oneppo chamber music series
David Shifrin, artistic director
Miró String Quartet with David Shifrin, clarinet
Tuesday, September 27, 2022 | 7:30 pm
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Program
George Walker 1922–2018
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756–1791
Lyric for Strings (1946, rev. 1990)
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, “Stadler’s Quintet”
I. Allegro II. Larghetto III. Menuetto
IV. Allegretto con variazoni intermission
Kevin Puts
b. 1972
Alan Shulman 1915–2002
arr. David Schiff Benny Goodman 1909–1986
Jack King & Dorothy Parker
Henry Lodge 1885–1933
Home (2020)
Rendezvous (1947)
Swing arrangements for clarinet and string quartet
A Smooth One (1941)
How Am I to Know (1929)
Temptation Rag (1909)
Artist Profiles
Miró String Quartet
Daniel Ching, violin
William Fedkenheuer, violin John Largess, viola Joshua Gindele, cello
The Miró Quartet is one of America’s mostcelebrated string quartets, having performed throughout the world on the most prestigious concert stages. For twenty-five years the Miró has performed a wide range of repertoire that pays homage to the legacy of the string quartet while looking forward to the future of chamber music by commissioning new works and collaborating with some of today’s most important artists. Based in Austin, TX, and thriving on the area’s storied music scene, the Miró takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds. Committed to music education, members of the Quartet have given master classes at universities and conservatories throughout the world; and since 2003, has served as quartet-in-residence at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas, Austin. Formed in 1995, the Miró Quartet has been awarded first prize at several competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition and Naumburg Chamber Music Competition; and in 2005, became the first ensemble ever to be awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Miró is quartet-in-residence at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, OR, and Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival in Washington state. The Miró Quartet took its name and its inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surrealist works — with subject matter drawn from the realm
of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy — are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century.
» miroquartet.com
David Shifrin, clarinet
One of only two wind players to have been awarded the Avery Fisher Prize since the award’s inception in 1974, David Shifrin is in constant demand as an orchestral soloist, recitalist and chamber music collaborator. He has appeared with many of the major orchestras in the United States and abroad, and has served as principal clarinetist with the Cleveland Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra (under Stokowski), Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and others. A sought after a chamber musician, he collaborates frequently with distinguished ensembles and artists. Shifrin has been an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1989 and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. From 1981 to 2020, he was the artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, OR. Shifrin also continues to broaden the repertoire for clarinet and orchestra by commissioning and championing the works of 20th- and 21st-century American composers.
At Yale, Shifrin teaches a studio of graduatelevel clarinetists and coaches chamber music ensembles. He is also the Artistic Director of Yale’s Oneppo Chamber Music Series and the Yale in New York concert series. Previously, Shifrin served on the
Artist Profiles, cont.
Program Notes
faculties of the Juilliard School, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, Cleveland Institute of Music, and the University of Hawaii.
Mr. Shifrin’s recordings have consistently garnered praise and awards. He has received three Grammy nominations — for a collaborative recording with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center of the collected chamber music of Claude Debussy (Delos), the Copland Clarinet Concerto (Angel/EMI) and Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro with Nancy Allen, Ransom Wilson, and the Tokyo String Quartet (Angel/EMI). His recording of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, performed in its original version on a specially built basset clarinet, was named Record of the Year by Stereo Review.
Shifrin performs on Backun Lumiere cocobolo wood clarinets made by Backun Musical Services and Légère premium synthetic reeds. He is represented by CM Artists New York.
» davidshifrin.com
Lyric for Strings walker georgetwalker.com
Composer and pianist George Theophilus Walker was born in Washington, D.C., on June 27, 1922, of West Indian-American parentage, and died in Montclair, NJ in 2018 at the age of 96. Graduating in 1940 from Oberlin College with highest honors, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music to study piano with Rudolf Serkin, and composition with Rosario Scalero. He graduated from Curtis with Artist Diplomas in piano and composition in 1945.
In 1946, George Walker composed his String Quartet No. 1. The second movement of this work, performed this evening in its original form, was arranged by the composer for string orchestra. At the time, Lyric for Strings became one of the most-frequentlyperformed orchestral work by a living American composer. A half-century later, in 1996, George Walker became the first black composer to receive the coveted Pulitzer Prize In Music for his work, Lilacs for voice and orchestra, premiered by the Boston Symphony. In 1998, he received the Composers Award from the Lancaster Symphony and the letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for “his significant contributions to the field of contemporary American Music.” In 1999, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In April 2000, George Walker was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
Clarinet Quintet in A major mozart
Robert Strong © 2014Mozart was the first composer to free the clarinet from its original trumpet-like role and bring out its softer expressive qualities. In June 1789 he set aside work on string quartets for King Frederick William of Prussia to write a clarinet quintet for a gathering of Vienna’s Society of Musicians. Anton Stadler, a virtuoso performer and fellow member of Mozart’s Masonic Lodge, played the clarinet part; Mozart played viola. Mozart not only admired Stadler’s skill but also was captivated by the extended lower range of his modified clarinet.
Stadler was something of a rogue — he would later lose his position in the court orchestra and leave his wife to live with his mistress. He treated Mozart shabbily, borrowing sizeable sums that he could not repay and adding to Mozart’s chronic financial distress. Somehow this did not alter Mozart’s warm feelings for Stadler, whose name Mozart himself appended to the title of the Clarinet Quintet.
A noble melody in the strings opens the Quintet. The clarinet first comments briefly, then joins the strings to elaborate and lead the music forward. Twice more string voices present new themes, and the clarinet answers. This wealth of melodic material continues in solo arias and tightly-linked ensemble passages. The second movement, “Larghetto,” is a long, soulful aria in the clarinet, accompanied by muted strings. Mozart achieves an ethereal blend of the five instruments as the clarinet pours out
what he called its “soft, sweet breath.”
The unusual “Menuetto” has two trio sections, the first for strings alone and the second for all instruments. In contrast to the good-natured minuet, the minor-key first trio is sighing and tinged with melancholy. After repetition of the minuet, the second trio is completely different in character, this time a peasant dance in which the clarinet becomes, in the words of Mozart commentator Alfred Einstein, “the rustic instrument that it was in Alpine provinces.”
The last movement is a theme and six variations. In some variations, the theme is embellished to display the clarinet’s athletic abilities, while in others the theme is reworked to show its different moods and textures. During the third variation’s plaintive viola lament, the clarinet murmurs softly in low tones. After Mozart lingers in the somber fifth variation, “Adagio,” he closes the Quintet with a sprightly, joyful final variation. Home puts Kevin Puts
The refugee crisis in Europe, documented in recent media by horrific stories and photos of displaced families, led me to compose Home.
The work begins in what is essentially C major, or with a tonal center of “C”, which I intended as a sonic representation of “home” and one which is abandoned after the idyllic atmosphere of the work’s first
Program Notes, cont.
several minutes in search of new and unfamiliar harmonic terrain. As is my way, I worked through the piece in a linear fashion, never certain what lay around each corner. My only hope was that I would find my way back to the musical idea heard at the opening, and that it would present itself in a way that suggested this material (or one’s perception of it) had been altered in some way by the journey the work represents.
I am grateful to Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival and to all co-commissioners for their support of this work. Home is the third work of mine written for the Miró Quartet, and it is dedicated with admiration and affection to its members.
After Alan graduated in 1937, the Shulman brothers joined the NBC Symphony Orchestra; the following year they organized both a “symphonic jazz group” and the Stuyvesant String Quartet, which specialized in performing contemporary compositions. Shulman had his first major success as a composer with the 1941 NBC Symphony premiere of his Theme and Variations for Viola and Orchestra. After service during World War II, Shulman built a diverse career including performing and teaching. He helped to found the Violoncello Society, wrote popular songs with entertainer Steve Allen, and arranged and composed steadily until declining health forced his retirement in 1987.
Rendezvous shulman Richard E. RoddaThe gifted cellist and composer Alan Shulman was born into a musical family in Baltimore on June 4, 1915, and encouraged to start playing cello when he was eight by his mother, who wanted him to round out a trio with his brother, a violinist, and sister, a pianist. Within two years, young Alan was studying at the Peabody Institute; he started composing almost immediately. Shulman entered The Juilliard School on scholarship in 1932 and studied cello, composition, and conducting. While still a student, Shulman arranged popular selections and played them with a string ensemble on NBC Radio, joined the Kreiner String Quartet, and made his formal debut as a composer with incidental music to an American Children’s Theatre production.
Many of Shulman’s compositions, all traditional in their melodic and harmonic idioms and almost entirely instrumental, bear Jewish, Impressionist, or folk influences. Others reflect the jazz and popular styles that he knew well as a player and arranger. Rendezvous originated at the suggestion of famed jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, whom Shulman met in 1941. Early in the summer of 1946, when Shulman had retreated to Maine to work, Goodman, then expanding into the classical concert repertory, asked if he and the Stuyvesant Quartet could join him on his NBC radio show to play a movement from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. Shulman did not want to trek back to New York to play for five minutes, so he asked Goodman if he could instead write a short piece to play together when he returned to the city. Goodman agreed, and Shulman finished his “Rendezvous with Benny” (re-titled simply Rendezvous upon its publication in
1947) on July 29. They gave the premiere on a nationwide broadcast three weeks later. Shulman also made a version of Rendezvous for string orchestra.
Rendezvous begins with meditative strings, but the mood turns jazzy when the clarinet enters. A smoky blues occupies the center of the piece before the return of the jazzy strains provides the work with an uptempo ending.
Swing arrangements for clarinet and string quartet goodman/king/parker/lodge, arr. schiff Maureen Hurd
Jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman was dubbed the “King of Swing” in 1935, and for the next fifty-one years, he pursued a parallel career performing classical compositions and undertaking an extensive series of classical commissions and projects which resulted in repertoire staples including Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra and Béla Bartók’s Contrasts, as well as the Clarinet Concerto by Paul Hindemith, a member of the Yale School of Music faculty from 1940–1953, and many other compelling though lesser known works by such composers as Benjamin Britten, Darius Milhaud, Alex North, Alan Shulman, Morton Gould, Ingolf Dahl, Malcolm Arnold, Gordon Jenkins, and Allen Shawn.
Goodman’s abilities and profile as a crossover artist were unprecedented and demonstrated by his successes as early as
1938. On January 16 of that year, his big band made its historic debut at Carnegie Hall, marking the first time jazz was heard there. This performance was a smash success that set the stage for the jazz concert, in which a seated audience listened to the music instead of dancing to it. Two days later, Goodman played a movement of the Mozart Quintet, K. 581, with the Coolidge String Quartet on a Camel Caravan radio broadcast. In April, he recorded the Mozart Quintet with the Budapest String Quartet. By September, Bartók had finished Contrasts for Goodman and the violinist Joseph Szigeti, marking the first successful classical Goodman commission, and in November, he performed the Mozart Quintet with the Budapest String Quartet in New York’s Town Hall.
Goodman would go on to perform with major symphony orchestras in the United States and record and perform much of the standard classical clarinet literature, in addition to performing with big bands and small groups. He would often perform chamber music or a concerto with a symphony orchestra on the first half of a program and then return after intermission to play jazz. Frank Tirro, Dean of the Yale School of Music in 1984, said when he awarded Goodman Yale’s Sanford Medal, that Goodman “created classics of jazz music while bringing the jazz audience to the classics.”
Goodman started giving some of his materials to Yale in 1985, and on June 10, 1986, just three days before he suddenly passed away, he visited Yale to discuss future gifts. Now, the Benny Goodman
Program Notes, cont.
Papers housed in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University are an invaluable resource that includes correspondence, manuscripts, and much more. Correspondence shows that attempts at projects with Zoltán Kodály, Aram Khachaturian, and Sir William Walton were envisioned but not completed. Unsuccessful proposals to Walton framed the nearly five decades of Goodman’s commissioning, with a first try in 1936 for a clarinet concerto that was diverted when Walton wrote his violin concerto for Jascha Heifetz instead. Correspondence from the early 1980s between Lady Susana Walton and Goodman in the Goodman Papers at Yale shows that Walton was interested in writing for Goodman again, but illness and then Walton’s death in 1983 prevented him from being able to do this.
Ahead of his time, Benny Goodman’s trailblazing crossover ability and curiosity have left a vital legacy, and the Goodman Papers are an important resource for experiencing it.
David Schiff
Over my forty-year-long association with Chamber Music Northwest, I have composed many original works for the festival, along with several arrangements of music by other composers, including Debussy, Grieg, and Ellington — a different kind of challenge, but one I always enjoy. So I was delighted when David Shifrin asked me to arrange some of his favorite Benny Goodman numbers for clarinet and string quartet.
Benny Goodman will always be remembered in terms of the Swing Era, and in particular, for two events that defined that era: his performance with his band at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935, when he thrilled a huge, young audience of dancers with his hottest numbers, many of them arranged by Fletcher Henderson, whose orchestra had perfected the idiom that became known as swing over the previous decade; and the concert at Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, which brought big-band jazz into the mosthallowed venue of classical music for the first time, but which also featured black and white performers on the same stage, a rarity at the time. The Benny Goodman Orchestra was joined on that evening by many of the most distinguished African American musicians of the time, including Cootie Williams, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges, from the Duke Ellington Orchestra; and Lester Young, Freddie Green, and Walter Page, from the Count Basie Orchestra (along with Count Basie himself). Goodman was a pioneer in desegregating jazz, most famously through his performances with a sextet that
included Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Charlie Christian. With a background in klezmer, classical, and jazz idioms, Goodman also performed and recorded many works from the classical repertory, and premiered new classical compositions by Bartók, Poulenc, Copland, and Bernstein. In all these endeavors, Goodman could immediately be identified by the warmly expressive sound of his clarinet, a sound that immediately inspired the young David Shifrin to take up that instrument.
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