Just four works to go in our journey through clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's "Top 10 [really 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos"

THIS TIME: Coming up we have Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, and Kodály

It seems to me I've heard that song before.
It's from an old familiar score.
I know it well, that melody . . . .

[Yes, "that song" is the opening Andante ma non troppo of the Sibelius First Symphony, more or less as it passed that Sunday afternoon in March 1950 from the stage of Carnegie Hall across the country. We indeed heard the New York Philharmonic, but not "under the direction of Victor de Sabata," interesting as that might be to hear. (Recordings of that broadcast do exist!)]

by Ken

I think by now we all know who the conductor and clarinetist on our clip are. Once again we hear once Leonard Bernstein conducting the NY Phil, with the clarinetting provided by Stanley Drucker, the orchestra's principal clarinet, 1960-2009 -- from the orchestra's March 1967 recording of the symphony.I think by now we all know that that clip of the opening of the Sibelius First Symphony is from the March 1967 New York Philharnonic recording conducted by Leonard Bernstein, with the clarinetting provided by Stanley Drucker (1929-2022), the orchestra's principal clarinet, 1960-2009.

What caught my eye on that concert program, though, as I perused the Philharmonic's nifty Digital Archive, was the date of that concert. Stanley D., we recall, joined the orchestra as assistant principal in 1948 (at age 19). If, as seems likely, he was playing the 2nd clarinet part, this would have been his first NY Phil performance of Sibelius 1.

I bring it up because we're going to run into Sibelius 1 as we make our final push -- clear down to No. 1 and beyond -- through Charlotte (NC) Symphony clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's "Top 10 [really 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos," posted on the orchestra's Sound of Charlotte Blog in November 2020, played mostly by Stanley D. (So far, down through No. 4, we've heard him play all seven -- today is where the "mostly" kicks in.)

THE LIST SO FAR

No proper post today, but let's listen to Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances"

by Ken

Except for a brief interlude or two, I've had no Internet (and most of that time no phone!) connection most of the day, so I've given up trying to do a post.

As you know, we still need to finish up with Ariadne auf Naxos, but I was also thinking about another post, which would involve Rachmaninoff's last major work, the Symphonic Dances, so for now I thought I'd just present this (unidentified) performance of this virtually symphonic suite of three dances, with some background chatter cribbed from Wikipedia:

RACHMANINOFF: Symphonic Dances, Op. 45



i. Non allegro
ii. Andante con moto (Tempo di valse)
iii. Lento assai -- Allegro vivace

#

Fleshing out our sound picture of Leon Fleisher

RAVEL: Sonatine
i. Modéré
ii. Mouvement de menuet
iii. Animé

Leon Fleisher, piano. Epic-Sony, recorded July 14-16, 1958

by Ken

In Friday night's "Leon Fleisher postscript" -- a "postscript," that is, to the previous week's post on "Schubert's mighty Wanderer Fantasy," in which Fleisher had been featured -- we heard a bit of perhaps unexpected repertory from Fleisher, Debussy's "Clair de lune," from a 1958 Debussy-Ravel LP. I suggested we might hear the complete Suite bergamasque, from which "Clair de lune" derives, but I thought instead we'd hear Ravel's Sonatine.


FLEISHER 2.0: THE ONE-HANDED PIANIST

In April 2012 I wrote about a pleasant evening at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at which Fleisher had shared the bill with a very different sort of pianist but a longtime colleague, Gilbert Kalish, who had served with him as faculty chairman during Fleisher's long stint as artistic director of one of the country's prestigious music-education programs, the summer Tanglewood Music Center.

Preview: You know who this famous tenor is, and what he's singing, right?

There's a tear in your eye,
and I'm wondering why,
for it never should be there at all.
With such pow'r in your smile,
sure a stone you'd beguile,
so there's never a teardrop should fall.
When your sweet lilting laughter's
like some fairy song,
and your eyes twinkle bright as can be,
you should laugh all the while
and all other times smile,
and now smile a smile for me. . . .

by Ken

In the cruelly aborted audio clip above, everyone knows what's coming next, right? After all, it is perhaps the signature song of this great tenor. And a great tenor he indisputably was; we're going to hear a couple of other selections in a moment.

CAN YOU GUESS THE "TEN GREAT [VICTOR] SINGERS"?

Perusing Van Cliburn's legacy (and yes, we'll even get to "the Tchaikovsky")

RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30:
i. Allegro ma non tanto

Van Cliburn, piano; Symphony of the Air, Kiril Kondrashin, cond. RCA-Sony, recorded live in Carnegie Hall, May 19, 1958

by Ken

The Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, as I've said, I love beyond qualification -- and we heard Van Cliburn play the first movement, with Fritz Reiner conducting, in the April 2010 post "In perfect balance -- Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, where everything comes together just right." As to the more ambitiously scaled Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, one of the supreme virtuoso challenges, well, I've just never come under its spell, though rehearing the first movement played live by the Cliburn-Kondrashin team (just a couple of days after the pianist's triumphant return from Moscow as winner of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition), I'm as close to being persuaded as I've ever been.

As I mentioned in Friday night's preview of this week's Cliburn remembrance, I got the copy of the Complete Van Cliburn Album Collection I mentioned having ordered in the brief post noting the pianist's passing.


YOU'D HAVE THOUGHT VAN HAD IT ALL, WHAT WITH --

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Charles Rosen (1927-2012)

Charles Rosen -- not only a pianist but perhaps
the most illuminating writer on music in our time

He was a lot of fun in snark mode, but it made me think about separating the desire for truth from the need to be right. The most beautiful element of Charles, for me, was after all this learning and accumulation, the smile with which he would play some beloved modulation, or demonstrate some trick of pedalling: suddenly again a child, innocence meeting knowledge at the end of the road. When I played Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze for him, he showed me how releasing the pedal in the middle of a held chord actually creates a crescendo in the bass -- in the middle of a sustained note eerily an unnoticed voice comes alive. When I got the effect he wanted, he beamed with real pleasure, aesthetic pleasure, and the pleasure of having communicated something precious -- the kind of pleasure that life should be all about.

-- pianist Jeremy Denk, in a December 18 newyorker.com
"Culture Desk" post, "Postscript: Charles Rosen"

by Ken

I won't try to calculate how many hours I spent preparing Friday night's chronicles preview post, only afterward stopping to think that it contained a grand total of less than four minutes. It occurred to me that one thing I might have done simply enough was to provide some context for the new clips I made of Charles Rosen playing the two pairs of pieces from Robert Schumann's great piano suite Carnaval by replaying the versions we heard in the September 2012 post "Taking a closer look at Schumann's Carnaval."

Here, for example, is the pair of musical caricatures of the commedia dell'arte Pierrot and Harlequin -- with, again, Charles's comments from his Nonesuch booklet notes, and now with the additional performances.

A QUICK NOTE ABOUT MY SHOCKING CHEEK
IN REFERRING TO THE MAN AS "CHARLES"

After all, I never met the man. But I know so many people who did know him, and who always refer to him that way, that I have difficulty reverting to "Rosen."

SCHUMANN: Carnaval, Op. 9:
2. Pierrot: Moderato (2/4)
3. Arlequin: Vivo (3/4)

2. "Pierrot" (Moderato) is a revolutionary work of pure instrumental music in its use of the grotesque. It is a character piece: relentless, deliberately monotonous, but with sudden jerky movements like the personage of the commedia dell'arte; it makes no pretensions to beauty or charm. The drama arises from the cumulative crescendo towards the end with a final and very original pedal effect, as the penultimate chord gradually frees itself of all the heavy pedal sonority.
3. "Arlequin" (Vivo) is also a grotestque character piece, with sudden changes of dynamics, and with a dancing charm.

Charles Rosen, piano. Nonesuch, recorded in the Netherlands, c1981

Nelson Freire, piano. Decca, recorded in Lugano, Dec. 18-22, 2002

Yevgeny Kissin, piano. BMG, recorded in Freiburg, 2001


CHARLES THE WRITER -- ON RAVEL

Greg Waldmann gives a nice retelling on Open Letters Monthly of the famous story of how Charles's writing career was launched.

In perfect balance -- Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto, where everything comes together just right

This is the first part (of three) of longtime pals Martha Argerich (born 1941) and Nelson Freire (born 1944) playing Rachmaninoff's delightful Second Suite for Two Pianos. (We last heard Argerich and Freire, separately, playing Schumann.) We'll hear more of the performance below.

by Ken

Friday night we heard the first movement of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2, as played by Arthur Rubinstein and Fritz Reiner -- the way I first encountered the music on RCA's Rubinstein Heart of the Piano Concerto compilation LP. Last night we detoured to make a quick run through Rachmaninoff's "other" piece for piano and orchestra -- other than the four concertos, that is -- the wonderful Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Today we're back to the Second Concerto.

It's not Rachmaninoff's most ambitious concerto, which would be the Third. I know people who are nuts for the Third Concerto, but I've never warmed to it nearly as much as the Second, which seems to me not only one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, but one of the most amazingly well-balanced, in terms of its movements, in the classical literature.

NOW THIS ISN'T WHAT MAKES IT A MASTERPIECE

Preview: A peek at the "fifth" Rachmaninoff piano concerto

Paganini started it all, with the theme that every composer wanted to write variations on -- as if Paganini (1782-1840) hadn't already done it himself in the 24th Caprice for solo violin. We've got a proper violin performance below, but here guitarist Eliot Fisk plays his own transcription.

by Ken

Last night we sampled the second of Sergei Rachmaninoff's four piano concertos, in anticipation of our look tomorrow at the entire piece. In addition to the four formal concertos, Rachmaninoff's piano-and-orchestra output includes a remarkable set of variations, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, on "the" Paganini tune. It's one of his most inspired and loved creations, and I don't know of any better way to illustrate the richness of his imagination than to make a tactical leap from the early variations to the most famous of them, the 18th (of 21).

To go back to the beginning, here's what Paganini actually wrote, as played by the young Itzhak Perlman.

PAGANINI: Caprice No. 24 in A minor


Itzhak Perlman, violin. RCA/BMG, recorded March 1965

Preview: Heart of the piano concerto, Part 2: Rachmaninoff's 2nd

The opening movement of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto works even if the soloist (Arkady Volodos here) doesn't have all that much imagination. Fortunately the movement (not quite complete -- these aren't exactly speedsters, and that introductory piffle runs the clock down) is nicely conducted by Riccardo Chailly.

by Ken

I explained recently how I was first exposed to Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto: via an RCA compilation LP called Heart of the Piano Concerto, which consisted of single movements from Arthur Rubinstein's then-most-recent RCA recordings of six popular piano concertos. It was the biting, driving Rondo finale of the Beethoven concerto that was included, and that had won my heart by the 50th or 60th playing.



MY SECOND-FAVORITE PIANO CONCERTO MOVEMENT WAS
THE OPENING OF RACHMANINOFF'S SECOND CONCERTO