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Matthew Charles Weiss |
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Dear Friends, If you live in the greater Seattle area, I hope you made it to the World Premiere of this Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra on Sunday Feb 24th 2008 in Seattle's Town Hall by clarinet soloist Jeffrey Brooks. During the course of this project, I made the rather bold (let's leave it at that, shall we? :-) decision to conduct the performance myself, having never conducted a full symphony orchestra performance in the past. This can be evidenced by the set of tails that I'm wearing that don't quite fit, especially the vest which I borrowed from my dear friend and talented conductor, Johan Louwersheimer. Happily, the community orchestra that we assembled out of friends and members of the Octava Chamber Orchestra, the Lake Union Civic Orchestra, the Rainier Symphony, and other Seattle groups, did a fine job on very few rehearsals, despite the huge challenges of working the kinks out of a brand new work, a newbie conductor, and a last movement that had some inherent notational problems that we simply had to live with for lack of time. If that weren't enough strikes against us, our soloist who had been working on the clarinet part for months, became ill and could not play the concert. So at the last minute, Jeff Brooks stepped in and learned the whole thing in 3 days, included his own beautiful cadenzas, rehearsed it for the first time an hour and a half before the show, and gave an absolutely miraculous performance. Bravo to everyone involved! Here are the program notes from our Feb 24th concert for your enjoyment: The Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra originally began as a Concerto for Oboe and Chamber Orchestra in Eb major composed in a style akin to Mendelssohn that I began writing back in the mid 90's and then shelved after completing about half of the first movement. Subsequently, I completely forgot about it until coming upon it last winter during the Indian holiday known as Shivarati. For some reason, I was compelled to go through the old material that remained on my computer and decided to listen to a MIDI rendition in order to show my kids some examples of what could be done with the tools that modern composers have available to them. To my surprise, the "sketch" as it were sounded great and I immediately decided to rekindle my interest in classical composition---after a hiatus of over a decade---and finish it. The opening theme in the french horns was screaming for a larger sized orchestra, so I decided to add timpani, two more horns, flutes, and bassoons. Soon, I decided that I wanted a richer sound than the oboe could offer, as well as a greater range, and the opportunity for more virtuosic passage work, so I decided to score it instead for solo clarinet. As the first movement was reborn, the question of course remained what to do with the other two movements. So I began to dig around in the computer to see what other sketches might be left that could be resurrected. To my great happiness and surprise, I found part of a slow movement to an unfinished symphony in G minor, composed about the same time as the original oboe concerto, that contained wonderful thematic material composed in an Italian style akin to Verdi that related surprisingly well to what is now the 1st movement of the Clarinet Concerto. The orchestral introduction to the 2nd movement of the Clarinet Concerto comes from there. The 3rd movement in C minor again is based upon a scherzo from the same unfinished symphony, with an added Wagner-like introduction and a quasi cadenza for the soloist. Following the Presto-Vivace is a nice pastoral Andante that takes an unexpected turn to quickly present some original melodies in 3 North Indian Ragas (Bhairavi, Jog, and Ramkali) all set to a seven beat pattern known as Rupak Tal (tin- tin- na- dhindhin nana dhindhin nana) . The solo clarinet, flute, and oboe play the melodies of the ragas while the orchestra imitates the sounds of the tabla and tamboura. Following the ragas, we quickly transition into a direct quote of a Vedic chant whose melody uses only 3 notes, the pitches and rythmn determined by the Sanskrit text. After this, the bass drum rockets us back into the scherzo, slightly changed in the orchestration, followed by some 19th century style transitional material which gets us back into Eb major, thematic material from the first movement surper-imposed over the same, and then finally a rambunctious coda in which the trumpet finally gets to play the opening theme from the first movement, however in a much more sarcastic form. This comes off sounding more like added fluff to the contrapuntal melee of the coda and soon the movement concludes like an old jalopy car revving itself up, back-firing and stalling a few times, and then riding off to glory in a puff of blue smoke. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Listen to the 2nd movement: Adagio ma non troppo (17 MB mp3) Listen to the 3rd movement: Allegro (18 MB mp3) Download the Conductor's Score (2 MB pdf)
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copyright © 2008 by Matthew C. Weiss. All rights reserved