Copland Clarinet Concerto

The commission for a new Clarinet Concerto from the great
American composer Aaron Copland came from a rather unlikely
source: Benny Goodman, the man known as the King of Swing.
Goodman was one of the most famous and important jazz musicians
of all time, but in the late 1940s, swing music was on the
decline, and bebop had taken over. Goodman experimented with
bebop for a time but never fully took to it in the way that he
had so mastered swing. Goodman then turned towards the classical
repertoire, commissioning music from many of the great composers
of the time, such as Bela Bartok, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith,
Francis Poulenc, and of course, Aaron Copland. Copland eagerly
agreed to the commission, and spent the next year carefully
crafting the concerto, which is full of influences from Jazz as
well as from Latin American music, perhaps inspired by the four
months Copland spent in Latin America while writing the piece.


What resulted from all this was a short and compact piece in one
continuous movement split into two parts. With an orchestra of
only strings, piano, harp, and solo clarinet, Copland created one
of the great solo masterpieces of the 20th century. It
practically distills everything that makes Copland so great into
just 18 minutes of music. Today on the show we’ll talk about the
difficulty of the piece, something that prevented Benny Goodman
from performing the concerto for nearly 2 years, as well as the
immense difficulty of the second movement for the orchestra.
We’ll also talk about all of those quintessentially Copland
traits that make his music so wonderful to listen to, and the
path this concerto takes from beautiful openness to jazzy fire.
Join Us! 


Recording: Martin Frost with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra


Pedro Henrique Alliprandini dissertation:
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/alliprandini_pedro_h_201812_dma.pdf