Program notes

After Figaro for e flat clarinet, opus 23 (1985)

This short piece was written for my own playing on a new E flat clarinet.  As the title suggests it is a sardonic reworking of moments from the Overture to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.  It is very fast and quite virtuosic and explores the liberating technical freedom I felt when first playing on the smaller and lighter E flat clarinet than the comparatively bigger B flat clarinet. I later extended After Figaro for solo viola for Nicole Saintilan, and in that version the piece is called Attack and is substantially bigger in scale.

© Andrew Schultz, 2011