WMV Music Web Log

Our wonderful clarinetist Ben Redwine sends his first (I think) posting to the WMV blog:

It’s been great playing my first season with Washington Musica Viva. Even more exciting is the upcoming season. From my concerts last season, I’ve been blessed with at least three great Washington D.C. area composers offering to write new music for me. As I always like to say “all music was new once”, so it is such a pleasure to play new music which may or may not become a staple in the music world, especially if it written with me in mind!

Playing and premiering new music is such a rewarding experience. I think it is a performing musician’s duty to help composers whenever possible by playing their works. It reminds me of collaborations throughout history of great composers and great musicians who together produce great works. The first that comes to mind is the collaboration between Johannes Brahms and Richard Muhlfeld. Brahms had actually retired from composing until he heard Muhlfeld perform, particularly the concerti of Mozart and Weber. Brahms was convinced to come out of retirement and wrote 4 works for Muhlfeld that have proven to be some of the best in the clarinet repertoire. He wrote the two sonatas for clarinet and piano, the trio for clarinet, piano, and cello and the quintet for string quartet and clarinet. The quintet comes to mind because we will perform it on the September 12th Musica Viva concert at the Ratner Museum. In my opinion, the quintet is the greatest composition in the clarinet repertoire, so I’m very excited to perform it with such great musicians. On the same concert, we’ll premiere Charlie Gerard’s new composition, which should be very fun.

While Musica Viva is taking a short summer vacation, I’m preparing two new compositions that I commissioned. One is from my friend Anthony Wakefield, from London. His piece is called Praying Mantis. It has three sections, evoking the mantis hypnotizing its prey, the prayer, and the attack. The other piece is by my new friend from Russia, Nataliya Medvedovskaya. She now lives in New Jersey, having emigrated here about 3 years ago. She studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Her piece has six movements, using b-flat, a, c, and e-flat clarinets. 1st: Alarm in the Ant-hill, 2nd: Waltz of the Fly Agaric and the Deadly Amanita, 3rd: Creeping Invisible Beings, 4th: Dance of the Dolphin, 5th: Tango of the Octopi, and 6th: Trip of the Solar Bunnies (an English translation of a Russian child’s game where the sun comes into a room, the child pretends that the movement of the reflections on the wall are rabbits). Both pieces are great and will be premiered on August 11th in Atlanta, Georgia at the International Clarinet Association convention, with Nataliya accompanying me. Hopefully, Carl will want to program one or both of these in the near future (hint, hint, Carl). Of course, there are other great pieces scheduled for the upcoming season and I look forward to seeing you (and all of your friends that you can bring along) at each concert. See you soon!

Ben Redwine