Waiting for Benny – Julien Hervé

Benny Goodman never commissioned a false note, apparently, and this disc goes a long way toward proving the point — though the clarinettist on hand this time is a Frenchman most American collectors will not recognize, and that turns out to be very good news indeed.

Julien Hervé plays with the kind of liquid tone that makes you forget how difficult this instrument actually is to play in tune. Listen to the opening of the Poulenc — that falling phrase, marked Allegro tristamente, which somehow has to sound both jaunty and bereft at once. Hervé gets the paradox exactly right. He has the French school’s tonal purity (think Boutard, think Lancelot) without the occasional dryness that can afflict that tradition on disc. There is vibrato here, used sparingly, like seasoning rather than sauce.

The Poulenc sonata carries a sad history that colors every hearing of it. He finished correcting proofs the morning of the day he dropped dead in his Paris apartment — January 30, 1963 — and never heard a note of it played. Goodman and Bernstein gave the premiere in Carnegie Hall that April, an odd pairing of personalities if ever there was one, the breezy virtuoso and the podium whirlwind, but by all accounts it worked. What’s remarkable listening to Hervé and Jean-Hisanori Sugitani is how the piece refuses to sound like a swan song. The central Romanza is gorgeous, yes, unapologetically so, but the outer movements snap and crackle with the same wit that animates the Mouvements perpétuels four decades earlier. Poulenc the monk and Poulenc the guttersnipe, Henri Hell’s old formulation, both present and correct.

Sugitani deserves real credit throughout this disc — not just as accompanist but as equal partner, which these scores all demand. His left hand in the Bernstein sonata has exactly the rhythmic snap the composer wants, that Copland-via-Harvard-Yard syncopation Bernstein hadn’t yet learned to disguise. Written when Bernstein was twenty-three and still finding his compositional feet, the sonata sounds like a talented student who has been listening to too much Hindemith and too much Billie Holiday simultaneously, which is not a complaint. The second movement especially — fast, nervy, a little showoff-y — gets a terrifically idiomatic reading here. You can hear the Broadway composer who hadn’t happened yet.

Gershwin’s three preludes, arranged by James Cohn from the solo piano originals, come off less convincingly, if only because no clarinet transcription can quite replicate the stride-piano snap of the originals. Still, Hervé phrases the famous blue third prelude with real sensitivity, that bent, aching melody sounding almost like klezmer — which, given Goodman’s own background, seems entirely appropriate.

Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for solo clarinet get a reading of real character — spiky, unpredictable, over before you’ve settled in. Thirteen minutes of Poulenc precede it; three minutes of Stravinsky demolish all that charm with cheerful indifference, which is rather the point.

Morton Gould remains the odd man out on any program like this, and deservedly gets the longest work here, Benny’s Gig, written for Goodman’s own klezmer-adjacent combo decades after their initial association. It’s a curious piece — six short movements, jazz inflections rubbing up against neoclassical rigor, a walking bass line (nicely turned by Ying Lai Green) that wanders in and out like it’s not sure it belongs at the party. Doesn’t always cohere. But there’s real charm in its disjointedness, and this performance leans into that rather than smoothing it over, which I think is the right choice.

The disc saves its best for last. Bartók’s Contrasts was the piece Goodman and Szigeti commissioned together in 1938, and the version we know — three movements rather than two, with the furious “Sebes” finale added after the premiere — remains one of the twentieth century’s great instrumental trios. Maud Lovett’s violin playing here has real Hungarian bite, those open-string drones and scordatura effects in the finale delivered with proper abandon. The “Pihenő” middle movement, nocturnal and strange, gets an appropriately hushed, unsettled reading — Bartók’s night music at its most alien. This is a rendition that holds its own against the classic Goodman-Szigeti-Bartók disc from 1940, no small compliment, and against more recent versions by Shifrin, by Neidich.

Taken as a whole, this is an unusually satisfying survey of what Goodman’s patronage gave the twentieth century — a reminder that the boundary between jazz clarinet and concert clarinet was, for a brief shining moment, genuinely permeable. Hervé is a real discovery. Sugitani is superb throughout. Recommended without hesitation.