RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 8 3 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W M A T T H E W S P E L L B E R G In its three hundred years of existence, the sound of the clarinet has been likened to the human voice, a squawking duck, a howl, Benjamin Franklin’s ethereal glass armonica (rumored to drive its players to madness), a screeching goose, the scent of a carnation, a lithesome cat, and someone speaking words just a hair’s breadth from discernibility. Hector Berlioz had a great deal, much of it contradictory, to say about the instrument. It has a ‘‘melancholy, noble character,’’ he wrote; no other wind instrument ‘‘can produce a tone or let it die away as beautifully as the clarinet. Hence its invaluable ability to render distant sounds, an echo, or the charm of twilight.’’ But he also wrote elsewhere, ‘‘The clarinet, though appropriate to the expression of the most poetic ideas and sentiments, is really an epic instrument – the voice of heroic love.’’ And the confusion only increases if we add practice to theory, for when, in the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz wanted to depict the beloved idée fixe transformed into a hideous witch, he made her cackle through an E-flat clarinet. All these descriptions – not just from Berlioz, but from newspaper reports, Mikhail Glinka, E. T. A. Ho√mann, Sergey Proko fiev, and others – speak only for the classical clarinet. When 1 8 4 S P E L L B E R G Y playing klezmer the clarinet can be a lamentation or a whirligig. In the marching band it conveys cheerful innocence before battle. In jazz it makes a fine mellow huskiness, a coo in a cloud of smoke (except in Barney Bigard’s version of ‘‘Sweet Marijuana Brown,’’ where it is the cloud of smoke, dancing stoner rings round the vocal line). Mozart solved the problem of description with a simple exclamation : ‘‘If only we had clarinets!’’ he wrote to his father. ‘‘You cannot imagine the glorious e√ect of a symphony with flutes, oboes and clarinets.’’ That’s the problem: no one can imagine the glorious e√ect of the clarinet. This curious instrument with its ancient mechanism – a single reed vibrates within a cylindrical bore generating standing waves of air – touches something like the abstract heart of sound, its callous disregard for referents, its slippery and defiant existence in itself. The medium by which we produce words resists them fiercely. Loud and quiet fit sound naturally , but they are the exception. Most of the other descriptive terms used to qualify the vibration of air in the ears – big, small, bright, dark, husky, smooth, scratchy, soft, liquid – are naturally at home in either sight or touch, and steal into sound only as metaphors . The di≈culty of describing sound is of course not unique to descriptions of the clarinet, but with the clarinet it reaches a special intensity. This may have to do with what is frequently called the instrument’s purity of tone. In music as in religion, purity is a di≈cult, mostly apophatic word. By pure tone is meant, it seems, that the clarinet can produce sound without discernible vibrato (although it can be played with vibrato), that it is capable of producing sound that appears to materialize from nowhere, without attack (yet it can be played with a dramatic, punchy attack), and that it is capable of a remarkable evenness and loudness over the full length of its range (yet it can be squawked and squeaked with the best of them). The clarinet sound is often credited with a roundness, but what exactly is roundness, especially when compared to more evocative, if mildly pejorative, woodwind words like shrill (for the flute), nasal (for the oboe), or clownish (for the bassoon)? Descriptions of the clarinet vacillate mostly between raw nature (the birdcall, the human voice, a shaking in the bones) and R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 8 5 R Platonic abstraction (the sphere, clarity, a smooth surface). Which...