Word: clarinet
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...newest ballet in Manhattan last week started off as relaxed as a picnic, and seemingly just as impromptu. As the curtain went up, a man in a grey double-breasted suit strolled on to the nearly bare stage, clarinet in hand. Taking his time, he eventually reached a stool in a downstage corner. He tootled a few warm-up phrases; then the orchestra in the pit joined in a discreet background from Aaron Copland's Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra. Thereafter, Jerome Robbins' Pied Piper kept its happy air of the impromptu, but it was scarcely relaxed...
More & more dancers edged onstage and fell under the spell of the tootling clarinet. Miming to the music, tiny, red-haired Janet Reed led her cohorts through a lithe trance that almost stopped the show. By the time Jerome Robbins himself danced on with Tanaquil LeClercq to join in some hilarious, supine calisthenics, the audience was having trouble deciding whether to hold its sides or pound its palms. It wound up at the curtain alternately doing both. Brilliant Choreographer Robbins had clearly brought the New York City Ballet a smashing...
...early '20s, and went back to Paris jumping with jazz. In this score for a Ballet Négre (1923), he proves that he caught the inflection better than many a serious U.S. composer has yet. The performance (with Benny Goodman taking the solo clarinet part) is in the groove. Recording: good...
Hungarians once used the ancient tarogato-a deep-toned, clarinet-like woodwind of remote Tibetan ancestry-much as the Romans, and the Scots and Irish after them, used the bagpipe: the tarogato's sound was a stirring call to war. In skirmishes with their Austrian rulers in the early 17003, patriotic tarogato players could arouse their fellow peasants to wild combat fury merely by playing their favorite songs of freedom. The annoyed
...across to the listener unless it plays with precision and delicacy. Heaviness in the string section and poor balance between soloists and orchestra resulted in a performance of this masterpiece that sagged badly at times. The soloists, however, did an excellent job, and Aaron Johnson's clean, rich clarinet tone was outstanding. Russell Stanger, beginning his second season with the orchestra, conducted the work in the first two movements as if it were by Richard Strauss. Only in the last movement did conductor, orchestra, and soloists loosen up enough to capture some of the Mozartian good-humor that makes this...