[By Aaron P. Tate; from the Ithaca Times] When the name Richard Stoltzman appears in print, the most frequently appended phrase is: “the greatest clarinet player alive.” And for good reason: not only is Stoltzman one of the most internationally acclaimed performers in the world of classical music, he is also well known for enthusiastically embracing jazz traditions and jazz improvisation, having played with Keith Jarrett, Gary Burton, and Wayne Shorter, to name but a few. Stoltzman’s distinction in the classical universe derives not only from his peerless virtuosity but also from the fact that he has significantly expanded the repertoire of the instrument by ceaselessly commissioning new works for it.
For some audiences, Stoltzman long ago attained the status of ‘living legend,’ yet for other, often younger audiences, his is the instrument through which the living and breathing craft of contemporary classical composition continues to sing with new life and relevance.
When Stoltzman comes to Ithaca College on Wednesday, April 23 for a performance in Ford Hall — the last in a year-long season entitled “Legends” — he will be performing with another living legend, namely, the quartet he co-founded 35 years ago with pianist Peter Serkin, cellist Fred Sherry, and violinist Ida Kavafian, known as the Tashi quartet.
The origins of Tashi, whose name means “auspicious moment,” are almost as mythical as the performances and recordings for which they are celebrated. Founded in 1973 in order to perform a single piece, Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet For The End Of Time,” the group was coached for the piece by Messiaen himself one afternoon in an apartment in New York City — a story that Stoltzman recounts with a mixture of awe and gratitude.
Messiaen’s quartet has long been considered one of the 20th Century’s most beautiful chamber works, and it enjoys a conspicuous fame for another notable reason: Messiaen began composing it for himself and three other players while they were jailed as a prisoners of war during World War II. He first wrote a trio, which was performed in the camp’s lavatory, and then later realized the piece as a 50-minute work, which Tashi will play as the centerpiece of the Ithaca program next week.
To hear Stoltzman tell it, the program for next week’s performance was carefully chosen in order to allow the group to revisit this signature piece, but also to present it alongside compositions equally concerned with different manifestations of temporality. Regarding the two Wuorinen pieces on the program, Stoltzman explains, “this is the kind of music that the Tashi group has always gravitated to, music that’s almost mystically simple and pure on the one hand, but on the other hand very challenging to rehearse, and still virtuosic at the same time.”
As for the choice to play Elliott Carter’s “Con Leggerezza Pensosa — Omaggio a Italo Calvino” the decision was easy, explains Stoltzman, since it dovetailed with a number of Tashi’s concerns: “2008 marks the centenary of both Messiaen and Carter’s births, which is why we are playing them. Though of course with Elliott Carter, he’s still alive and composing at the age of 100 — which is truly amazing — and in this piece, Carter specifically gives the clarinet metrical divisions of three, the violin divisions of four, and the cello divisions of five, so that from the beginning until the end of the piece we do not play together once.”
When asked how the players approach the separate metrical divisions, Stoltzman explains: “It’s quite fascinating, actually, the three of us must try to feel the same universal pulse individually and then be willing to give up our own personal division of time. We have to do this in order to make the piece flow through all three of the different time divisions. You actually cannot play your own part, you have to play everyone else’s part at the same time, because if you try to play your own part in isolation, it won’t work.”
Though Carter’s piece is barely five minutes long, its mastery has required untold hours of rehearsal. Stoltzman: “Carter’s piece, to be honest, is a philosophical trip more than anything else, but in order to make it a reality, we spent countless hours rehearsing it. That’s another funny conception of time, when you have to spend countless hours for a piece that’s only going to exist for an infinitesimal fraction of the amount of time you’ve spent working on it. As a performer, it starts and then it is suddenly over. It’s like… a mist. Every time I play the piece I think ‘What? What happened? My god? We’re done? How did that happen?’ It is so strange. How you perceive time is of course a very personal and very philosophical thing, since we’re all living in the same time, yet we are experiencing it in so many different individual ways.”
The Toru Takemitsu work on the program, “Quatrain II,” also holds a special place in the Tashi repertoire. “This particular piece is very appropriate to be played on the concert because of the presence of Takemitsu’s personality and philosophy in our group. He wrote the piece for us, initially as a concerto for our quartet and orchestra, and then he decided to make another version of it that could be played by the four of us alone. Needless to say, it’s a much more involved piano part now, because the piano must take up the slack of the original orchestral part. But Peter Serkin is such a poet and magician, he creates sounds coming from the piano that leave you thinking, ‘No no, I think that’s a French horn,’ then, ‘No no, I think that’s a second flute part,’ and then suddenly you can hear that the orchestral part has come alive in the way that he is voicing his part.”
The connections between Takemitsu, Tashi, and Messiaen run deep, both musically and historically. “Takemitsu’s sensibilities were very much akin to Messiaen’s. Both felt very close to the elements of nature, especially the calls of birds, and the sounds of wind and water. These elements pass through Takemitsu’s music all of the time, and Messiaen was conscious of them too. The fact that they were both together when we coached the “Quartet For The End of Time” with Messiaen was a huge memory in my life, and I think that it is a beautiful, nostalgic part of all of the Tashi players’ lives.”
It is this last point that bears re-telling, since the story is not widely known. When Tashi members were rehearsing the Messiaen quartet in the early 1970s, another auspicious occasion occurred. By sheer chance, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and the young Tashi players all happened to be in New York City at the same time. With the hope of gaining his ear and input, Serkin arranged, through Messiaen’s wife, for Messiaen to listen to the quartet play his piece and to give advice. Stoltzman paints the scene: “In an apartment in New York, on a weekend afternoon, Messiaen sat in a big overstuffed chair in front of us as we played, with his wife translating beside him. Takemitsu sat very quietly in the furthest corner of the apartment, just trying to be almost invisible. It was a remarkable moment.”
Stoltzman continues: “As for Messiaen, we were all in great awe of him. He was severe. He was meticulous with each of us in our ways of articulating, of directing the sound. He had many suggestions for Peter as to how to pedal, and he was also really caught up in the idea of rhythmic motifs that would be played forwards and backwards; also there were scales that he’d devised, he wanted all of these things to be impressed upon us very clearly. I remember that he kept asking me to play ‘More darkly! More darkly!’”
Near the end of our conversation, when I ask about Takemitsu’s role that afternoon, and its relevance for his subsequent decades of composition for the Tashi quartet, Stoltzman takes a moment to reflect: “He did not say one word that day, though I think that this was the moment that inspired him to begin writing for us.”