A Young Virtuoso Goes Solo

By Annalyn Swan

Richard Stoltzman wants to be the Casals of the clarinet

Richard Stoltzman is the first to admit it: the clarinet, his chosen instrument, is no musical prince. To begin with, there is the clarinet's tendency to be loudmouthed and crass. It is the sharp-tongued marcher in high school bands, the instrument everyone loves to play badly. In orchestra pits, the clarinet is a foot soldier, sturdily seconding the melodies of the grander piano, violin and cello. Few composers have favored it with solo works. Few Benny Goodmans exist; although there have been outstanding clarinetists, they traditionally have belonged to orchestras and thus missed the dazzle of a Paganini or Casals. In short, clarinetists were not born to be stars.

But Stoltzman, 36, is challenging all that. A short, engagingly boyish virtuoso who has chosen a solo career over an orchestra seat, Stoltzman has an almost magical rapport with his instrument. His recent sell-out appearance in the Mostly Mozart series at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, where he wore a velvet jacket and what he calls his "dress sneakers," turned into a celebration of the clarinet's possibilities. In Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A Major, which he performed with the Tokyo String Quartet, Stoltzman glided effortlessly through long, sustained phrases. He caressed his instrument into whispery trills and treble work and then commanded a full-bodied tone as smooth as old wine. It was masterly Mozart, and the audience loved it.

The Mostly Mozart success--Stoltzman will appear four more times in the popular summer festival--is by now standard. Last year, he won a $2,500 Avery Fisher prize, awarded by Lincoln Center to "exceptionally talented younger instrumentalists." He has performed as guest soloist with many major chamber groups. He has released two solo albums; the latest, The Art of Richard Stoltzman (Desmar), is a marvelous collection of 19th century French clarinet pieces. He will make his debut with the New York Philharmonic next year. Says Violinist Isaac Stern: "Rarely have I heard such a virtuoso use of the clarinet. He has searched out its possibilities, and he has the sort of solo quality about him that makes him equal to any performer."

Stoltzman's technique is strikingly subtle. (A recording engineer once told him, "Oh, you're the guy who has no beginning to your notes.") Says Stoltzman: "I don't like how the clarinet sounds most of the time. In the official style, you don't have enough freedom to wander." His own clarinet, by turns, mimics the fluttery delicacy of a flute, the finespun song of a violin, a bassoon's dark, melancholy air. His playing refuses to sound well-schooled. Even Mozart runs take off so spontaneously that Stoltzman might almost be improvising--as he often does. He recently took part in a jazz workshop at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and let fly with some big-band solos. Says he: "I told them that I'm basically a classical musician, but that I love jazz."

Stoltzman, in fact, came to the classical clarinet by the unorthodox route of jazz. During his childhood in San Francisco, he and his father, a railroad man with a passion for the tenor sax, would im- provise hymns at Presbyterian Sunday school. "We'd play the main-line melody and then just float in and out of harmonies," he recalls. "That freedom not to play all the notes exactly as they were written was the beginning to me of making music."

In high school, he "played with the dance band for money and with jazz groups for fun." Ohio State University came next, after Stoltzman was rejected by Eastman School of Music and Juilliard. At Ohio he majored in math and music, and even considered a career in dentistry. "I still thought that classical music was somebody sitting in a symphony and playing things that you didn't understand," says Stoltzman. But after some lessons with Clarinetist Robert Marcellus of the Cleveland Orchestra, he decided on graduate work in music at Yale.

There he lived for two years in a semi-commune of string students. "Not only did I come to feel that music was essential to life," says Stoltzman, "but I was surrounded by people who tried to play like a voice singing, something neglected by clarinetists." He credits those two years with his interest in expanding the clarinet's color, after which his technique was inspired by Kalman Opperman, a New York teacher of the strict "old school."

Says Stoltzman: "One of the first things that he told me was that I moved my fingers like a country bumpkin--and I already had a master's degree from Yale."

Stoltzman now lives in Manhattan with his wife, Lucy, 26, and his year-old son, Peter John. Lucy, a violinist, occasionally supplements the family income by playing with Broadway shows. Stoltzman spends his free time transcribing music from other instruments for the clarinet to help fill out its meager repertory. One of the Mostly Mozart performances will include Mozart's Concerto in B-Flat, composed for the bassoon.

As his career takes off, Stoltzman is increasingly on the road, appearing with regional symphonies or with the TASHI Quartet, which he helped to organize. His ambition now is to do for the clarinet what Casals did for the cello: transform his instrument into an eloquent solo performer. "Last spring, when I was playing in Vancouver with the Amadeus Quartet," says Stoltzman, "a 90-year-old man came backstage and said, 'That's the first time the clarinet ever sounded human to me.' That's what I want--to make music that will liberate people." -- Annalyn Swan

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