Grazioso
Andantino – Vivace e leggiero

Leonard Bernstein wrote his Clarinet Sonata on a holiday spent at Key West, Florida, in the summer of 1941, just after finishing his conducting studies with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute. It was first performed in Boston on 21 April 1942 by the clarinettist David Glazer, with Bernstein at the piano. But it was another clarinettist – David Oppenheim – to whom the work was dedicated, and who gave the first New York performance, and made the first recording, both in 1943. Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s mentor, had expressed reservations about Clarinet Sonata being played in public as he thought it too heavily influenced by Hindemith, Bartók, Milhaud and Copland himself. After the Boston premiere Bernstein wrote to him: ‘Your weren’t supposed to know that the Clarinet Sonata was being done! Direct defiance of your orders. But, hell, I’ve got to hear it.’ A year later, Bernstein put it on the programme of the concert he gave with David Oppenheim at the League of Composers in New York and confessed to Copland: ‘I betrayed you by playing the Clarinet Sonata today … I felt the need to present my first League composition as a piece with a slightly larger form … and the Sonata does approach, at least, a big form. Besides … it provided a lovely excuse for having David Oppenheim come down. So you will forgive me, won’t you?’ Published the same year, Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata, with its pastoral, rather Hindemith-like first movement and its ebullient 5/8 finale – unmistakably Bernstein – was one of the first pieces to establish his reputation.

Nigel Simeone 2014