Stoltzman’s Clarinet Playing Hits New Notes

Can you blame Richard Stoltzman for not taking the usual solo clarinet route of playing the Mozart and Weber concertos to death for the rest of his life? Not when you get enterprising, entertaining concerts like the one he put together with the expert, five-man Canadian percussion group NEXUS before a sparse turnout at Royce Hall on Friday night. Indeed, the cunningly constructed cyclical program took Stoltzman about as far out as we’ve heard him go.

NEXUS opened with a piece derived from West African drumming, Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood,” immediately establishing a hot groove. Then Stoltzman weighed in with Reich’s live/taped “New York Counterpoint,” swinging as hard as he always does in this piece, now with even more expression and grace. Two Villa-Lobos pieces, “Tristeza” and “Modhina,” and Stoltzman chum Bill Douglas’ “Feast” were strung together into a long medley that traveled from a quiet, mysterious vamp of jungle sounds into a dynamic Afro-Cuban-tinged incantation, interrupted briefly by another of Stoltzman’s ventures into rhythmic South Indian scat singing.

Following Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet--played with warmth as Stoltzman walked through the aisles and in a fiercely hectoring manner when he reached the stage--Stoltzman and NEXUS tried an experiment: a free-form, 18 1/2-minute improvisation in which Stoltzman blew on his mouthpiece or wailed in a tortured tone in tandem with shifting, often sparse percussion. Ultimately, the piece didn’t quite take. But in “Kobina,” everyone returned to West Africa for a deliciously clattering finale.