Bringing the Clarinet Front and Center

Closet clarinetists, it seems, are everywhere. With high-school bands requiring phalanxes of licorice-stick tooters, it is not surprising so many folks have a passing familiarity with the instrument.

It is, however, a bit surprising that Richard Stoltzman, one of the world’s preeminent clarinetists, started in similar fashion. But he did, then went on to a degree of success that should offer hope to every young aspirant struggling to deal with a squeaky reed.

Stoltzman’s versatility will be on full display this week in two tributes to Benny Goodman, a similarly multifaceted clarinetist who came to classical music from a somewhat different direction.

Stoltzman--with his wife, Lucy, playing violin and David Deveau at the piano--performs chamber works by Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, Bela Bartok and Leonard Bernstein tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Then, on Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, he romps through a set of swing-era numbers with a big band led by David Warble.

It’s an ambitious project, but Stoltzman began far more modestly, pretty much like every kid who picks up the instrument. In fact, he barely considered a career on the instrument until he was well into his college years, first at Ohio State, later at Yale.

“I had a wonderful education,” he says, “but it was not geared toward being a clarinet soloist....What was the point of being trained to be a clarinet soloist when there really wasn’t such a gig available at the time?”

Stoltzman soon moved beyond the crowd of fellow clarinetists, first as a founding member of the chamber group Tashi, later by pursuing the idea that a solo clarinet performance could be as musically compelling and pleasing to audiences as programs showcasing violin, piano, cello or any of the more commonly heard solo instruments. Stoltzman further strengthened his appeal with his capacity to play convincingly within the orbits of jazz and popular music.

He credits his wife with starting him on the path to solo performance.

“Since we got married more than 25 years ago,” Stoltzman says, “she’s been my guiding light in bringing me around to being able to play classical concertos. She started making transcriptions of all the clarinet concertos, and playing them on the violin so that I could hear what the heck they sounded like before I had to play them with orchestra.”

In fact, the version of the Copland Concerto scheduled for Irvine is one Lucy prepared.

“Copland actually made a version for clarinet and piano, which is [virtually] unplayable because the piano part has enough notes for three or four hands,” he says. “But when we started doing these trios, it dawned on us that this would be beautiful to do it as a transcription for piano, violin and piano.

“And,” Stoltzman adds with a chuckle, “she gave the wicked, terrible parts that Copland wrote for the strings to the piano part, and let David handle it.”

His musical epiphany--the moment he realized that it might be possible to blend the various currents of music that attracted him--came at Yale when he met Mel Powell, the former Goodman pianist who turned to classical music in the ‘50s.

“When I was at Yale,” Stoltzman says, “Mel had written a piece called ‘Improvisations for Clarinet, Viola and Piano’ that I played for my graduation recital. And he said to me, ‘You know, I have a clarinet player friend, and I’d like to have him hear this piece. Would you be willing to go play it for him?’

“Then he added, ‘It’s Benny Goodman.’ It took me a minute or so to get over the shock, but I eventually gulped and said, ‘Oh, well, yes, I guess so.”’

Unlike Goodman, who never seemed as comfortable in his classical performances as in his jazz soloing, Stoltzman moves easily between genres. His extensive recording catalog ranges from classical concertos to jazz to Brazilian music to Celtic songs. “Music all goes back to singing, in one way or another,” he says. “The musician sings on the instrument, on the piano, the violin, the clarinet, whatever. You look for a way to find the voice of the music and then apply it to your own instrument. In that sense, they’re all related. I don’t change my mouthpiece, for example, to play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ or Thelonious Monk [or] put on another kind of reed to play Mozart.”

“To me,” concludes Stoltzman, “it’s just a great honor and thrill to be playing at a time when there is a new approach in which we can hear everything, we can know all the traditions and we can express them through our individual roots....

“I just try to find their voices and approach them all from my own standpoint.”

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Richard Stoltzman plays music of Copland, Bartok, Bernstein and Foss in “Benny Goodman Classical” tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. 8 p.m. $20 to $29. Also music of the swing era in “Benny Goodman Swing!” on Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $20 to $35. Part of the Eclectic Orange Festival presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. (949) 553-2422.