Reedy, Willing and Able : Clarinetist Michele Zukovsky Has Eclectic Musical Interests and a Fresh Outlook

Staying fresh with Mozart, even in this year of wretched excess, is not difficult for clarinetist Michele Zukovsky. Her career, after all, ranges from doing period-instrument work to commissioning new music, from within the orchestra and fronting the orchestra, as well as with various chamber ensembles.

But Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet is her current assignment, in performances with the Angeles Quartet tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre and Wednesday at Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

“I stay fresh with it because it’s better than I am,” Zukovsky said. “It’s that kind of music.”

Principal clarinetist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Zukovsky was speaking by phone shortly after returning home from the orchestra’s tour of Great Britain and Germany under Kurt Sanderling. She reports that Europe’s case of Mozartmania is as severe as the local outbreak.

“It’s incredible, everywhere,” she said. “It’s as if we’re going to hear Mozart until Dec. 31, then we’ll never hear him again.”

The composer’s hold on the public doesn’t surprise her, however.

“The universality of Mozart is like the universality of Bach,” Zukovsky, 48, said. “It can be appreciated on many levels.”

The Clarinet Quintet is one of the works, along with the great Clarinet Concerto, that Mozart wrote for the virtuoso Anton Stadler and the so-called basset clarinet, a little-used instrument with an extended low range. In these performances with modern-instrument-wielding colleagues, Zukovsky will also use a modern clarinet, but she has a keen interest in earlier practices and instruments.

“I’m into period practices. I’m starting a sextet on original instruments. By the time I’m through, I’ll have a room full of instruments,” she said.

And at no small cost. When she first investigated the basset clarinet, Zukovsky discovered the price for a modern reproduction is around $5,600.

“At the time, I thought that painting my house was a better idea,” she said, with a sigh.

Don’t imagine, however, that Zukovsky’s musical interests are exclusively antiquarian. In April, she gave the world premiere of a concerto by movie-music meister John Williams, with the composer conducting the Riverside Philharmonic, and in July she’ll present the East Coast premiere of the piece with Williams and the Boston Pops at Tanglewood Music Center.

During her conversation, a piece by Soviet avant-garde composer Sofia Gubaidulina is playing in the background at her Los Angeles residence.

“I’m going to commission a piece from Gubaidulina,” Zukovsky said. “I’m trying to get a concerto from her. I’ve also asked Ed Bland and Karel Husa for pieces.

“If I were just to play in the orchestra, it wouldn’t be enough for me,” she said, while hastening to add, “I’m totally gung-ho about our new conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen.”

With the rest of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she is facing summer at the Hollywood Bowl. This season, however, there is the promise of some relief from the new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which will play five of the weekend pops programs instead of the Philharmonic.

“We don’t know if (the new arrangement) is going to work out, but we certainly hope so,” Zukovsky said. In any case, “we’re looking forward to the time off. It gives us a chance to reintroduce ourselves to our families.

Zukovsky’s summer also includes a teaching stint at the Banff Festival of the Arts in Alberta and another Mozart gig in Spain, as well as the performances at Tanglewood. Having sustained such intense activity over many seasons, she said, “I can certainly see the time when I open my clarinet case and I gag.”

That time does not seem imminent, and anyone who has seen her in solo performances can testify to her involvement in the music at hand, expressed sometimes in vivid body language.

“I move around way too much,” Zukovsky acknowledged readily. “At this point I’m sick of it. I think it’s a very bad habit, and I’d love not to do it, but it’s a release, a non-thinking process.”

If so, that is one of the few for this thoughtful musician. Happily, she has other forms of release as well.

“I’m going camping as soon as the concerts are over, and forget all about the clarinet and reeds--you don’t know what we go through with reeds, never the same--for a while.”

Clarinetist Michele Zukovsky joins the Angeles Quartet in Mozart’s Quintet in A, K. 581 at 8 tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Also on the program: Schubert’s String Quartet in E, Op. 125, No. 1 and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, Op. 110. Tickets: $10 to $20. Information: (714) 854-4646.