Completed in September of 2007, Elliott Carter's Clarinet Quintet is scarcely 15 minutes long, yet shows the 99-year-old composer to be still bubbling with invention. And last night clarinetist Charles Neidich and the Juilliard String Quartet gave us a gift: a second reading of it at the end of the concert.
In three movements, the piece often pits the clarinet against the strings, almost as a saboteur, with the composer's typical mercurial mood shifts. About midway, the strings hold stratospheric notes pianissimo, while the clarinet is at the other end of the spectrum, at the low end of its range. And as the composer later explained, the intervals he chose for the clarinet differ from the ones he uses for the others, subtly increasing the divide between the two forces.
Perhaps my favorite part is the final movement, about which Neidich writes, "The clarinet plays what may be the longest sustained melody ever written for the instrument while the strings play ever more involved figurations as if trying to be willfully oblivious of what the clarinet is playing." It reminded me of a sort of chamber music complement to the first movement of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony, in which a snare drum is given the task of trying to "halt the progress of the orchestra."
The superbly expressive Juilliard musicians filled out the evening with five of Carter's solo works: Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi (for violin, from 1984), Figment (cello, 1994), Gra (clarinet, 1993), Rhapsodic Musings (violin, 2001) and Figment IV (viola, 2007). At intermission, Ara Guzelimian asked Carter right off the bat, "So what about this combination of instruments appealed to you?" Without losing a beat, the composer replied, "I really don't know!"
Update: Steve Smith captures the mood in his write-up for The New York Times, and a big "yes" to that first sentence.
[Clarinet drawing from MadProf's Workshop]
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