British Clarinet Quintets
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Arthur Somervell, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Richard Henry Walthew
Genre:
Chamber
Label: CPO
Magazine Review Date: AW2015
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 72
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: CPO777 905-2
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Quintet for Clarinet and Strings |
Arthur Somervell, Composer
Arthur Somervell, Composer Leipzig String Quartet Stephan Siegenthaler, Clarinet |
Quintet |
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Composer
Leipzig String Quartet Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Composer Stephan Siegenthaler, Clarinet |
A short Quintet |
Richard Henry Walthew, Composer
Leipzig String Quartet Richard Henry Walthew, Composer Stephan Siegenthaler, Clarinet |
Author: Jeremy Dibble
The ensemble also show great sympathy for Coleridge-Taylor’s prodigious Quintet in F sharp minor, composed when he was only 20. Redolent of Dvořák’s penchant for modal harmony, the work is nevertheless an impressive and individual essay showing, for one so young, a mature understanding of the apparatus and a feeling for form to rival any of his native contemporaries (save perhaps William Hurlstone). How ahead, for example, he was of his RCM confrère, Vaughan Williams, who was three years his elder! There are three other relatively recent recordings – on Koch (10/92 – nla), Centaur (1/07) and Hyperion (11/07) – but this reading has a lightness, felicity and verve which is enhanced by the quartet’s balance, careful intonation and a rhythmical aplomb in the metrically shifting sands of the Scherzo.
Left unpublished until 2000, Richard Walthew’s one-movement Short Quintet in E flat dates from 1917 18 and builds on the through-composed concept of his most successful chamber work, the Phantasy Quintet of 1912. Adopting a tripartite scheme, with a central (and deeply poetic) slow movement, the work is affectingly nostalgic and introspective, though not without its outbursts of passion.
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