Clarinet Stars In Concerto By Copland

“I never would have thought of composing a clarinet concerto if Benny hadn’t asked me for one,” Aaron Copland said. “I can’t play a single note on the instrument.”

The “Benny” Copland talks about is Benny Goodman, the jazz great who also loved classical music. The “clarinet concerto” is Copland’s only clarinet concerto, one that will be performed by Sharon Kam with the Spokane Symphony tonight in Coeur d’Alene and Friday in Spokane.

Kam also will perform Rossini’s Introduction, Theme and Variations for Clarinet and Small Orchestra. The symphony, conducted by music director Fabio Mechetti, will perform Villa Lobos’ exotic tone poem “Dawn in a Tropical Forest” and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2.

Kam, winner of the 1992 Munich International Clarinet Competition, was born in Israel, where her playing received early recognition. At 12, she won the first of the seven AmericanIsrael Cultural Foundation Scholarships she received, and at 16 she made her solo debut with the Israel Philharmonic under the baton of Zubin Mehta. Kam also was selected to be a soloist in the historic joint concert of the Berlin Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic in 1992.

In addition to her prize in the Munich Competition, Kam also has won the Davidoff Prize at Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein Festival and the Bunkamura Award in Japan. She has presented solo recitals throughout North American, Europe and Japan and played with such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Tokyo Philharmonic.

Kam, now a resident of New York, studied clarinet at the Juilliard School with Charles Neidich, who was a soloist here a few seasons ago.

The two works Kam will perform with the symphony are both established classics of the clarinet repertoire. But Copland wryly recalled that his Clarinet Concerto was slow to take off, even with the advocacy of so popular a soloist as Goodman. “The reviews were not overwhelmingly enthusiastic,” the composer once said. “In fact, one might call them lukewarm.”

Goodman, who also had commissioned new works by Bela Bartok and Paul Hindemith, was proud of it: “Of all the concertos I commissioned, the Copland is the one that’s performed most; all the best clarinetists have played all it over the world.”

The earliest performance of Copland’s Concerto on the West Coast took place right here in Spokane in 1951, well before the piece achieved the distinction of becoming a classic.

The other work Kam will perform with the symphony, Rossini’s Introduction, Theme and Variations, was written in 1809 at the outset of Rossini’s career, when he was all of 15. It uses all the ornamental exuberance associated with his later coloratura arias in opera rather than the mixture of North and South American folk music and jazz found in Copland’s Concerto.

Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which occupies the entire second half of the program, is a part of what appears to be an ongoing survey of Rachmaninoff’s major works by Mechetti and the orchestra.

The Spokane performance will be preceded by a pre-concert talk by symphony clarinetist James Schoepflin at 7:30.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: The Symphony Symphony, with clarinetist Sharon Kam, will perform in Boswell Hall at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene at 8 p.m. today and at Spokane Opera House at 8 p.m. Friday. Tickets for the Coeur d’Alene performance are $14 and $16; call (208) 769-7780 or (800) 4CDATIX. For the Spokane performance, tickets are $12 to $27, available at the Symphony Ticket Office (624-1200) and G&B Select-a-Seat outlets (325-SEAT and (800) 325-SEAT).