It took about two seconds, Tuesday night at Bass Performance Hall, to be reminded of the unique—and often overlooked—beauty of the clarinet in combination with the piano. Thank Brahms, who, late in his career, explored the possibilities of the piano-clarinet ensemble to a previously unprecedented degree, producing, among other works, the magnificent Sonata in E-flat that opened the concert. And thank pianist Jon Nakamatsu and clarinetist Jon Manasse, the performers who brought a remarkable level of insight into the possibilities of their respective instruments to the performance.
Nakamatsu, who emerged onto the international concert scene from relative obscurity as gold medalist of the 1997 Cliburn competition, has since covered himself with glory (and won over skeptics, including me) with an admirable and ongoing career as a recitalist, orchestral soloist, and chamber musician. The most notable recent addition to his increasingly impressive musical résumé has been in the chamber music category, as collaborator with clarinetist Manasse, with whom he co-directs the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival.
The duo wisely chose to open with the Brahms—rather than saving it for the end of the show as the officially designated masterpiece of the evening. The piece offers the unusual advantage of diving right into the clarinet part, without piano introduction—in this case hypnotizing the listener with the extraordinary beauty and balance Nakamatsu and Manasse have accomplished in their partnership.
Brahms, as in much of his late music, achieves an autumnal, unselfconscious lyricism here; he might almost have designated this three-movement work a lyric suite rather than a sonata. Nakamatsu, who can rattle the rafters with the best of them, was completely at ease in exploring the expressive range of the piano within the narrowed volume range required in his role as a collaborator with a clarinetist; Manasse, for his part, brought into play the full lyrical potential of the clarinet.
Though Carl Maria von Weber is respected among connoisseurs of nineteenth-century opera for his innovations, one doesn’t often hear him mentioned as a genius in the same breath with Brahms—which, however, is exactly what Manasse did in his always entertaining commentary from the stage. And Manasse and Nakamatsu proceeded to making a convincing case for that assertion with a devoted reading of Weber’s Grand Duo Concertante in E-flat, finding some striking moments in this dramatic, occasionally bombastic piece to further demonstrate the possibilities of the clarinet and piano in combination.
Immediately after intermission, Nakamatsu came on stage alone to show off extraordinary delicacy and sensitivity in the filigreed passagework in Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso in E major, a piece that brings to mind that composer’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music. Manasse took his solo turn with “Lecuonerías,” a homage to one Cuban composer (Ernesto Lecuona) by Cuban another (Paquito D’Rivera); written as the third movement of the four-movement Cape Cod Files (commissioned by Nakamatsu and Manasse in 2008, and recently recorded by them), “Lecuonerías” fondly and elegantly riffs through favorite tunes from Lecuona, including the evergreen main melody of Malagueña.
A delicate piano-and-clarinet transcription of Ravel’s Habañera floated by next, followed by American piano virtuoso-composer John Novacek’s Joplin-inspired (with hints of Gershwin and Fats Waller) Four Rags for Two Jons, which took advantage of the humor inherent in the combination of clarinet with ragtime idioms; the closing item in this set, “Full Stride Ahead,” opens with a bugle call and closes with a hilariously slap-dash catalog of ragtime clichés. An energetic paraphrase of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” provided the encore for the evening, and, with its lively, vigorous lyricism, somehow seemed the perfect destination for a musical journey that had begun with the equally sturdy lyricism of Brahms.
Photo: Jon Nakamatsu
