The Ojai-based chamber music organization Chamber on the Mountain will present a recital by the virtuoso clarinetist Narek Arutyunian with pianist Christopher Goodpasture at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, in Logan House, adjacent to Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road, Ojai.
A Meet the Artists reception will be held immediately following the performance.
Arutyunian and Goodpasture will play, in concert or solo, François Poulenc‘s “Sonata for Clarinet & Piano, FP 184 (1963);” Maurice Ravel‘s “Pièce en forme de Habanera, M 51 (1921);” Igor Stravinsky‘s “Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1919);” Béla Bartók‘s “Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 56 (1915);” Elliott Carter‘s “’Gra’ for Solo Clarinet (1994);” “Isoldens Liebestod” (arranged by Franz Liszt, 1867) from Richard Wagner‘s opera Tristan und Isolde (1859); and Johannes Brahms’ “Sonata in f-minor for Clarinet and Piano, Opus 120, No. 1 (1894).”
This is, I must say, a most elegant program. The Poulenc and the Brahms are old friends and, curiously, more like each other than you might expect.
We could, tentatively, suppose the sonorities of an instrument have much to do with the kind of music written for it, so long as the composer has taken the trouble to learn those sonorities and internalize them.
The Carter and the Stravinsky bear a similar, familial, resemblance. While the literature for solo piano is virtually endless, and that for the solo violin and solo cello are respectively vast, compositions for solo wind instruments are much thinner on the ground, and tend to be of recent date.
Both these pieces are like charcoal sketches or armatures; masterpieces in outline. Carter’s music is seldom so easily grasped and appreciated on first hearing. In Polish, “Gra” means “play,” and the work is dedicated to the great Polish composer Witold Lutoslavski.
Lizst was a canny virtuoso, hyper-aware of when he had an audience and when they were drifting. There was a basic group of his own composition — Hungarian Rhapsodies and a few other inspired melodies — that audiences would always want to hear.
To keep his listeners happy, Lizst became a master transcriber of other people’s music, their greatest hits, as it were.
He was the first pianist to present his audiences with his profile, rather than his back, and his dramatic good looks, coupled with the dazzling dexterity of his fingers, made every concert a sell out. He seemed the Romantic Movement personified.
An early supporter and patron of Wagner, his transcriptions of the great music dramas were both memorable highlights of his concerts and evangelical promoters of the younger composer’s works.
Admission to this concert is $25; advance reservations may be purchased on line at www.ChamberOnTheMountain.com.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.