Klarinet Archive - Posting 000258.txt from 2001/12
From: Kenneth Wolman <kenneth.wolman@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Nasty surprises and simple gifts
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 19:27:53 -0500
I signed back on after a way long absence to find out that Anthony
Gigliotti had died. Some sort of timing--I won't judge it as bad or good.
I'm upset. I was neither his student or personal friend. I never even met
him. Yet there is a level at which reading of his death affects me.
This story has been around the block before for all the good it's done
me. Back when I was a kid in the Bronx you either learned to play the
violin or the clarinet. Those were the choices. In the Fifties culture in
which I grew up, opting for the violin either made you a girl or a sissy.
I hated the clarinet. I hated the smell of Bronen's Music Store on Simpson
Street where I got schlepped to rent one of those tacky metal clarinets. I
hated that all I could get out of the damned horn for two solid years--no,
three, because the malady continued into the 7th grade, my first year in
Junior High School--were appalling squawks and squeals that made me sound
like a Siamese cat in megaheat. Cracked reeds, laughter from fellow
students, teachers' rolled eyes, whispers about how sucky Kenny played
(they were right). I didn't know enough to play well and I didn't know
enough to quit the damn thing and throw it down the incinerator, mainly
because it wasn't my horn to throw away.
But somewhere in there I learned to love music itself. My parents had a
collection of music that ranged from what I realized later were dirty party
songs ("She Has Freckles on Her Butt, She Is Nice") through Spike Jones
through some classic Red Diaper Baby lefty stuff (a bunch of Paul Robeson
songs) up through Morton Gould...and it was that last stuff that I latched
onto and played into the ground because it had orchestration. I played my
Aunt Esther's recording of the Tschaikovsky 5th Symphony with Artur
Rodzinski and the Cleveland. I played it more than they did...that and the
Soviet Army Chorus that taught me what gorgeous voices can sound like, and
so set me up for opera a few years down the road, too.
And then I got a REAL 33 player for my bar mitzvah in 1957 and it was magic
time: vinyl! I don't know how I discovered the Philadelphia Orchestra but
I did...and that recording I've mentioned before, "First Chair," the first
volume apparently, where Gigliotti played the Weber Concertino. It's one
of the few recordings I ever blew out to the point where it was literally
unplayable after a few years.
The day I heard that was the day I stopped hating the clarinet. Well, the
Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall concert didn't hurt either, but the
Gigliotti rendition of the Concertino had more to do with it. I didn't
exactly find a "vocation," but I found something that would be an aid and
comfort to me for the rest of my life, whether the instrument was the
clarinet, sax, or lately (for my own amusement, too) the Irish flute. Who
knows? It all started back with the clarinet and Gigliotti playing that
thing like nobody I've ever heard since. Oh, I've not heard everyone...I
own several different recordings of the Concertino and they're all good,
but Gigliotti's was like hot metal. I wondered if I was imagining things:
A la recheche du temps perdu, etc., until a guy I know made me a tape last
spring of the First Chair recording and I got to listen to Gigliotti play
it again. No, no mistake. The playing explodes. Did he really do that in
one take?--if so, it makes sense because it has the brio of someone who was
"on," who played it straight through with flawless technique and
musicality. It was incredible then and remains so. Yes, I wrote to Sony
Classical and urged/begged/pleaded with them to rerelease First Chair, both
recordings. Never heard from them. I gather they didn't pay attention to
Gigliotti either, and that he was the person who urged listeners who
remembered the old recordings to write to Sony and noodzh them.
I won't say anything hammy like "Tony Gigliotti changed my life" because he
didn't. But he helped in his own way with his playing to give me a tool to
get through some dark moments and celebrate some light ones as well. He
let me see the possibilities in the instrument he chose and got me to see
it as a gift, not just something that was being forced on
me. Music--playing it, not just listening to it--has been a gift ever since.
Ken
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It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.
D. H. Lawrence, "The Hands of God"
Kenneth Wolman http://www.kenwolman.com
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