Consummate clarinetist

Some of us Winnipeggers use our vacation time to jet south for balmier climates.

The California-based Boris Allakhverdyan, one of North America’s leading clarinetists, asked for time off to come to Winnipeg at a time when the hangover of winter still lingers in the air.

He’s not here for the climate, however, but to take centre stage alongside the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in performing a favourite work of his for the orchestra’s final concert this season.

“This is my first time in Winnipeg,” says the Russian-born Armenian principal clarinetist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

“I’ll have to miss Mother’s Day. It’s OK, because I’m really excited to play Mozart … it’s a true gem of the clarinet literature.”

That piece is Mozart’s almost operatic Clarinet Concerto in A Major. One of the Austrian composer’s final works, it’s among the finest examples of his late style — and seems positively to sing, showcasing the clarinet’s most lyrical qualities.

“Playing Mozart concerto is actually so hard, because it sounds so simple, but it’s (not). The sound has to be perfect, the intonation has to be perfect,” Allakhverdyan says.

“It somehow transforms you more into the vocal world rather than just clarinet.”

Getting out of L.A. is often when Allakhverdyan gets to really stretch as a soloist.

In fact, it’s how he met WSO maestro Daniel Raiskin in Dubai, when the two came together to perform Ukrainian composer Alexey Shor’s Clarinet Concerto with the Slovak Philharmonic.

“I’m really excited to be playing that with my friend Daniel Raiskin, who I worked with before. I’m looking forward to hearing (Mozart) in Daniel’s interpretation.”

But that doesn’t mean Allakhverdyan has any shortage of things to do in his adopted home in California.

As well as teaching music at UCLA and California State University, Allakhverdyan, in his 40s, is also a father and plays in a duo with his wife, pianist Alin Melik-Adamyan.

And then there’s his gig at the L.A. Phil. It’s become one of the world’s orchestral powerhouses, thanks in no small part to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who famously led the orchestra in the 1990s and 2000s.

There, Allakhverdyan leads his section across a long season — roughly September to June at Walt Disney Concert Hall after an intense summer schedule at the Hollywood Bowl. As these venues’ names evoke, L.A.’s entertainment industry is inescapable even for the city’s classical musicians — and Allakhverdyan seems mostly to get a kick out of this.

“It keeps you on your toes playing jazz concerts, pop concerts, super classical concerts,” he says, recalling shows he’s played with Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga.

“We did Coachella last year with the L.A. Phil,” he say, referring to the annual music festival held in the California desert. “That’s something hard to forget … 70,000 people listening.”

Allakhverdyan grew up in Russia in the 1990s and studied at the eminent Moscow Conservatory. By the 1980s, under Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s more liberal policies, Hollywood movies and rock ‘n’ roll were already blaring from Russian teenagers’ cassette players and screens.

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s fall, American brands were advertised on every street corner and most middle class homes had ready access to MTV Russia.

“I didn’t have that vacuum. I grew up listening to Eminem and watching Home Alone and Terminator,” says Allakhverdyan. “(But) I didn’t listen to much pop music when I was growing up. The older I get, I get to listen to much more.”

This may be the early influence of his parents, both classical musicians. As significant for many classical musicians was the growing availability of modernist scores that had been censored or discouraged in the Soviet Union.

Allakhverdyan fondly recalls performing modernist heavyweights such as Berio, Donatoni and Boulez in Russia when he was a youngster, the sort of experimental Western music that resounded more rarely in Russia’s performances spaces under Soviet cultural policy.

This isn’t to say that innovative, daring music wasn’t composed in the Soviet Union.

Russia’s most famous composer of the Soviet period, Dmitri Shostakovich, was unequivocally a modernist pioneer, and had a fraught relationship with the Soviet state.

At Saturday and Sunday’s concerts, the WSO will play his Symphony No. 5 (as well as Mahler’s tender Blumine).

Shostakovich’s triumphant 1937 piece is often seen as marking the composer’s return to official favour after an infamous 1936 article in the Soviet press, trashing some of his music on political grounds, that compromised his career and safety.

While it’s not as politically rebellious as other works of his, many listeners continue to hear a coded ambiguity, even sarcasm, in this masterwork.

“I love Shostakovich Five … Usually I don’t look at it from a political perspective. I think it’s one of his best pieces,” says Allakhverdyan.

As well as looking forward to performing Mozart and hearing Shostakovich, the clarinettist says this weekend’s concerts allow him to catch up with old friends in the WSO, whom he’s played with before — and flex in ways he often can’t when he’s leading his section and playing symphonies at the L.A. Phil.

“I become a better musician when I’m in front of the orchestra,” he says. “When opportunities like this come, I almost always agree to do them.”

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