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| | | | | | | | Our Price: $0.00  | | | | Genres: Concerto\Featured Soloist | | | | Description | | Excerpts from the Liner Notes (by Mark L. Lehman)
Clarinet concertos aren’t a recent invention. Mozart’s - a sublime creation and the composer’s last concerto of any kind - dates from 1791. But they are still, two centuries later, scarce. The first half of the twentieth century offers only a few distinguished examples, those by Busoni, Nielsen, Copland, Stravinsky, and Berio being among the best.
Almost all the composers who have written for clarinet and orchestra have had a particular virtuoso in mind to play the solo part. For Mozart, it was his friend Anton Stadler; for Nielsen, Aage Oxenvad of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet; for Stravinsky, Woody Herman; and for Copland, Benny Goodman. The three new concertos so brilliantly performed by Richard Stoltzman on the present recording follow in this great tradition: they were written for and inspired by Stoltzman, with his unsurpassed technical finesse, versatility, and fluidly expressive lyricism in mind.
Each of the three concertos exploits Stoltzman’s musicianship in its own distinctive way. Though all three use the same basic vocabulary-a melodically-dominated, chromatic but freely-tonal idiom in resplendently imaginative orchestral scoring-they differ widely in formal outlines and emotional impact. Only a musician of Stoltzman’s virtuosity and sensitivity could have given such thrilling and persuasive premieres of three so different works. |
| | | | Reviews | | "[On MMC2031,] Stoltzman negotiates the demands of these complex scores with remarkable aplomb and effectiveness. MMC's Polish orchestra, led by an American conductor who most certainly knows the scores, also rises to levels of great virtuosity and dramatic effectiveness. Expertly wrought as the solo parts are by the three American composers, each requires his orchestra to be half the show and then some.
"The idea of the clarinet concerto [such as William Thomas McKinley's] as a work of immense power and drama is new to me. The third and fourth movements attain ever more brilliant sonorities, the whole work representing in sound the stages by which base materials are alchemically transformed into purest gold."
"Like Bruckner in his earlier symphonies and Sibelius in his later, Fenner [in Arundo Donax] produces awesome sounds with moderate means. He also gives the clarinet a part highly challenging for the performer and engaging for the listener."
"John Carbon's [Concerto] score is even more richly orchestrated than McKinley's, reminding me at different turns of Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and Ottorino Respighi, though Carbon's harmonic language and use of percussion are far more advanced than one finds in those masters of the early twentieth century."
"MMC's gorgeously recorded disc is a winner in every respect and decidedly material for the 1997 Want List."
-Fanfare: Robert McColley |
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