San Francisco Classical Voice

In Copland's own arrangement, Stoltzman was playing the violin part as composed, which was a little startling considering its occasional flights into the upper register. But the Sonata works beautifully in the clarinet's resonance, a trick Stoltzman previously achieved when playing and recording the transcription of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata.

Bernstein had just completed his advanced training at the Curtis Institute of Music when he wrote this little two-movement Clarinet Sonata. It's only a tad over 10 minutes long and shows much influence from the late 1930s. Oddly enough, the opening movement, in sonata form, sounds more like a parody of Hindemith than anything else. On the other hand, I suspect that not many today can remember how dominant a figure Hindemith was in American music during the late 1930s and most of the ‘40s. But by the Sonata's second movement, Bernstein was already crafting the style which would develop into works like Fancy Free, On the Town, et al. The Sonata is essentially a curio, but a pleasantly witty one.

The audience cheered all the pop collages. They are welcome to them. To put it mildly, I didn't care for them.

The younger Stoltzman is essentially a jazz pianist, or so the program informed us. Besides, his playing sounded more in line with happy-hour lounge traditions than the artistry of a true jazz concert. Worse, he's a banger, aggravated by the concert grand with the lid propped wide open: “In your face, buddy.” Then too, these pop collages feature himself in long-winded vamps of withered clichés. Father Richard, which is what the audience came to hear, seemed almost the accompanist to the piano part.

Worse than that were the pointless distortions of the originals' basic musical materials. There's more to a piece of music than the melody. The tune may be what we best remember, but it is only one important element in a larger whole. To completely ignore and rewrite Gershwin's original use of harmony, for one example, was absurd. Harmony was at the root of the originality in Gershwin's music. Gershwin's hints of modal harmony are what most sets him apart and above other Broadway composers. It sits at the heart of Ravel's belief that “The Man I Love” was the greatest art song of the 20th Century.

Peter John sought to enliven things by adding gimmick performance techniques. The West Side Story, for instance, opened with both players repeatedly snapping their fingers to set the tempo for “Something's Coming.” Cute, and appropriate to the original, but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way.

One heard and saw tempo foot stomping, even a bit of maracas playing by clarinetist Stoltzman as his pianist son flailed away. Then too, we had the clarinet playing individual notes into the pianos' coffin-like interior as the pedal was held down, a kind of echo effect from the 1940s. When you get right down to it, the repeated use of such things among the pop rhapsodies represents just so many irrelevant distractions. The whole series seemed mostly like an effort to promote the son into prominence, since the various arrangements relegated the clarinet to a back seat much of the time.

Richard Stoltzman is possibly the most distinguished clarinetist of the past 50 years, a man of the highest musicianship on all counts, quite apart from his instrumental virtuosity. But like so many sons of famous musicians, his son impressed me as no more than a minor talent.

Even so, I was very surprised to see as many vacant seats for this program. The box seats were all empty, and there were blocks of four, five or six seats around the hall. Still, the Copland was a lovely experience, while the Bernstein was like running into an old college chum. Even the son's gamey piano playing couldn't deflect that.