Richard Stoltzman
MASTER OF THE CLARINET Richard Stoltzman Talks About the Sublimity of Mozart, a Taboo Technique, and the Linzer Tortes at Lincoln Center
Richard Stoltzman is arguably the world's greatest living clarinetist. Among his accomplishments are winning the coveted Avery Fisher Prize in 1986 (the first wind player to do so), presenting the first clarinet recitals at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, and assembling a large and admired body of recordings. He's no slave to the classical masters, though; many of his CDs are aimed at the crossover crowd, and jazz is a frequent element in his concerts. Still, he has an ongoing commitment to commission and perform new music, premiering a new Clarinet Concerto, for example, that was written for him by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, and regularly recording 20th-century works for clarinet. (A 2001 release on the MMC label, part of a series, features concertos written for Stoltzman by American composers; another on RCA gathers works by Prokofiev, Nielsen, and Lutoslawski.) Barnes & Noble.com's EJ Johnson caught up with the virtuoso to talk about his distinctive approach to the clarinet, the music that inspires him, and more.
Barnes & Noble.com: You've made so many recordings, but I have to say my favorite is the one with the Mozart Clarinet Concerto and Quintet. You really make the clarinet sing.
Richard Stoltzman: Well, thank you. That's my purpose, I've decided, not to sound like a clarinet. [laughs] I mean, not that there's anything wrong with the clarinet. But I didn't fall in love with the clarinet; I fell in love with the ability of the instrument to sing. In fact, at the beginning of my life, when I was old enough to get a clarinet, my dad had me come to some of his choir rehearsals and sit in and just kind of quietly play along. I hadn't even learned how to read music yet; I just did it by ear. And that was really my first experience of playing, trying to sound like voices.
The thing that is very close to me about the Mozart Quintet goes back to when I used to go to the music festival at Marlborough, Vermont. And Pablo Casals, the very famous cellist who was part of the festival there for many years, he asked for the slow movement to be played at his funeral, and I was honored to be part of the ensemble that played it. It's a piece that I was coached on by a wonderful wind player at the festival, and when we were practicing the piece, I remember he stopped us in the middle of the slow movement and said, "You have to be careful with this piece, because this is the music that they're going to play for me when I go to heaven." We were very young kids at the time, just playing it through, and I think he wanted us to understand that you don't "just play it through," you know. "This is a very profound bunch of notes here, kids, and so, let's get into it!"
The special thing about the Concerto, though, was that we -- the English Chamber Orchestra and I -- didn't use a conductor for the recording. I'd never done anything like that before, not use a leader. So to me, that was the ultimate chamber music experience. In fact, the second movement is the first take. Actually, it isn't even the first take -- it was the sound check. After we had played it through once, Max [the producer] said, "Dick, you'd better come in here and listen to this." And we just sat there and I said, "Geez! God!" The result is, I don't know, some kind of beautiful return to serenity. Something like that. It's a lucky moment, actually.
B&N.com: It was the Brahms Quintet, so I understand, that inspired you to become a professional clarinetist.
RS: Yeah. Before I entered Yale, I went to the summer program in Norfolk, Connecticut, and I heard the person who was going to be my teacher, Keith Wilson, play that Quintet. And I had never heard it before, I have to confess. Not that I had a shoddy education, but growing up in San Francisco and the Midwest, I just hadn't really thought about classical music and chamber music as the prime center of my life. And when I heard the Brahms Quintet I thought, "My God, I could die if I could just play this once!" It's such an amazing work.
B&N.com: Let me ask you about something you do that's a little controversial among clarinetists, and that is play with vibrato.
RS: Oh, God. Yeah. I'm, what, guilty of this, I guess you'd say. Almost all my teachers warned me about vibrato in varying degrees of sternness. You know, that it either is forbidden, or you'd better watch it, or be careful, it sounds nice but probably some people won't like it. That kind of thing. But I remember when I was in graduate school, I was playing a contemporary piece by Mel Powell, who was one of my teachers there and, I found out later, was also the pianist for Benny Goodman. He wrote extremely contemporary music, and I remember he told me later on that Benny had listened to some of his so-called academic music and said, "What do you write that s--t for, man?" [laughs] That was his choice. But anyway, on the second page of one of his pieces there was a mark that said "these three measures no vibrato." And I just thought, well, wait a minute, so what was the page and a half before that supposed to be? And it just made me think, OK, no vibrato is a technique; no vibrato is not a way of life. So, I'm not going to get on some kind of bandwagon about it, but people come up to me after concerts and say, "Gee, I didn't know the clarinet could sound like that," you know, and I decided to take that as a compliment. [laughs] But I think what they mean is that the clarinet usually isn't allowed to sound like that, or it's not proper, or something is wrong about using vibrato. But I'm not in that camp.
B&N.com: Well, one camp you are in is classical crossover, which you've really embraced. It's a bit of a dirty word these days, though. What do you think about that?
RS: Well, I mean, if you use the term in the most sublime way, you could say that Mozart was a great crossover artist, or Schubert, or Beethoven. I mean, Mozart heard a Turkish band and the next week it was in one of his operas. And Schubert took the dance tunes and pop songs of the day and created very sensitive, lyrical lieder and ländler [dances]. And one of the hit tunes that Beethoven was furious about was some sort of stupid little pop thing, you know [starts to sing], which was from some unknown Italian guy's opera, and he put it into a clarinet trio and turned it into something somewhat sarcastic but also somewhat.... Look, music is music, and I can take something that maybe someone else would say is banal and turn it into something striking and emotionally satisfying and terrific. And I just feel like that's what crossover is at its best: It's taking music where you find it -- real music, real melodies, real harmonies -- and assimilating them and then playing them with your own sincerity, with your own sensibility, what you are as a person. I'm mostly a classical musician, but I heard big band records all the time as a kid, and my parents sang in choirs, and I never thought there was one kind of music that was more appropriate than another kind in certain places.
B&N.com: It can be controversial, though. For instance, I understand you caused a stir at Bayreuth [the German opera house founded by Richard Wagner] when you played jazz there.
RS: Yeah. Well, it caused a great stir with the audience -- the audience loved it! But the publicity, the hype about it was controversial. And the presenter, I remember she met us at the train, and she was very, very concerned and upset because she'd gotten threats, you know, from people who were completely irate, who said this is hallowed ground here that we're talking about, and you mustn't allow these Americans to play jazz in, well…
B&N.com: Wagner's shrine!
RS: Yeah. I don't know. There were lots of German words she came up with for why we couldn't do this. [laughs] We thought about changing the program, actually, but once we got on the stage and we were warming up and the stagehands were setting up the lights and stuff, we were doing some of the jazz parts of the program. And, you know, they were smiling, they were into it. I mean, I think they might have been aware that it wasn't supposed to be part of the aura of the place, but they were having a good time. And then as soon as we started playing for the audience, we knew it was fine. In fact, we had to play like two or three encores, and afterward, people were slapping us on the back and stuff like that. So, ah well, it's a tempest in a teapot.
B&N.com: Do you also play klezmer? That's so closely connected to the sound of the clarinet.
RS: It is. No, I love the sound of klezmer music, and on one of the records I made for RCA called Spirits, there's one piece, "Oseh Shalom," a beautiful, haunting tune of the Jewish tradition, and I tried to emulate a little of the qualities of klezmer. But I haven't studied it, and so I don't feel right about just sort of jumping in and doing it. I always feel that the things I do best are those that are most natural to me and that I feel come from my own life.
B&N.com: On another topic, I understand you've published a songbook.
RS: Yes! For me, it's a huge achievement, to publish this music that I've played for my whole life, or my whole concert career life. And I like that it's called a songbook [Richard Stoltzman Songbook is the full title -- Ed.]. I mean, "songbook" is just a generic term for most people, but I often meet people who come to my concerts from outside of the classical music world. They heard me in some other context and decided to take a chance and go to a -- God forbid! -- clarinet recital. [laughs] And I remember we were playing in Pasadena, and a nice little old lady came back after the concert, and we had played some Schubert and some Bill Douglas, and she said, "You know, I very much liked the Bill Douglas pieces, they were very nice, but that Schubert song, that was really nice." And she was talking about the "Arpeggione" Sonata, which is a half-an-hour piece, but her term was still song.
B&N.com: Right, it's become a generic word for music nowadays.
RS: Yeah, my mom used to say, you know, "I like that Mozart song that you played," meaning the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. So, I thought, well, you can belittle that, and say, come on, it's the Allegro Moderato, or whatever, it's not the song. But on the other hand, it is the song. So these are the songs. A lot of them are beautiful pieces I've worked on with Bill Douglas over 30 years, and a lot of them are from classical music that has beautiful melodies that I believe musicians should approach with the sound of a song, with the sound of words. Anyway, it's a great book, and there are things in there that people have asked me for for years and years.
B&N.com: Forgive me, but you're also a published chef, aren't you?
RS: [laughs] Yeah. Well, everybody loves to eat, and musicians especially, I guess. I got into it mainly because of a person at Yale, a violin teacher there who had a group of students who lived in his home with him. And all of them had to cook -- he insisted, even if they didn't know how to, because he felt that everything should relate to music. It was a disaster sometimes, but what you realize is you can't separate practicing and the toil of working on a piece of music from all the other things of life.
It's my Linzer torte recipe that's been published a whole bunch, and I sort of came up with my own version of it -- a little bit like putting a few embellishments on Bach, or making a little cadenza in the middle of the Mozart Concerto. They actually served my torte at Lincoln Center at the restaurant. The chef took my recipe, and when I was doing the Mostly Mozart Festival one year, they featured it on the menu. I saw what they were charging for a slice, and I said, "I'm in the wrong business, man! [laughs] $7.75 for a slice of Linzer torte? Sheesh! What am I doing onstage? I should be in restaurants!"
September, 2002
EJ Johnson
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