Two of the world’s top performers on their respective musical instruments live in Greater Boston — and they’re married.
Mika Stoltzman is much more than one of the greatest marimba players in the world. She has expanded the very range of the instrument, playing across genres including jazz and performing original arrangements of composers like Bach. Her husband, Richard Stoltzman, is a clarinetist who also plays across genres. His virtuosity is legendary — so much so that Sony recently released a 40-CD box set of his work.
Mika is performing a special concert in Carnegie Hall that will feature a mix of old and new, including a world premiere. Before they left, Mika and Richard joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath at GBH’s Frasier Auditorium to talk about their music career and their love story, as well as perform a short selection. This transcript has been lightly edited.
Arun Rath: How did you two meet?
Mika Stoltzman: I invited him to Japan for my festival. I’m a big fan of Richard’s thoughts.
Richard Stoltzman: Yeah, I didn’t know her at all. But in order to invite me, she flew all the way to Boston from Japan. She came to my house for basically about 12 minutes or something like that and said, “This is my festival. I want you to come.” And I said, “OK.” And that was it. Then, she left. So this lady has something very mysterious about her.
Mika: My hometown is a very small island in Japan that I don’t think anybody knows, called Amakusa.
Richard: I didn’t. And I don’t think most Japanese people know either.
Mika: So Richard’s manager said to me, “Where is this island?”
Richard: Yeah, I couldn’t answer that.
Mika: So I invited him and Steve Gadd and a string quartet and my percussion teachers, the NEXUS guys. I produced three bigger festivals there. And that’s when I met him and played with him.
Rath: So you were playing together right away?
Mika: Yeah. We played Bach's "Invention."
Richard: How did we get it together to do that? I didn’t practice.
Mika: You don’t need to practice, you know. It was just Bach's "Invention No. 1."
Rath: Is it possible now to imagine your musical development without the other?
Richard: Not me. Well, I should be dead anyway — I would’ve been dead a long time ago, and then I became alive again, basically, because of all the music that Mika wanted to explore and choose and commission everything. I don’t think I’ve recovered. I don’t think I’ve ever commissioned anybody.
Mika: He never does this.
Richard: I’m embarrassed to say that. But like William Thomas McKinley, who is passed away now, he was a great composer here in Boston. Mika and I were just shopping and getting some tomatoes or something, and there was Tom. She said, “You should ask him to write a piece for us!” And I said, “He’s too expensive. I don’t think we can do that.”
Mika: So I told him, "We have $500 for you — just a short piece." And then, he gave us 24 movements, even though we just had $500.
Richard: Well, money is not Tom’s forte.
Mika: It was a gift to us.
Richard: It’s a big responsibility, I think, as a performer. If someone writes music for you and doesn’t say, “OK, that’ll be $5,000, please,” and they just trust you with their music. You feel really in debt but in a great way. Like, "God bless you, and we’ll try our best to make this worth your listening."
