Bohuslav Martinu
Otiose Odalisque
* La Revue de Cuisine
* Sonatina for clarinet and piano
* Pastorales (Stowe)
* Quartet for clarinet, horn, cello, and side drum
Michele Zukovsky (clarinet), Bohemian Ensemble Los Angeles
Summit DCD214 Total time: 48:27
Summary for the Busy Executive: Four pastries, deliciously played.
If I had to nominate someone as the Twentieth-Century Mozart, I'd pick
Martinu with no hesitation. A brilliant all-rounder, he created a huge
catalogue including at least 11 operas, 5 or 6 symphonies (depending on
whether you count the last one), several ballets and fugitive orchestral
works, and a mountain of concerti and choral and chamber music. I keep
reading about the variation in quality, but I've yet to see the point.
Outside of some juvenilia, I've never met a Martinu work I didn't fall
in love with, immediately, from the opening bars. Someone will have to
explain to me why he doesn't count as one of the great voices of the
Modern period, along with the Top Five - Bartok, Schoenberg, Webern,
Hindemith, and Stravinsky. The only thing I can come up with is influence.
He founded no school. No one great took up what he did. But then,
nobody great continued what Mozart was doing, either.
Although I can't pick even my favorite genre of Martinu, let alone a
single piece, I've always found the "essential" Martinu in the chamber
music. The range of it - from the darkly powerful Piano Quartet in d
to the joyful Trio for flute, cello, and piano - astonishes me. Some
of it qualifies as pure entertainment, for players and listeners alike.
Much inhabits very complicated emotional territory, although I should
mention that I've encountered fewer less-psychological artists than
Martinu. Like Mozart, he looks out rather than in. You can't really
tell the man's inner life from the work, except at a considerable remove.
While you may have substantial insight into, say, Don Giovanni through
Mozart's opera, you can't equate Mozart with the Don or even tell the
composer's inner turmoil (or lack of it) through the music itself, just
as you can't equate Shakespeare with Hamlet. Shakespeare, Martinu and
Mozart run counter to our prevailing notions of the Artist. The Classic
artist explains the world to itself. Modern, Romantic artists explain
the world through themselves.
The program presented here, although dominated by fun and the clarinet,
demonstrates Martinu's emotional and functional range. The earliest of
the pieces, the Quartet of 1924, boasts an odd scoring - the inclusion
of the side drum - but the music itself sounds like the most natural
thing in the world. It's a "sociable" work, and I strongly suspect
Martinu wrote it for four friends who played clarinet, horn, cello, and
side drum. Some of the music sounds closer to Stravinsky's L'Histoire
du soldat than to Satie and Les Six. Some of it is pensive, a little
surprise in essentially a one-off.
Martinu wrote his chamber ballet La Revue de Cuisine (the kitchen revue)
a little later, in 1927. Definitely no-frills, the work uses only six
instruments and belongs to Martinu's so-called "jazz" period. Two of
its movements include a tango and a Charleston. The closest thing I can
think of, really, is Milhaud's La Creation du Monde or Martinu's own Le
Jazz. Mainly a good time, it partakes a bit more of the aesthetics of
Les Six - the fondness for vaudeville and popular forms. "Jazz" in the
Twenties meant something quite different than it does today. After all,
people considered Jolson a jazz singer. The term embraced certain kinds
of pop and white dance or cabaret music as well as Louis Armstrong,
Fletcher Henderson, and Bessie Smith. In certain measures, one can
almost hear The Rhythm Boys crooning into a microphone, with Paul
Whiteman's orchestra in the background.
The Pastorales (Stowe) of 1951 have only recently come to light - a
frightening thought, if you consider that Martinu reached the considerable
height of his fame in the early Fifties. I wonder how many other pieces
wait for discovery? Composed for the von Trapp family (yes, those Sound
of Music-y von Trapps) who at the time ran an inn in Stowe, Vermont,
Pastorales features the instruments the family played: 5 recorders (2
sops, 2 tenors, and a bass), C-clarinet, 2 violins, and cello. For an
antidote to the sugary Broadway show, I always wondered if at least one
of the kids had a tin ear and the rhythm of a stutterer. After all,
what are the odds that all the many Trapp Kinder were musical? On the
basis of this piece, the musicians among them were quite musical indeed.
Not that there's anything virtuosic about the work, but it does demand
a mature sense of phrase. The music itself has a mellow sound that,
while recognizably Martinu, lies slightly outside his usual nervous
energy. Martinu plays his favorite trick of fooling the ear into believing
more instruments play than actually do, and the melodies inhabit that
limbo between singing and dancing peculiar to Martinu. That is, you're
never quite sure whether he sings in a dancing way or dances in a singing
way. Slonimsky once characterized Martinu as a "brilliant contrapuntalist."
In all the years, I had listened to Martinu, that thought had never
occurred to me, but I saw at once that Slonimsky hit the nail on the
head. The counterpoint was how Martinu - like Bach and Hindemith - got
his music to dance.
Martinu composed his 1956 clarinet sonatina in New York, a city he hated.
Of course, he did stay at the Great Northern Hotel, which would have
depressed a lot of people. Jim Svejda's liner notes make a case for the
work as emotionally discombobulated. I take the point, but I disagree.
The sonatina certainly throws off emotional complexity, but Martinu's
music, like Nielsen's, keeps its emotional balance, no matter how powerful
the emotions expressed. It was the composer's conscious decision for
his music - he wrote very feelingly about the French concept of mesure
and what it meant to him - and fortunately it suited his extremely
reserved nature. I doubt a listener unaware of the biographical
circumstances of composition would pick up on Martinu's unhappiness.
On the other hand, the diminutive title slightly misleads. This is no
throwaway or bagatelle. Martinu packs a lot into a small space. Wistful
little polkas and marches flit through the work like fireflies, far from
the brashness of, say, La Revue de cuisine. The energetic passages of
the first movement have an edge to them, which by movement's end have
transformed to high spirits. Similarly, the slow movement may start out
as a trip through Carlyle's Centre of Indifference, but it shades into
an heroic looking back. The finale hops about - Martinu's signature
rhythms - but it's not just high spirits. Something more solid runs
underneath. The emotional territory strikes me as mainly nostalgic or
retrospective, much like Brahms's late clarinet music. Martinu's sonatina
strikes me as full-grown masterpiece, with more weight to it than many
a longer work.
After the CD ended, I wanted to give the performers a standing O.
Zukovsky's a clarinetist in a million - wonderful tone, great command
of color, and, beyond technique, the ability to communicate the living
music behind the notes. Her recording of the clarinet sonatina handily
beats de Peyer's, the only other one I know. She joins David Shifrin as
My Favorite Clarinetist (classical). Her colleagues are mostly members
(even principals) of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, including such
luminaries as trumpeter Thomas Stevens, horn player Jerry Folsom,
bassoonist David Breidenthal, and violinist Bing Wang. The joy of elegant
music-making comes through with all of them. Even though the disc timing
runs more than a bit short, I enthusiastically recommend this disc.
Steve Schwartz
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