South Florida Classical Review

Clarinetist Jon Manasse performed chamber works of Anna Clyne and Robert Schumann with New World Symphony musicians on Sunday.

Music of the romantics bookended the New World Symphony’s final chamber music concert of 2025 Sunday afternoon in Miami Beach. Clarinetist Jon Manasse was the afternoon’s featured guest artist at the New World Center. Manasse played Schumann’s Märchenerzählungen and an outstanding recent work by British-born composer Anna Clyne. 

The outlier on the menu was George Antheil’s Symphony for Five Instruments. Antheil (1900-1959) was an American eccentric whose early career marked him as an avant-gardist and provocateur. (His Ballet Méchanique of 1924 is scored for player pianos, airplane propellers and mechanical bells.) Later, he wrote Hollywood film scores and orchestral and vocal works in a conservative style, including a cantata about the explorer Cabeza da Vaca. 

Antheil’s Symphony for Five Instruments, written in Paris in 1923, is clearly influenced by Stravinsky in his austere, neo-classical phase. (There is an allusion to a theme from Petrushka in the initial Allegro.) Antheil, however, was not even near Stravinsky’s equal. Scored for flute, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and viola (which is barely audible over the brass and winds), the work emerges rather arid with a plethora of empty note-spinning. In the final section, the thematic material inclines toward the trite. The five New World fellows played the complex opus with precision but the music was hardly worth the effort.

Manasse is one of the finest clarinetists on the concert scene, excelling as soloist, chamber player and orchestral musician. Märchenerzählungen (“Fairy Tales”) is late Schumann, written three years before his death in a mental asylum. There is a cloud-tossed undertow beneath the songfulness of the four movements. 

Manasse’s woody, mellow tone spun the lyrical phrases of the first section in one long arc. Tyler McKisson’s dark viola had an appropriate edgy side. In the lopsided march of the second movement, pianist Pei-Hsuan Chen drew a hard, percussive sound from the keyboard. An exact and tight sense of rhythm pervaded the final movement, Manasse negotiating the leaps with skill and aplomb.

Anna Clyne’s Strange Loops for clarinet and strings was written in 2020 during the covid pandemic lockdown. The 17-minute score is consistently inventive and inspired. An angular subject, breezily dispatched by Manasse, turns more pensive and introspective. A rapid, hard-driving section for strings precedes a haunting episode almost like an Appalachian folk hymn. This music is beautifully conceived in a coherent, flowing manner. Manasse played with ardent warmth and the strings, led by violinist Marissa Weston, were excellent.

Schubert’s Quintet in A minor for piano and strings (The “Trout”) is one of the masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire. The New World players gave an accomplished, highly musical perusal but this landmark work demands something more. 

Chen’s pianism was the reading’s strong point. Her attack was vigorous but she could bring the volume down to calibrated softness. Violinist Deurim Jung offered intensity of expression. but her tone sometimes turned scrawny with some harshness. Chen set a poetic mood for the Andante but, although the strings were well coordinated, the movement came off as too light and superficial. 

A lithe and sparkling Scherzo and subtly contrasted theme and variations on the Schubert song that gives the quintet its nickname provided the performance’s best moments. The strings’ initial statement of the theme had an aristocratic, almost Mozartean aura. In the rapid variations, Chen proved agile and blended well with her colleagues. Alexander Wu spun the cello variation in beautiful layers of tonal resonance. 

The Allegro giusto finale, however, was too rhythmically rigid, wanting in flexibility and breadth. Chen’s entry provided some needed virile lift.  Violist Harper Randolph and bassist John Shank filled out the lower string lines capably.

Andrew Grams conducts the New World Symphony in Duke Ellington’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Darius Milhaud’s La creation du monde, Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Marcus Roberts Trio  8 p.m. January 10, 2026 at the Arsht Center in Miami. nws.edu

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