The first, longer piece is supposed to represent
the poet’s various moods as he walked away from the asylum; the second is
intended to reflect the difficulties of his journey home. To those unfamiliar
with Clare – whose work has gained in stature in recent years but remains
relatively little-known – the background of these orchestral tone poems will be
obscure. The works themselves are well-made but not especially original in the
way they seek to portray someone’s emotional state; both get fine performances
that do not, however, show convincingly why the music should engage listeners as music – that is, why it should appeal
to those who do not know the reasons for its creation. Clare was re-committed
to an asylum after five months back home, and eventually died in that second
institution; his story in fact has elements worthy of opera, not just of tone
poems. But the (+++) CD of Noyes’ music, which contains only two of the works
inspired by Clare that Noyes has written, requires too much knowledge of the
subject matter underlying the music to be appealing to a wide audience.
The interplay of voice and
instruments is more direct in the title work of a new CD featuring the music of
Marty Regan (born 1972). Scattering
Light, Scattering Flowers (2011) uses a female voice with shakuhachi (a
bamboo flute) and 25-string koto (Japan’s national instrument, derived from the
Chinese zheng) to evoke a series of images – and indeed, image evocation, with
human voice in this piece and without it in the four other works here, is the
main effect of Regan’s compositions for Japanese instruments, of which he has
written more than 60. To Western ears, a little of this music goes a long way,
since the sounds are quite different from those of Occidental classical music
(which, incidentally, is extremely popular in Japan); and those sounds have
enough similarity from work to work, and sometimes from instrument to
instrument, to make the overall sonic palette of this (+++) Navona CD seem
rather bland. In addition to the title track, the works here are Beyond the Sky (2005) and Shakuhachi Concerto No. 1: “Southern Wind”
(2008), both for an ensemble of Japanese instruments, the latter featuring a
shakuhachi soloist; Phoenix (2009)
for flute and shamisen (a plucked three-stringed instrument); and 21-String Koto Concerto No. 1: “Spirit of
the Mountains” (2008), which includes not only the instrument of its title
but also a 17-string koto and two of the more-typical 13-string variety. There
is a certain delicacy of blandness about this music, its lines tending to move
sinuously and its sounds and rhythms pleasant and rather “New Age-y” rather
than strongly emotionally involving. Much of it comes across a bit like
background music, although in fact a series of close hearings – for listeners
willing to commit the time and effort – reveals considerable beauty and
subtlety here. The disc is nevertheless a limited-interest item.
So too is the (+++) Navona CD
of the music of Irish composer Gráinne
Mulvey (born 1966). Here the human voice appears in conjunction with a “voice”
of another kind, that of the machine. Mulvey likes to contrast electronic or
synthesized sounds with those made by humans, and in two of the seven works on
this disc, that contrast is played out between a soprano (Elizabeth Hilliard,
handling a challenging role well) and tape: The
Gift of Freedom, which is intended as celebratory, and The Seafarer, where hope emerges from a state of mournfulness. Tape
is used to contrast instruments elsewhere on the disc, in Syzygy for cello (Annette Cleary) and tape, Soundscape III for flute (Joe O’Farrell) and tape, and – most
intriguingly – in Shifting Colours,
where O’Farrell’s flute plays against (and is played off against) a synthesized
flute, resulting in a dialogue by turns amusing and involving (although at 10
minutes, it does go on too long). The remaining works here are Steel-Grey Splinters for solo piano
(Matthew Schellhorn), in which the percussive elements of the piano dominate
over any attempt at tunefulness or expressiveness; and Akanos for orchestra, played by the Lithuanian National Symphony
Orchestra under Robertas Šervenikas,
in which – as in the piano work – Mulvey’s main concern is the production of
widely contrasting sounds and their juxtaposition against each other. This
technique, also seen in several of the other pieces here, becomes tiresome
after a while – the ear longs for consonance that is very rarely forthcoming.
The disc will be of interest primarily to those who want to hear some recent
uses of the sorts of strong contrasts and electronic-vs.-traditional
instrumental layouts that composers have been using in much the same way since
the middle of the 20th century.
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