[Dixielandjazz] Benny and Bartok meet Ms. Uchida & Friends

[Stephen G Barbone]

May 20, 2008 - By Bernard Holland - NY TIMRS
The Clarinet, Speaking in Many Voices and Accents
When composers look for important voices among the family of wind  
instruments, they come away, more often than not, with a clarinet. It  
has many colors. Its acoustical presence makes it a good public  
speaker. It can sing simply or be complicated on demand. But there is  
something else: an ambiguous quality, a hint of delicious sourness  
that says to the listener, “You think I’m playing flat, but I’m not.”

Bartok’s “Contrasts,” as played at an evening called “Mitsuko Uchida  
and Friends” at Zankel Hall on Saturday, has the appearance of a  
European composer’s catering to the ambitions of an American jazz  
musician. And this three-movement trio for clarinet, violin and piano  
would indeed not have happened if Benny Goodman had not been restless  
to expand his immense talents beyond jazz.

But “Contrasts” is more Bartok’s using Goodman than the other way  
around. Goodman is given his virtuoso turns on the clarinet but is  
otherwise taken through a busy survey of Hungarian folk music. The  
first movement bounces with the inverted dotted rhythms that give  
Hungarian music its singular identity. The finale dances wildly. Those  
who discover jazz in Bartok’s more seductive syncopations may be  
imagining things. I hear more Central Europe than 52nd Street.

The pianist Llyr Williams began the evening with “La Lugubre Gondola,”  
whose morose vision, quiet voice and indifference to accepted rules of  
harmony show how far Liszt in old age had come from the florid  
paraphrases and rhapsodies of the past. Wagner is about to die, and  
Liszt has imagined his funeral procession by gondola in Venice. Liszt,  
the most public of all composers, turns intensely private. The  
impression is of an improvisation. Why he wrote it down at all is a  
question, but be glad that he did.

Ms. Uchida’s other “friends” on Saturday — recipients of grants from  
the Borletti-Buitoni Trust in a program conceived by Ms. Uchida — were  
a kind of United Nations of splendid talent: a Swedish clarinetist  
(Martin Frost), a Welsh pianist (Mr. Williams), an American violinist  
(Soovin Kim) and a Swiss cellist (Christian Poltéra). With Ms. Uchida  
now as pianist, the rest of the evening was Messiaen’s “Quartet for  
the End of Time.”

I have run out of adjectives and images to describe this great piece.  
It is in good part a series of soliloquies: for clarinet (bright and  
raucous), cello (soulful) and violin (more soulful). Messiaen is, as  
ever, the busy ornithologist, and his feathered friends chirp from  
every branch. In Messiaen’s unorthodox church, it is the birds who  
preach to St. Francis.