Clarinetist Richard Stoltzman's direct, affectionate manner has often been noticed. In a master class recently he left off explaining what was making a scared young student clarinetist's Brahmas sound so stiff and asked, "Can't I just give you a hug?"
Experience has taught the boyish, forty-four year old Stoltzman how to cope when the compliment is returned. The first thing he does at the end of an orchestral concert, he has said, is to cover his instrument's reed, so that if the conductor hugs him, it won't be ruined. The risk is not exactly a small one; Stoltzman makes about 100 concert appearances a year.
If Stoltzman is a bankable commodity these days, part of the reason lies in his apparent willingness, and his ability to do everything. A Stoltzman solo recital draws on a number of repertoires - music written expressly for the clarinet; music transcribed from other instruments; and an unpredictably expansive third category that includes the innocuous jazz/pop/easy-listening mixture that comes vaguely under the heading of "crossover."
Early in July Stoltzman appeared in recital with pianist Richard Goode at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestras (BSO) summer home in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. The occasion was touched by a certain irony, since there was once a time - when both were associated with the Marlboro Festival - when the much admired Harold Wright, now the principal clarinetist of the BSO, was not that convinced that Stoltzman was in the right business. It was intimated that perhaps he might consider engineering.
It was tempting to listen for the particularities to style and temperament that prompted that judgment. In the very first minute it was obvious that Stoltzman is not the sort of clarinetist who is content to play safe. Some of the playing, in fact, verged on the indiscreet. The opening piece, Schubert's Sonatina in A minor, Opus 137, No. 2 originally composed for violin, seemed to bring out a strange sort of defensiveness in the performers, who pushed impatiently against bar lines, the molto expressive to and fro would have caused rows filled with raised eyebrows at the staider sort of violin recital. There was body English in it too. In Debussy's sinuous Premier Rapsodie there were some of the dramatic, explosive qualities that make some of his fellow clarinetists nervous; also, from time to time, a deliberately unpretty edge to the tone, which is likewise controversial. But there was not a moment's boredom.
What Stoltzman's admirers and detractors alike may be responding to is the fact that tradition with a capital T didn't get an early hold on him. Though he started playing the instrument in elementary school in San Francisco, it wasn't until he was in graduate school at Yale that he first heard the Brahms quintet for clarinet and strings. Earlier, Juilliard and Eastman had turned him down, s he went to Ohio State. He played Dixieland and John Philip Sousa in addition to classical works.
In any case, it is hard to imagine another clarinetist who would undertake to perform, as he did in this program, a set of eight songs by Charles Ives - including such beauties as Like a Sick Eagle and The Housatonic at Stockbridge. It has to be said, though, that the management wasn't trusting everything to the players' powers of evocation: the tests by Ives, Keats, Whittier, and others
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