Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) presented its Clarinet Party program. LCCE’s clarinetist Jerome Simas was joined by his colleague at the San Francisco Symphony, Principal Clarinet Carey Bell, and SFCM Faculty member Jeff Anderle, a founding member of both the Sqwonk duo and the Splinter Reeds quintet. The program consisted of six compositions for different combinations of members of the clarinet family, five of which were composed during the twentieth or 21st centuries.
However, the one “outlier” in this collection was particularly fascinating, since it involved a seldom-heard member of the clarinet family. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 439b is a collection of five divertimentos for three basset horns, all composed in the key of B-flat major. It would probably be fair to call this instrument the “tenor” in the clarinet family, since its range lies between the seldom-encountered alto clarinet and the bass clarinet. Mozart used this instrument in a generous number of his orchestral compositions (including his opera scores); so it should be no surprise that it also figured in his divertimento compositions.
Of particular interest was Mozart’s ear for the diversity of sonorities afforded by all of the instruments in the clarinet family. As a result, the attentive listener at last night’s performance would have had no trouble sorting out soprano, alto, and tenor “roles” for the three distinct instruments. The blending of these “roles” by Bell, Anderle, and Simas could not have been more engaging. There is reason to believe that many of Mozart’s divertimento compositions were written to serve as “background music” at social functions. However, an opportunity to listen to three basset horns deserves more attention; and there were more than enough engaging rhetorical turns in Mozart’s music to satisfy that attention.
The other departures from the “standard” clarinet (both the B-flat and A instruments) involved the bass clarinet. Simas played the world premiere of a suite composed for him by David Garner, Professor of Composition at SFCM. Simas was accompanied at the piano by Eric Zivian. As in the Baroque period, Garner’s suite was a collection of dances; but the dances were all situated in the twentieth century, going all the way back to the Charleston of the Roaring Twenties and all the way forward to the retro-funk that emerged during the dance scene that became popular in the Seventies. Both Simas and Zivian had no trouble getting into the spirit in each of Garner’s five dance movement, making for one of the most refreshing premiere performances I have encountered during the current season.
By way of contrast, Zivian accompanied Bell in a performance of Jessie Montgomery’s “Peace.” Montgomery’s note for the program book observed that she wrote this piece a month after COVID-19 quarantine had been imposed on a general public scale. One could appreciate the “coming to terms” rhetoric in her score, expressed through through the contrasting sonorities of an A clarinet (only slightly darker than that of the B-flat instrument) with the broader range afforded by the piano keyboard.
The two opening selections on the program both included electronics. The first of these was Anderle’s arrangement of “Zoetrope,” a tune composed by the Scottish duo called Boards of Canada. This was basically a “repetitive structures” work for all three clarinets, with intricate textures arising from “short-distance” echoing. Ironically, this was followed by Anderle playing a piece for clarinet and electronics by Olly Wilson entitled “Echoes.” The coupling of these two compositions could not have been more engaging.
The remaining work on the program was a bass clarinet duo performed by Anderle and Simas. “Seven Pasos” was composed by Sebastián Tozzola, who plays bass clarinet in the Orquesta Filarmonica of Buenos Aires. The title refers to the 7/4 meter of the composition, whose swinging rhetoric was deftly negotiated by the two clarinetists. This was the one offering whose surface structure was so engaging that I found myself curious to listen again to see what, if any, approach Tozzola had taken to the score’s “deep structure.”
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