Breathing New Life Into Chamber Music
The Music Scene
Richard Stoltzman; Photo Lisa Marie Mazzuco
Paul McCartney isn’t the only celebrity musician who turns 70 this summer. The man many call the world’s greatest clarinetist, Richard Stoltzman, will perform at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, less than a week shy of his 70th birthday.
The two-time Grammy winner talks like someone half his age, full of the joy of music and discovery, not a hint of a celebrity’s world-weariness. Reminiscences come easily.
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Richard Stoltzman and the ascendancy of the clarinet
Sat, 06/23/2012 - 12:04pm — Vincent de Luise MDOver the last forty years, Richard Stoltzman has led the emergence of the clarinet as one of the most vibrant, textured and nuanced of all the musical instruments, both as a solo vehicle and in providing orchestral color. Along with Charles Neidich of Juilliard, David Shifrin of Yale and CMSLC, and now, the exciting Swedish prodigy Martin Frost, Stoltzman has taken the clarinet to the musical empyrean by performing and recording a significant amount of the clarinet's deep and broad repertoire as well as championing newly commissioned works, not only in the classical idiom, but in jazz and folk-rock as well.
To some clarinet purists, Stoltzman's vibrato and rubato are a bit too much, but for the rest of us, these are the very aspects that make his musical artistry
so eloquent, poetic and endearing. He caresses each note and phrase in his playing in a way that is reminiscent of how Caravaggio and Velazquez enlived the characters in their patinings with their deft and sensitive brushstrokes.
Within Stoltzman's vast discography, his first recording of the Brahms quintet for clarinet and strings (in b minor, Op 115), with the Cleveland Quartet, was a revelation. They breathed and played as one. In one of his earlier performances the Mozart clarinet concerto (in A, K.V. 622), in the second movement cadenza, he created such an astonishing array of at once beautiful and plaintive sounds with those dimished sevenths and cascading arpeggios, that Mozart himself would have been entranced. Indeed, Mozart is likely still smiling because Richard Stoltzman has graced our time with his artistic genius.
Stoltzman and the clarinet
Sat, 06/23/2012 - 1:22am — Vincent de Luise MDOver the last forty years, Richard Stoltzman has led the emergence of the clarinet as one of the most sublime, textured and nuanced of all the musical instruments, either as solo or in the orchestra.
Along with Charles Neidich at Juilliard, David Shifrin at Yale and CMSLC, and now, the remarkable Swedish clarinet prodigy Martin Frost, Stoltzman has essayed the deep and broad literature for the clarinet, and has made it come alive in so many genres - the classical idiom of course, but also in jazz and even folk-rock. For some clarinet purists, Dick's vibrato and rubato are a bit too much, but for the rest of us, these are quintessential aspects of this remarkable musician's creative process and his brilliance as a performing artist. He caresses notes and phrases in a musical work in the same way that Caravaggio enlivened the characters in his paintings with his brushstrokes.
Of Stoltzman's far-ranging discography, his first recording of the Brahms Quintet in b minor, Op 115, with the Cleveland Quartet,is astonishing. The five musicians play as one. In one of Dick's early recordings of the Mozart Concerto (in A, KV 622) he crafts a second movement cadenza that is infused with such plaintive diminished seventh chords and cascading arpeggios that Mozart himself would have been entranced to hear it. Indeed, Mozart is still smiling because Dick Stoltzman has graced our times with his ineffable clarinet artistry.
Vincent de Luise MD
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