Last night in the Green Room, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) presented The Clarinet Program, featuring a return visit by clarinetist Jerome Simas, former Bay Area resident and performer and now Assistant Professor of Clarinet at the University of Oregon. The program consisted of four works, all with major clarinet parts. Three of them were performed by Simas, and the fourth was taken by Jeff Anderle. The repertoire covered music as early as 1894 and as recent as 2009.
The first half of the program covered the period of transition into the current century. It began with The Horse with the Lavender Eye, a suite of four “episodes” composed by Stephen Hartke in 1997. This was scored for violin, clarinet, and piano, the same combination of instruments used by Béla Bartók for his “Contrasts.” As might be gathered from the title, Hartke’s imagination was a bit more surrealistic than Bartók’s; but he definitely was capable carrying on the torch passed by Bartók when it came to pursuing imaginative sonorities for this collection of instruments.
The surrealism of Horse has much to do with the extent to which it is a composition of extremes. For the clarinetist this means extended passages for the piccolo (E-flat) clarinet, as well as both B-flat and A clarinets. However, extremes also pervade the rhetoric of the episodes themselves.
The first of these, “Music of the Left: Left-Handed,” requires all three performers to execute their parts only with the left hand. For the violinist (Anna Presler) this involved some highly demanding pizzicato work with one finger plucking while another fixed the pitch. Simas had much more flexibility, since the clarinetist can play a moderate sample of notes from two registers without using the right hand. Hartke then required the piano (Eric Zivian) to spend most of the time rumbling in the lower registers.
The second episode was named after Carlo Goldoni’s play, The Servant of Two Masters. In his opening remarks, Zivian explain that he was the servant. The clarinet and violin were the two masters, each making different (and extreme) demands on the piano for accompaniment. It was a clever approach to composition; but, once the joke was established, it felt as if the composer was not quite sure where to take it.
This was followed by an episode inspired by Dom Casmurro, by the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. As Hartke observed in his notes, he was drawn to the author’s vision of “waltzing at the abyss of final catastrophe.” His tempo indication is “Gingerly, but always moving along,” capturing both the lightness and the extreme delicacy of this literary vision. The music then makes a radical turn into the concluding episode, “Cancel My Rumba Lesson: Two Left Feet.” The primary title is taken from a panel of one of R. Crumb’s comic strips, while the overall architecture of the suite has progressed from too many left hands to too many left feet in the form of a don’t-try-this-at-home dance lesson, winding up with an unexpected (and highly extreme) serene conclusion.
Taken as a whole, the suite was given a solid execution of unabashed raucousness. This made for an excellent introduction to the second work on the program, which was also the newest piece, “Velvet Hammer,” completed by Sean Friar in 2009. This was the one composition that Anderle performed as part of a rather unconventional ensemble bringing electric guitar (Travis Andrews) together with clarinet, flute (Stacey Pelinka), double bass (Michael Taddei) and piano (Zivian). Friar described “Velvet Hammer” as “an experiment in combining my favorite aspects of rock and classical music in as genuine a way as I could.” I am not quite sure just what his “favorite aspects of rock” were; but there was definitely no shortage of Spinal Tap dynamics. Nevertheless, Andrews always seemed to find the right way to blend his instrument with the rest of the ensemble, giving the impression that chamber music was what Friar liked most about the classical repertoire.
The first half concluded with another trio, this time bringing Simas and Zivian together with cellist Leighton Fong. This was a more traditional trio in three movements composed by Zivian in 2008. There was no shortage of technical demands on all three of the musicians, all of whom met their challenges with enthusiasm. Nevertheless, those elements of rhetoric that pervaded Hartke’s “episodes” and emphasized Friar’s opposing interests in rock and classical seemed absent in Zivian’s three-movement composition. The work felt like virtuosity for its own sake in the domains of both performance technique and compositional skill in managing floods of notes of often intimidating density. Whatever merits this piece may have had as an abstraction, they were overshadowed by the compelling dramatism of the two works that preceded it.
The second half of the program took us back to the nineteenth century with a single composition, the first of Johannes Brahms’ two Opus 120 clarinet sonatas, the one in F minor. Like his mentor, Robert Schumann, Brahms was always seeking out that sweet spot that would honor both the structural constraints of classicism and the unrestrained expressiveness of the German Romantic movement. I have told the story of his clarinet music many times, how hearing Richard Mühlfeld, clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra, inspired Brahms to renege on his self-imposed retirement and compose four pieces for Mühlfeld, two sonatas, a trio (with cello and piano), and a quintet (with string quartet). Each of these compositions is masterful in seeking out and accounting for that aforementioned sweet spot.
Simas clearly appreciated the value of that sweet spot. His execution was expressive in all the right ways, always managing dynamics and tempo in the interest of both dramatism and structural clarity. As an accompanist, Zivian was always right where he needed to be, following Simas’ approaches to shaping the score in every detail. Nevertheless, it was virtually impossible for Brahms to write for piano and not give the pianist some of his own solo turns. Here Zivian tended to overdo the expressiveness, disturbing the balance that he had established so well when supporting Simas. Fortunately, those piano solo moments were few in number, making for a generally positive impression that could have done with a bit more polishing.
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