Discs by Jeff Miers The trouble with being the Great American Clarinet Virtuoso is also the advantage of it: The repertoire for your instrument isn’t exactly scant but nor is it overly abundant, either. A clarinetist needs his contemporaries in the composer’s tribe. Brahms, Mozart and the Baroque masters simply didn’t supply enough repertoire. That’s what “Reflections” is all about – five new works for clarinet and orchestra for Richard Stoltzman, the wizard of his instrument (and a man convincing, too, as a jazz soloist) to show what he can do. It will surprise no Buffalo listener who remembers the remarkable composer and radical spirit and bristling, brilliant music writer Andrew Stiller that Stiller’s 1994 “Procrustean Concerto” is one of the two most impressive pieces on “Reflections.” So named, says the composer, because he “cut a normally three-movement work down to two,” it sports individual movements called “Interview With the Dissidents: Sestina” and “Hockets From the Andes,” which, in its blend of politics and obscure musical and literary forms nicely indicates Stiller’s antic, scholarly wit, utter unpredictability and no small truculence (major chord tuttis sound like sonic flips of the bird). So does the piece itself, which Ives might have liked. The other first-rate piece on “Reflections” is Keith Lay’s tone poem “Earth Caoine.” A “Caoine,” we’re told, is a “piercing wail over a corpse” and Stoltzman’s agonizing glissandi make it quite beautiful and effective. Stoltzman is featured in the Clarinet concerto of the superb new disc of music by the extraordinary and profoundly poetic Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. The concerto, from 2001, is supplemented by “Garden of Spaces,” an aleatoric piece for orchestra which, says the composer, can be “different in every performance and created anew by the conductor.” Completing the disc is Rautavaara’s best-known work, “Cantus Articus,” a “concerto for birds and orchestra” made from tapes of Arctic birdsong. Rautavaara’s is one of the most varied and evocative sound worlds of any living composer. – Jeff Simon