The High Points of a Clarinetist’s Job

When Aaron Copland first showed Benny Goodman his Concerto for Clarinet, Piano, Harp and Strings more than 50 years ago, the King of Swing, who had commissioned the work, suggested a few changes.

“When Benny Goodman looked at the score, basically his eyes popped out,” said clarinetist Charles Neidich, 45, who spoke by phone between tour stops in Tennessee with I Musici de Montreal. “Parts were too difficult, notes went too high . . .

“Goodman told Copland that a couple of high notes were ridiculously high,” said Neidich, one of the world’s most respected clarinetists. “Copland told Goodman that he took these notes off Goodman’s own recordings. Goodman said that in jazz, when he’s inspired in the heat of the moment, he can go up to those notes. But to look on a page and play them cold is quite a different technique.”

Copland rearranged the offending passages for Goodman, who nonetheless spent two years working on it before he felt ready to play it in public. When Neidich plays it tonight with I Musici at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, he plans to play it as Copland originally wrote it.

Does that mean he can play those ridiculously high notes cold?

“I hope so,” Neidich said.

I Musici artistic director Yuri Turovsky also leads the group in Joaquin Turina’s “Serenata,” Op. 87, Jose Evangelista’s “Airs d’Espagna,” Mozart’s Divertimento in F, K. 138 and Mahler’s string orchestra transcription of Beethoven’s “Serioso” String Quartet in F minor. (The Laguna Chamber Music Society and Philharmonic Society of Orange County jointly sponsor the concert.)

Neidich recently performed the New York City premiere of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Concerto at Carnegie Hall with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and he has presented numerous premieres of pieces by other 20th century composers, including William Schuman, Milton Babbitt and Joan Tower. His solo recitals feature a repertory of more than 200 works, many commissioned or inspired by him.

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So why do most concertgoers hear such a tiny body of works--albeit masterworks--for clarinet, notably Mozart’s concerto, a couple of Brahms sonatas and quintets by Mozart and Brahms?

“There’s tremendous literature, and a huge 20th century literature,” Neidich pointed out. “But you don’t have a huge literature [from the period that] makes up most concert programs, music from the late 18th century through 19th century. You don’t have numbers of Beethoven sonatas, and works by Chopin, that pianists have.

“What you have are works by composers who are not as well known today--Carl Maria von Weber, Ludwig Spohr, Carl Nielsen and Charles Stanford--who wrote many works for clarinet. But there is always great conservative pressure to present the beloved standards.

“I should say, though, that even violinists play basically a couple of concertos--the literature is incredibly huge,” he said, “yet the selection that is made is quite small.”

In addition to his recitals and orchestral engagements, Neidich surveys the chamber literature in frequent appearances with the Juilliard and Mendelssohn string quartets, the Peabody Trio and the New York Woodwind Quintet. He serves on artist faculties at the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In 1985, Neidich won the first major clarinet contest in the United States, the Walter W. Naumberg Competition. Ten years earlier, he became the first American to receive a Fulbright grant to study in the Soviet Union. He attended the Moscow Conservatory for three years, where pianist Kirill Vinogradov changed the way Neidich thought about music.

“I was already accomplished on clarinet, but Kirill Vinogradov gave me an appreciation for expanding the instrument’s limits,” Neidich said. “ ‘You should play it this way, or strive to play it this way,’ he would say--as a pianist, he had no appreciation of what would be difficult or not difficult on the clarinet. . . . He looked at music as drama.”

A native New Yorker of Russian and Greek descent, Neidich began musical studies at an early age, clarinet lessons with his father and piano with his mother.

When Neidich was “still quite little,” he said, his father sparked the first epiphany of the boy’s musical life when the elder Neidich began playing recordings of Beethoven quartets by the Budapest String Quartet.

“That really opened my eyes to the world of chamber music and the conversational way of playing,” Neidich recalled.

As a child, Neidich’s musical idols were not clarinetists, but violinists such as Fritz Kreisler and pianists including Artur Schnabel. Nevertheless, clarinet eventually won out over piano. Neidich decided against attending a music conservatory, instead continuing private studies with famed pedagogue Leon Russianoff while earning a cum laude bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Yale University.

Not that Neidich would necessarily recommend that route for other young musicians.

“It completely has to do with the background of the individual,” he said. “My parents are musicians. I had very thorough musical training. But because they are musicians, they always urged me to do something else with my life; they knew it was a hard business.

“Music is not a profession that a person makes a logical decision to enter,” he said. “It’s something a person has to be passionate about, that they can’t think of doing anything else.”

That’s certainly the case with Neidich. Asked about passions apart from music, he said, “That’s difficult to say. My hobby when I’m not playing clarinet is playing the piano--or reading about music.”

* Clarinetist Charles Neidich joins I Musici de Montreal for a program of works by Turina, Evangelista, Copland, Mozart and Beethoven/Mahler tonight at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. $23-$27. 8 p.m. Presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County and the Laguna Beach Chamber Music Society. (949) 854-4646.