Explore a myriad of chamber music alongside NWS Fellows as they tackle styles spanning over 200 years! The clarinet has a rich history and concert artist Alexander Fiterstein will make sure we experience all of it, joining Fellows for a performance of one of Mozart’s best-known chamber works, the Clarinet Quintet. In Paul Schoenfeld’s wildly virtuosic and fun Trio, the clarinet celebrates Jewish traditions, including klezmer music. The wind and brass Fellows are on display for John Harbison’s abstract score that provides answers before it asks questions, while Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova explores familiarity and the unknown in her music, which John Adams called “extremely original and rare.”

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Program

John Harbison

Music for Eighteen Winds (1986)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

John Harbison’s lucid and relatable style reflects his own broad tastes, from Bach and Stravinsky on the classical side to the jazz piano sounds he cultivated in his own ensemble starting at the age of 11. After studying at Harvard and Princeton, Harbison began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, where he remains in the distinguished role of Institute Professor.

It was an invitation from the MIT Arts Council that led to Harbison’s Music for Eighteen Winds. As he wrote in a program note, he was asked “to compose something for any MIT performance organization, of any length, of any intent. Commissions seldom grant this kind of freedom, and I wrote a piece I had been contemplating for some time—for winds, concise (about 11 minutes), and abstract (without extra-musical associations).”

The scoring mostly conforms to the usual orchestral complement of winds and brass, with the addition of an alto saxophone that inserts jazzy runs into the angular, neoclassical proceedings. Harbison described how the work splits into “two large sections, both based on the same musical materials: I. Very fast, full ensemble, answers, urban, concrete; II. Not as fast, solos, questions, rural, metaphysical.”

 

Dobrinka Tabakova

Such Different Paths (2007-08)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

From the time of her first piano lessons at age seven in Bulgaria, Dobrinka Tabakova enjoyed improvising at the keyboard. At 11, when her family moved to London, she began to study composition formally, and she went on to earn degrees at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and King’s College London. Championed for years by some of Europe’s finest musicians, Tabakova broke through to a wider audience with the release of her debut album on ECM Records, String Paths, which earned her a Grammy nomination in 2014. That disc closes with the string septet Such Different Paths, composed in 2008 for the Spectrum Series in Berlin, and first performed there by an ensemble featuring the superstar Dutch violinist Janine Jansen.

As Tabakova explained in a program note, Such Different Paths emerged from “the underlying idea of music as building blocks,” with the intention that “there is the sense of a journey.” With stacks of cyclical, recurring motives, she touches on the European strain of Minimalism advanced by the likes of Henryk Górecki and Louis Andriessen, with whom she studied briefly. There is also an antique quality to the music, an aspect that arises frequently in Tabakova’s works, such as the 2006 Suite in Old Style. Sometimes the austere string harmonies in this modern septet seem to echo the sound of the viol consort, a tradition with 500 years of history in England.

 

Paul Schoenfeld

Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1986)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Paul Schoenfeld is best known for his compositions that incorporate elements of Jewish folk music and heritage. He is also one of the rare classical composers in this day and age with a vital sense of humor, as seen in his official bio that starts with a rundown of brutal reviews of his music from around the world. The Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano, written in 1990 for the clarinetist David Shifrin, exemplifies Schoenfeld’s spirited and unapologetic embrace of Jewish folk traditions, from campy Klezmer to maudlin liturgical singing.

The four movements of the Clarinet Trio correspond to a typical classical structure while also incorporating Jewish elements, starting with a Freylakh, a dance style that takes its name from the Yiddish word for “festive.” Instead of a scherzo, the second movement is a biting March with shades of Shostakovich, followed by a slow Nigun (Hebrew for “melody”), reflecting the wordless, free-flowing vocal style that is at the core of Hasidic Judaism. The fast finale, Kozatzke, references a Jewish adaptation of the Ukrainian Cossack dance, that energetic move which involves kicking out one leg at a time from a deep knee bend.

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Quintet in A major for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581 (1789)
Approximate duration: 32 minutes

The music that Mozart wrote for his friend and fellow Freemason Anton Stadler played no small part in elevating the clarinet to the indispensable concert instrument it is today. Until the 18th century, the closest precursor was the cylindrical, single-reed woodwind known as the chalumeau that had open finger holes like a recorder and which only played in a compressed, lower register. The advent of a register key opened access to the instrument’s upper range, which offered a bright tone not unlike an 18th-century trumpet, or clarino in Italian—hence the diminutive clarinetto, rendered in English as clarinet.

Through his friendship with Stadler, Mozart came to write a Trio in 1786 for the novel combination of clarinet, viola and piano (the so-called “Kegelstatt” Trio). A Quintet followed in 1789, scored for two violins, viola, cello and basset clarinet, an instrument designed by Stadler with an extended low range. The Clarinet Concerto that Mozart wrote just two months before he died in 1791 also featured Stadler and his basset clarinet.

Despite Stadler’s advocacy, his basset clarinet design died out, and most performers today perform the Clarinet Quintet on a modern clarinet, adjusting a few low notes as needed. The instrument’s fluidity and wide range is on display from the outset, when it enters with rising and falling arpeggios in response to a smooth string chorale.

The second movement places a songlike melody in the clarinet’s sweet soprano register, offset by a few well-timed drops into the throaty chalumeau range. Muted strings provide a soft bed of sound, and the first violin rises to act as a melodic foil to the clarinet.

The Menuetto, based on the graceful three-beat dance from France, makes a game of handing off slurred, chromatic phrases. The clarinet waits out the first contrasting trio section cast in the parallel minor key, but it returns for a second trio in the home key.

The finale begins with a simple, bouncing theme that would not sound out of place on a children’s playground. This humble tune becomes a vehicle for flashy variations, showing off the clarinet’s wide leaps and virtuosic passagework. An Adagio variation provides a momentary lull, before a short transition and clarinet cadenza usher in the energized closing.

-- Copyright © 2018 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.