Clarinet Concerto

With its comparative emotional restraint, Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto marks a change from the immediacy of his wartime ballets and orchestral music. It was written in 1947 and 1948 for Benny Goodman, then established as the pre-eminent American jazz clarinetist, who still balked at Copland’s ingenious yet demanding employment of such idioms in his music. Only after revisions did Goodman give the premiere, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Fritz Reiner, on 6 November 1950. The piece quickly established itself in the repertoire, its two movements complementary in their scoring while contrasted in their expressive manner. Marked “Slowly and expressively”, the first evokes Mahler through its bittersweet lyricism and wistful interplay of harp and strings. An increasingly animated cadenza links directly into the second movement, marked “Rather fast”, where piano replaces harp and jazzy syncopations come to the fore in a coda that vividly reflects the cultural environment of Rio de Janeiro, where Copland began composing this work.