Music Reviews : Tashi in Monday Evening Series at County Museum

Any ensemble that includes both Stefan Wolpe’s ultra-cerebral String Quartet and Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” on the same program is either trying to make a point or can’t make up its mind. The chamber group Tashi--appearing on the latest Monday Evening Concert at the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater--would appear to be facing two directions at once: On the one hand it wants to remain a serious-minded ensemble that performs important and worthy music; on the other, it wants to capitalize on the crossover popularity of its most famous member, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman.

Monday it made for an uncomfortable and unilluminating mix. Not that Tashi played badly--the group performs with persuasive exuberance and technical and stylistic assurance.

A high point was its performance of Hindemith’s 1923 Quintet for clarinet and strings, its bustling energies and cosmopolitan mixture of styles--running the gamut from slow, sinewy counterpoint to shrill, demented parody--delivered with an aggressive flair. Particularly memorable was the moody statement of the spare Arioso.

Wolpe’s Quartet is a kind of relentless variation on, and permutation of, short, serial motives. It eschews such commonalities as developmental form, exploration of color, homophony, contrasting moods and dynamics, even extremes of range. It’s a middle ground of continuous imitative, hard-edged activity, effective through its sheer cumulative hammering. Tashi revealed spirit and confidence in the grapple.

A set of five Gershwin pieces--including “Walking the Dog” from “Shall We Dance” and “Bess You Is My Woman Now”--arranged for clarinet and string quartet closed the program. Stoltzman, of course, was featured prominently, handling the tunes with playfulness, panache and expressiveness. The arrangements, however, though solid, didn’t add to our deeper understanding of this music.

Also on the program were Alan Shulman’s jazzy and negligible “Rendezvous With Benny” (written for Benny Goodman) and Ingolf Dahl’s bubbly, neoclassical Concerto a tre, for clarinet, violin and cello.