Finding a way to play her own tune

Sharon Kam's mother wanted her to be a cellist, but she felt like a flashlight was following the clarinet, she tells Michael Dervan

My first encounter with Israeli clarinettist Sharon Kam came at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. I arrived for our interview during at the end of her final rehearsal with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. That evening she was to give the Austrian premiere of Brett Dean's 10-year-old Clarinet Concerto, Ariel's Music. She remained in hot debate about a number of issues as the rehearsal ended. As the players were packing up and leaving, she squatted on the stage, fretting through a criss-cross of discussion on issues not yet resolved, before repairing to the conductor's room for some definitive clarifications.

She gave every indication of being one of those performers who lives life in the fast lane. And she certainly gave the impression of being someone who knows what she wants. The picture was reinforced after we repaired to the nearby Café Schwarzenberg, one of the best-loved institutions on Vienna's Ringstraße.

Like many a child born into a musical family - her mother plays viola in the Israel Philharmonic - she began early, when her mother, then studying in California, decided to take lessons in teaching Suzuki. The tone of the narrative - "I had a small, scratchy, horrible violin" and "it didn't take long before I stopped" - makes the message clear. Back in Israel, the piano didn't work out either. Finally, she took up the recorder with "an old, really nice man," who also taught violin.

"I think for about two, three or four months we used to have sandwiches and talk. But my mother didn't mind paying for it, because she realised the piano thing had been moving me away from music. I started not to want to go to concerts, I was definitely not wanting to practise, a lot of crying, a lot of screaming. And, through the sandwiches and this old man, who was like a psychiatrist, basically, I started playing recorders and loving it.

"It was totally automatic. I realised this was my language. It's all about blowing. I don't have to think any more. I don't have to move around fingers, look at them and feel like there's an instrument and there's me and it doesn't connect, which was my feeling with piano. I knew what I wanted to do with the music, but I couldn't reach it at all. With recorders I didn't need to practise very much, just think about it, and, pop, it was there."

There was an epiphany at the age of 12, when she was Bat Mitzvah. "I just felt I had to play the clarinet. Around that time my mother was playing chamber music with clarinet. It came up again and again, and in the orchestra it was just like a flashlight was following clarinet all the time. At some point I just said, you know what, that's what I want to do.

"My mother was not very happy about it. She thought cello would be much better for chamber music purposes. But, since I really didn't stop bugging her about it. The next Israel Philharmonic tour, which landed in Paris, one clarinettist from the orchestra went into Buffet [ the clarinet makers], found an instrument, bought it, and brought it back to Israel. I started on a very good instrument, had a good teacher, and after half a year I was already playing Schumann Fantasy Pieces, winning scholarships. It went very quickly from there."

She appeared with the Israel Philharmonic for the first time at the age of 16 ("Having a mother in the orchestra, I probably waited longer than I needed"), and conductor Zubin Mehta "found it just so refreshing having not just a violinist or a pianist standing there, and being still able to reflect the music in a lively way, that he took me everywhere, all the benefit concerts, joint concerts with the Toronto Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, the first time they came to Israel after the war - it was a very big deal."

She also went out of her way to make sure she had high grades in maths, science and physics, as a kind of insurance policy against the possibility of things not working out in music. Or, more specifically, against the possibility of ending up with a job in an orchestra.

"My husband - the conductor Gregor Bühl - always says, 'Ha, ha, ha! You were never there, so how do you know?' But I really do think I'm not made for it [working in an orchestra], that it's something I would not feel happy doing. Although it means playing the clarinet, I think having that kind of stress - having to deal with other people, their wills, not to talk about the conductor standing in front having his or her own will, and the colleagues around you, and having to sit and count for 15 minutes and then come in with a tremendous solo - it's not for me. I need the spotlight on myself, I need to rely on myself and know exactly what I've prepared and more or less what it's going to be like and be able to lead. I can't be led, I'm not the type. Although I love playing chamber music, it's a decision - I'm leading now, I'm following now. It's very different when you're in the orchestra. I always said I would not do that."

The basis of her success, she suggests, is her way of thinking, which she describes as "not necessarily an instrumental way of thinking. It's not about which note sounds bad and how do you make it better. It's always about the phrase. How does a phrase have to be? And then you make it technically possible to get the phrase the way you musically want it to be. When I was 15 I could play five pieces. I couldn't play the clarinet, but I could play five pieces. I didn't play études, and I didn't warm up. I always played pieces. Mozart Concerto, Weber Concerto, this sonata, like stamps in a passport. I was there, I have it, it's mine. And not about the clarinet - faster, higher, further."

It has taken quite a while, she says, to reach a point where "I'm really able to say I can play any piece. It took a very long time to get acquainted with modern music, not because I don't like it - I always listen to it - but because I never felt free to take a piece on myself and know that I could learn it in three months. It took so long to get the notes imported into my head and to get a concept about it. I always needed a very long time to become friends with a piece. I conquer a piece very slowly, but when I do, it's mine, it's absolutely me. When people are sitting there, they hear from one part the composer - I try to be very true to the music - but they have a feeling that they listen to me, it's me talking . . . supposedly," she adds wryly. "It's what I've been told, it's interesting to listen to."

She had a tough teacher between the ages of 15 and 18, a kind of technical tyrant grappling with a teenager who really only wanted to play pieces. She played in concerts, and even worked with the violinist, Chaim Taub, leader of the Israel Philharmonic, behind her clarinet teacher's back. Once freed from such a technical grindstone, she hasn't looked back. She hasn't touched formal études since then, but she does accept a separation between challenges which are musical and those which are technical.

"Because every instrument is uneven at particular levels, it will always stay that way. It's like being a singer - they have breaks in the voice, and you have to know how to bridge them. You're basically playing things uneven in order for them to sound even at the end. These are technical things that you have to work at. You have to say, why can't I sound the way I want to? What's the problem? Go back and fix the problem, have the brain be able to think faster than the phrase in order to fix the little things before they happen, in order for the phrase to come out the way you want it to. It's a very long process, and anyone will tell you that. Of course, I can play anything and it would sound half decent, but to make it as perfect as I need it to be to serve it to an audience, takes lots of time."

There are, of course, people for whom things are different, like her teacher at Juilliard in New York, Charles Neidich.

"Everything is too easy for him.I get three pieces of new music and I have all the time in the world to study them, and the last piece doesn't come and doesn't come and doesn't come, and a week beforehand I say, I'm not going to be able to learn a piece in a week, and I cancel the concert. And he gets the music two days before, because he's not even in town and he says, don't bother to send them, I'll pick them up. And he plays all the notes in two days which I would have studied for three months. That's the type of guy he is. He sight-reads incredibly, and he can do anything on the instrument, anything. He's bored. He needs challenges. I totally understand. He's a scientist, he's a real, real scientist."

Neidich is as active in the field of period instruments as he is in new music. Kam has yet to find a rapprochement with old instruments, though she has a lively concern about matters of style. "I have two kids. I am somebody who just opens their mouth and plays. I need to be spontaneous. I need at least to have my instrument that I know, love and cherish."

Making an exception for early flutes, she asks, "When have you been to a concert on an original instrument, on a clarinet, oboe, bassoon, piano, violin, and had a musical experience which was not intellectual at all? That's what I mean. Music is not about 'intellectual'. Maybe if you take a very modern piece, they tend to be intellectual sometimes. I tend to let them be when they don't get from that intellectual level to anywhere else - I don't like to play them any more. I'm an emotional person, and I feel music is an emotion."

Krzysztof Penderecki (including a CD with the composer conducting), Edison Denisov and Peter Ruzicka feature in her repertoire, and there are performances by Halvor Haug, Herbert Willi and Manfred Trojahn in the offing.

"You get out of a concert that was wonderful and you just give a hug to the person who was sitting next to you although you don't know them. That's how music should reflect on people. Music should make the world better, without words, without intentions, without text, without a programme. Because you were there, and it just did something to you."