On guitar and clarinet, musicians meet their match

   Two of New England Conservatory's superstar faculty soloists teamed up Tuesday night for a joint recital: guitarist Eliot Fisk and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Jordan Hall was a sauna, but the large, young audience listened with attention and responded with whoops, whistles, and cheers of enthusiasm.

   Each played a major 20th-century solo work written for him. Fisk chose Luciano Berio's "Sequenza" for guitar (1988), the eleventh in the composer's magisterial series of works for solo instruments. Fisk said in his introduction that Berio intended to create a musical portrait not only of each instrument and its history, but also of each original performer. "You can hear how wildly demented I am," he said. The piece is full of flamenco strummings, ghostly percussive taps on the wooden part of the guitar, and demands for extreme virtuosity, all of which Fisk supplied. Stoltzman played Steve Reich's "New York Counterpoint" (1985), a quarter-hour workout for live clarinet, shadowing the electronic voices of 11 additional clarinets. Unlike the Berio, this piece is dated. Still, it is fun to hear and even more fun to watch the exercise of concentration and chops it requires. At the end, Stoltzman breathed a "Whew!" of relief.

   The two musicians joined for several works and made an appealing pair Fisk dressed in a suit with a loosely-knotted ascot, Stoltzman in what looked like a patchwork tunic of Himalayan origin. Their musical personalities seemed completely attuned, and it was amusing to see Stoltzman meet his match in flamboyance. Because the literature for guitar and clarinet is not large, they performed arrangements of Schubert's Sonatine in D (originally for violin and piano), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Sonatina (Op. 205) (flute and guitar), "Mountain Songs" by Robert Beaser (flute and guitar), and the 17 year-old Rossini's "Introduction, Theme and Variations" (clarinet and keyboard or orchestra).

    Stoltzman, famed for his ability to avoid brittleness when playing high, loud, and fast, did not avoid it in the Schubert and exploited it in the merry finale of the work by Castelnuovo-Tedesco (the composition teacher of John Williams and Andre Previn). He was at his silky-toned, bel canto best in the Rossini, a work that calls for a sense of humor, which both he and Fisk have in abundance. Fisk was always nimble fingered, agreeable in tone, vital, and uncompromising in rhythm. The folk-song settings by Beaser are attractive; there was a nice hand for the composer, who was in the audience. The players returned to the most soulful of them, "Fair and Tender Ladies," for their only encore.