REVIEW: Audience gives polite reception to clarinet piece

• WILLIAM NESMITH / CORRESPONDENT
• Posted February 21, 2010 at 11:37 p.m.

In his autobiography, the great Swiss composer Arthur Honegger posed a question to aspiring young composers.

He asked, in short, and in despair, "Do you really wish to be a person who makes things that nobody wants?" Outside of a few places, I'm sure the easiest way to guarantee empty seats at an orchestra concert is to feature new works by modern composers, sometimes defined by the audience as such avant-garde figures as Leos Janacek (died 1928) and Bela Bartok (died 1945). Of course, this list doesn't include George Gershwin or Aaron Copland.

What Honegger didn't take into consideration in his lament was the power of the Western concert music tradition to continue to produce musicians who want to be more than curators of an aural museum.

On Saturday evening the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Alfred Savia, displayed what may be its very finest contribution to that tradition, Lowell Liebermann's new "Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra." Commissioned by a consortium of orchestras including the EPO, this new concerto deserves to become part of that small list of familiar clarinet concertos, along with those by Mozart, Carl Nielsen, Carl Maria von Weber and Copland. It is a thoroughly wonderful piece in every way.

The evening's soloist, Jon Manasse, clearly at the very top of any list of the world's great clarinetists, is an astonishingly eloquent player, and he displayed virtually all of the clarinet's possibilities in the concerto.

Upon occasion, Manasse seemed overborne by the orchestra, but never having heard the piece before, I can't say if that was Liebermann's intent or simply one of those things that happens in live performance.

The opening of this piece is simply one of the most surprising and gorgeous sounds I've ever encountered, closely resembling Balinese gamelan music. Out of this rises the clarinet, emerging through this musical mist and into the bright central allegro before returning back to the opening's stillness.

The third movement, noted by Liebermann to have a Latin sound, is festive, grand and witty and is a fine conclusion to this piece.

But it is the middle movement, all longing and bittersweet pensiveness, which is the emotional core of the work. Like the first movement, this one featured orchestral combinations of the most wonderful invention, with the solo clarinet soaring lyrically above.

The audience seemed underwhelmed, unfortunately, and finally gave a standing ovation, which was thoroughly deserved and should have been more enthusiastically given. This concerto will be, I hope, rapidly accepted and repeatedly played by the world's orchestras.

As soon as it's on a CD, I'll be first in line to get one.

It occurred to me about halfway through the third movement that this could have been deservedly called "Concerto Grosso for Clarinet, Two Percussionists and Orchestra." The percussion section of William Shaltis and Greg Jukes should have gotten an acknowledgment during the ovation after the piece, but didn't - so here it is.

Percussionists, unlike the rest of the orchestra, sometimes find themselves becoming choreographers. Composers, unless they are themselves percussionists, rarely indicate how the various parts are to be apportioned - they simply want a cymbal crash on this beat, a snare drum roll over here, and a few notes on the orchestra bells over there. It is up to the players to figure out who has to move to which instrument in the battery, where to place the sticks, mallets and beaters they share, and then to move through the piece while playing music. This is all part and parcel of being a symphony percussionist.

Shaltis and Jukes, between them, played marimba, xylophone, orchestra bells, upright bells, gong, snare drum, triangle, several types of cymbals and everything else in the percussion cabinet, from slapsticks to jawbone, and they made it look easy.

So, gentlemen, consider this your standing ovation of one person. It should, instead, be a wave.

The evening opened with Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture," a very nice start.

The concert's conclusion was Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, the "Eroica" Symphony, part of the EPO's continuing survey of the Beethoven symphonies.

This was, I fear, disappointing in the first and second movements. Perhaps it is from 40 years of listening to this symphony, but the first movement seemed to me to be far too fast, giving it a frenzied feel.

The second movement, the funeral march, seemed too fast as well, although that is preferable in this case to going too slow and turning the whole thing into an interminable slog to the Scherzo.

The third movement, the Scherzo, pulsed along very nicely with the right amount of bustle and brio, and the final movement was equally well done.

Of course, there was the standard, predictable and thoroughly meaningless standing ovation at the end. Since Evansville gives a standing O to everything, that didn't mean much.

On the air

A digital recording of Saturday's Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra concert will air at 7 p.m. March 7 on WNIN-88.3FM.

And as part of the orchestra's two-year focus on the Beethoven symphonies, the philharmonic soon will make a digital recording of its performance of Symphony No. 3 available for free download at http://www.evansvillephilharmonic.org/.

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2010/feb/21/audience-gives-polite-reception-to-clarinet/