Aaron Copland’s popular Clarinet Concerto, with its tender and poignant opening, highly virtuosic central cadenza and brilliantly jazzy final movement, is preceded by Robert L. Aldridge’s Clarinet Concerto, which has been described as the direct descendant of the Copland. Classical, folk, jazz and klezmer influences are brought together in a work which is infectious in its driving rhythms and soaring melodies. Aldridge’s Samba for clarinet and string quartet is an attempt to make this instrumentation sound like a Latin big-band. David Singer, the acclaimed longtime principal clarinetist of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, is joined on this recording by the internationally renowned Shanghai Quartet and A Far Cry Orchestra, a Boston-based collective of young professional string players who perform without a conductor and with rotating leadership.
