Polyglot
Iván Enrique Rodríguez composer
Johanny Navarro composer
Chia-Yu Hsu composer
Gabriel Bouche Caro composer
Johannes Brahms composer
Eric Schultz clarinet
Han Chen piano
Clare Monfredo cello
Eric Schultz’s masterful clarinet playing speaks in new and known tongues on POLYGLOT, a concept album celebrating music as a language of cultural identity and the self. A strong advocate of living composers, Schultz opens with an engrossing performance of Iván Enrique Rodríguez’s Sonata Santera, exploring the development and evolution of three Caribbean Santeria rituals. Schultz captures the enchanting, mystical nature of the rituals between the rhythmic, driving movements, occasionally accompanied by percussive elements.
Schultz follows with Críptico no. 9: DAVЯTHAN, an interpretive piece that centralizes language and text-setting at the core of its composition. Shortly followed is Johnny Navarro’s romantic Danzón, a nostalgic work punctuated by fleeting moments of sensuality. The same intimacy is carried into Chiayu Hsu’s Summer Night in a Deep Valley, showcasing meditative episodes on the natural beauty expressed in Guo Xi’s Chinese landscape paintings. Likewise, Gabriel Bouche Caro’s Escenas explores a meditation on self-identity and its existence as a product of culture, the clarinet never languishing in melancholic passages, but always remaining reflective and curious.
POLYGLOT culminates with the Brahms Trio, Op. 114, a composition inspired by the clarinet playing of friend Richard Mühlfeld, an inspiration so strong it served to pull the composer from retirement. To Schultz, a quarterfinalist for the 2025 GRAMMY® Music Educator of the Year, music is a hallmark of metamorphosis that drives cultural change across history, the performer and composer working in tandem to create something inspired and new — speaking each other’s language, you might say.
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Track Listing & Credits
| # | Title | Composer | Performer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Sonata Santera: 1. Despojo - Cleanse | Iván Enrique Rodríguez | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Han Chen, piano | 7:31 |
| 02 | Sonata Santera: II. Ofrenda - Offering | Iván Enrique Rodríguez | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Han Chen, piano | 5:49 |
| 03 | Sonata Santera: III. Bembe - Summoning of the Orichas | Iván Enrique Rodríguez | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Han Chen, piano | 6:14 |
| 04 | Criptico no. 9: DAVЯTHAN | Iván Enrique Rodríguez | Eric Schultz, clarinet | 2:51 |
| 05 | Danzón | Johanny Navarro | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Han Chen, piano | 6:30 |
| 06 | Summer Night in a Deep Valley | Chia-Yu Hsu | Eric Schultz, clarinet | 4:30 |
| 07 | Escenas | Gabriel Bouche Caro | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Clare Monfredo, cello | 8:44 |
| 08 | Trio in A minor, Op. 114: I. Allegro | Johannes Brahms | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Clare Monfredo, cello; Han Chen, piano | 8:06 |
| 09 | Trio in A minor, Op. 114: II. Adagio | Johannes Brahms | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Clare Monfredo, cello; Han Chen, piano | 7:44 |
| 10 | Trio in A minor, Op. 114: III. Andantino grazioso | Johannes Brahms | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Clare Monfredo, cello; Han Chen, piano | 4:17 |
| 11 | Trio in A minor, Op. 114: IV. Allegro | Johannes Brahms | Eric Schultz, clarinet; Clare Monfredo, cello; Han Chen, piano | 4:54 |
Recorded March 2022 in the Edwards College Recital Hall at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC
Session Producer & Engineer Mckinley Devilbiss
Mixing, Editing & Mastering Antonio Oliart
Executive Producer Bob Lord
VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil
A&R Jeff LeRoy
VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Chelsea Kornago
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci
Artist Information
Eric Schultz
Eric Schultz is an American clarinetist equally in demand as a soloist, chamber musician, and interpreter of new music. He maintains an active concerto schedule performing with orchestras across the world and can be seen and heard from Netflix to National Public Radio. Hailed a “mastermind” in the Myrtle Beach Herald and a “pathfinder” by iconic composer Valerie Coleman, Schultz was selected as a quarterfinalist for the 2025 GRAMMY® Music Educator of the Year Award.
Han Chen
Han Chen is a powerful performer of classic piano repertoire. Reviewing Chen performing Beethoven’s Sonata No. 29 Op. 106 Hammerklavier, Lee Eiseman of The Boston Music Intelligencer had this to say in August 2023: “Oxygenated by powerful intellectual bellows and endowed with muscular forearms, Chen didn’t just hammer Beethoven’s formidably relentless and ever-modern challenge to pianists and listeners; with fire and tempering plunges he alternately annealed, welded, sintered, and sensitively stretched the well-wrought iron into impressive curls and shapely forms. His carefully plotted interpretations conveyed nuance and compelling gesture through very well-graduated colorations and dynamics from white hot to warmly glowing.”
Clare Monfredo
Clare Monfredo is a cellist originally from Seal Harbor ME, currently living in Brooklyn NY where she is pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and is the recipient of the Graduate Center Fellowship. Monfredo has performed as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral leader all over the world, collaborating with a diverse array of notable artists, from Patricia Kopatchinskaja to Jon Batiste, to groups such as Ensemble Intercontemporain and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Iván Enrique Rodríguez
Described by San Francisco Classical Voice, Boston Classical Review, and New York Concert Review as fiery, gripping, lyrical, eloquent, with a strong feeling for musical drama, and a gifted colorist with an abundance of emotional energy and the means to communicate it, Puerto Rican composer Dr. Iván Enrique Rodríguez’ (b. 1990) music has been performed in Puerto Rico, the United States, throughout North/South America, and Europe in important venues and landmarks such as the Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Harpa in Reykjavík, Iceland, Jordan Hall in Boston MA, among others around the world.
Johanny Navarro
Young Puerto Rican composer Johanny Navarro is one of the most exceptional artists of her generation. Navarro has worked on commissions for important music soloists like Elisa Torres, Luis Miguel Rojas, and Andrea González Caballero, and organizations like Multicultural Music Group, Inc. and Boston Opera Collaborative; has also composed for ensembles like The Catholic University of America Symphony Orchestra, American Harp Society, Inc., New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy, Victory Players, and Coralia from the University of Puerto Rico.
Chia-Yu Hsu
Chiayu Hsu is an active composer of contemporary concert music. She has been interested in deriving inspirations from different materials, such as poems, myths, and images. Particularly, however, it is the combination of Chinese elements and western techniques that is a hallmark of her music. Her career has been burgeoning with a remarkable number of commissions. Since December 2022, Hsu’s work, City Renaissance, has been included in PBS’s series Songs about Buildings and Moods, and aired nationwide. In July 2022, her EC Sketches was performed by the Orchestra internazionale di Roma at Festival Federico Cesi in Trevi, Italy and also at the femfestival in Florence, Italy in November 2021. Her choral work, To A Lost Year, was premiered by the San Francisco Choral Society in May 2022.
Gabriel Bouche Caro
Gabriel Bouche Caro is a Puerto Rican composer based in New York City. Caro explores concepts and perceptions of personal and musical identity through language and the experience of life as part of a colonized people and society. Identity, authenticity in a non-native environment, and foreignness are all tints that color the artistic conception and eventual discourse that is communicated in his work. His music has been performed in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. Caro’s music has been featured in the Havana Contemporary Music festival, soundSCAPE, and New Music on the Point festivals.
Notes
Puerto Rico, as part of the Caribbean, was victim of colonization, genocide of the Taino natives, and slavery. When Spain reached the shores of Puerto Rico it brought with it Catholicism. By establishing itself as the power of authority and government, it forced its religion on all its inhabitants including African slaves. The African population, victims of the Atlantic slave trade, brought with them their Yoruba religion. To avoid being killed by their owners, practitioners of the Yoruba religion syncretized their beliefs with the Catholic religion. The product of this syncretism was Caribbean Santería.
Santería practices different important rituals and in Sonata Santera I present three of them. The first movement is based on the Despojo, a ritual where the santere granting the cleanse baptizes the recipient with tobacco smoke, rum, and orange blossom water while hitting him with different weeds and flowers. The movement is built on the Holandé rhythm from the Puerto Rican Bomba. The second movement focuses on the act of offering, Ofrenda. In this ritual the saints (Yoruba deities with names of Catholic saints) are presented with different offerings on their dedicated altars. These are intended to ask something of the saint, or simply as an act of gratitude. Offerings may include fruits, sweets, tobacco, woods, incense, and rum, among other things. In this movement I present a tender and calm atmosphere to later reveal that within all the musical activity the rhythm of Orunmila or Saint Francis of Assisi has been hidden. Orunmila is one of the most important saints of the religion. The third movement presents the mystical celebration where the saints are invoked. This celebration or ritual is known as Bembé. The importance of this ritual is such that it carries with it its own dedicated rhythm; the rhythm of Bembé, in which this movement is built on. The celebration of Bembé is full of energy, mysticism, and intensity embodied in the great virtuosity that this culminating movement presents.
– Iván Enrique Rodríguez
The Críptico is a compositional methodology created by Iván Enrique Rodríguez consisting of transforming texts—either quotations or original—into short musical pieces typically for a solo instrument. The metamorphic stage from text to music is fundamental to the work. Each and every one of the text letters becomes a musical note within a particular scale or an assortment of notes put together by the composer. This creates a “cell” in which each Críptico is based. Curiously, as part of the composition process, the composer destroys the text after musically creating the cell. This allows a free interpretation of the work, but it could also incite the performer to decode the cryptic message. This could inspire a different, and perhaps more intimate, interpretation.
– Iván Enrique Rodríguez
Danzón para clarinete y piano evokes a sentiment of nostalgia and melancholy. These sentiments provided the idea of the title and, subsequently, the form. As the name implies, danzón translates as dance. This particular and unique dance was created in Cuba around the 19th century. The danzón was the expression that resulted from the combination of Spanish and Afro-Cuban aesthetics. This rich and elegant amalgam of textures gave birth to a genre that has impacted El Caribe and the rest of the world. As the traditional intention of danzón, the dancers have to wander into closer embraces as the piece evolves. This magical moment is the main idea for all melodic themes that travel from one instrument to another in a constant but subtle manner. The architectural structure of the piece is based on the traditional form of danzón. Every melody imitates a dance movement, similar to when the dancers get closer and move together as one and when they separate from each other and move independently, creating provocative, sensual movements as they look at each other from afar. Danzón para clarinete y piano paints and depicts the relationship between music and dance, dancers and movement, and colors and rhythms.
– Johanny Navarro
Summer Night in A Deep Valley is inspired by the Chinese landscape paintings by Guo Xi (c. 1020 – c. 1090). The piece tries to capture the magnificent scenes presented in different layers in the paintings by using various timbres to create a sound world that includes imitations of insect and animal sounds, rumbling of water, dropping leaves, and blowing breezes. Sometimes the music is meditative to reflect the broad landscape and sometimes it moves swiftly to depict the active night lives in the valley.
– Chia-Yu Hsu
Escenas is the result of an active introspection on the topic of identity. With this piece, I do not attempt to clearly depict or make obvious any specific image, nor do I desire to present segmented sections tied to a specific idea, but rather a mix of elements that surfaced as answers to the very difficult question of how to represent my own identity musically. These answers or “scenes,” as the title of the piece suggests, blend together aspects of my own individual identity with the cultural and group identities that combine to create the “me” that only I can see, know and hopefully understand.
In Escenas, the active and chaotic musical material draws from feelings of excitement, happiness, rage, and uncertainty all at the same time, while maintaining a high level of energy and activity that serves as an adaptation of the heavily constant and rhythmic character of the sounds that have been essential to my development. The softer, longer, and sometimes more traditionally “beautiful” sounds, are reflections upon feelings of longing and sadness that do not wallow in these states but are felt in combination with the love and beauty that I feel towards, and comes from, those important to me, my culture, my community, and the natural beauty of the place which I’m lucky to call my homeland.
Such as our memories sometimes distort as time passes, this piece represents my own “distorted” interpretation of the aforementioned elements without attempting to provide an obvious equivalent to any aspect that plays an important role in my life and culture.
– Gabriel Bouche Caro
For me, the Brahms Trio, Op. 114 is one of the greatest pieces of chamber music ever written. Before writing the trio, Brahms was considering retirement from composition. However, he was so fascinated by the playing of his friend, clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, he continued to compose and wrote many works for the relatively young instrument. Moving forward, this piece serves as my model for a new repertoire for the instrument, where composers and performers inspire each other to create.
– Eric Schultz
Special thank you to:
Kristin Bertrand at woodwindworkshop.com
Mckinley Devilbiss, recording engineer
Antonio Oliart, mixing and mastering
Phil Romano at romanopiano.com
Tian Hui Ng and Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts
Coastal Carolina University
Buffet Crampon Clarinets
PARMA Recordings
