Richard Stoltzman was born in Omaha, NE, in 1942 to a father who played the saxophone. He grew up in San Francisco and Cincinnati, and pursued degrees in music and math at Ohio State; he earned his music master's at Yale and studied for his doctorate at Columbia. Stoltzman began to make his name as a professional through Vermont's chamber-music-oriented Marlboro Music Festival, where he debuted in 1967 (the first of ten straight appearances) and began making the contacts that would lead him to co-found the chamber ensemble TASHI in 1973. In the years that followed, Stoltzman achieved a number of firsts: he performed the first clarinet recitals ever held at the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall; he was the first performer to feature jazz in a program at Wagner's legendary Bayreuth Opera House; and he became the first wind player to win the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize in 1986. He appeared as a soloist with a number of major symphonies, and a...