Fantasie for solo clarinet

Program notes

About the Work

Jörg Widmann wrote the Fantasie in 1993, when he was about twenty and still a clarinet student. He has called it his first real piece for his own instrument. He played the first performance himself, in March 1994 at the Bavarian Radio in Munich.

The model was Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for solo clarinet of 1919, which Widmann knew as a player. He described his own piece as eccentric in its virtuosity and cheerful and ironic in character, and as ‘a little imaginary scene’ in the spirit of the commedia dell’arte, in which several characters talk at close quarters. All of them are played by one clarinettist.

For the most part the Fantasie uses the warm, singing clarinet sound that the Romantic composers loved. Against that it sets what Widmann’s publisher calls ironic side trips into dance music, klezmer and jazz. It lasts about seven minutes.

In this concert the composer plays it himself, between conducting his Second Violin Concerto and Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony.

What to Listen For

The piece begins with a multiphonic, a way of fingering and blowing that makes the clarinet sound several notes at once. It is a knowing nod to the avant-garde, and the piece then heads somewhere else entirely.

After that, follow the characters. Widmann thought of the piece as a scene in which several people talk at once, so listen for the changes of voice: a singing line is cut off by a burst of fast notes, a dance rhythm appears and is dropped, and turns of phrase borrowed from klezmer and jazz slip in and out. Much of the comedy lies in the speed of these changes, as if the players in the scene kept interrupting one another.

It is also a display piece, full of virtuoso flourishes and of the unusual playing techniques that Widmann, as a clarinettist, knew at first hand.