Sometimes a close friendship can inspire some beautiful music, and that is exactly what happened between the 19th century clarinetist Heinrich Baermann and one of his greatest champions, the German composer Carl Maria von Weber. Among many works that Weber wrote to show off Baermann’s talents is his Clarinet Quintet, a work that combines technically dazzling passages with operatic aria-like melodies that the whole ensemble shares. Audiences will have two opportunities to hear the music when Camerata del Sol performs it twice in the next two weeks.
“I’ve been waiting to play this for years,” said John de la Paz in this Zoom interview with KRWG’s Intermezzo host Leora Zeitlin. “A lot of people consider this a clarinet concerto with string quartet accompaniment.” De La Paz recently returned to his native Las Cruces after spending many years in Arizona and teaching and performing in numerous countries around the world. This is first time performing with Camerata del Sol.
Also making his Camerata debut is pianist Joseph Lecher, who recently moved to El Paso with his wife, cellist Alina Vasquez. They and violinist Daniel Vega-Albela will perform the Piano Trio No. 1 by Felix Mendelssohn, who, like Weber, died in his 30s but left a huge and lasting legacy of music. “It is almost the standard-bearer of the genre… one of the crowning achievements,” Lecher said of the work. “It’s almost a complete how-to of high-level piano playing. There’s fast arpeggios, broken octaves, every virtuoso trick that you can find in the 19th century is available in the trio.”
Camerata del Sol will perform these two masterworks of chamber music by Weber and Mendelssohn on Sunday, Oct. 31 at 2 p.m. at the Good Samaritan Auditorium. They’ll repeat the program on Monday, Nov. 8 at 7:30 p.m. at the Fox Fine Arts Center Recital Hall on the UTEP campus.
Listen to the whole interview about the music and the musicians here:
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