Here is an imaginative coupling and an attractive mid-price issue, even if its 44 minutes make one wish that something else had been played as well, for example one of Brahms's clarinet sonatas. His Clarinet Trio is a late work dating from the summer of 1891: it was written after he had composed nothing for a year and told his publisher in a letter that he felt it was time to retire, but then, fortunately for us all, he heard the clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld who was to inspire this work, the Clarinet Quintet and the two sonatas. After the premiere, in which Brahms played alongside Muhlfeld and the cellist Robert Hausmann, his friends were full of admiration and later they were to prefer the Trio even to the famous Quintet. Since then, however, opinion has gone the other way, regarding it as less inspired although masterly in its use of canon and other compositional devices, which in my view is a pity since it has much quiet beauty. This is a thoughtful performance, well paced and shapely in phrasing, with each artist offering fine tone, and the recording is satisfying enough, if not really glowing tonally.
Beethoven's Clarinet Trio is much more open in manner, a lively and attractive work with a particularly fetching variation-form finale on a bouncy theme by Joseph Weigl (not Wiegl as the booklet has it, as well as leaving out Muhlfeld's umlaut), a minor operatic composer of the day. Here, too, David Campbell shows himself to be a fine artist and the playing generally has a pleasing freshness (not least Iwan Llewelyn-Jones's neat and characterful account of the demanding piano part) and a youthful ebullience entirely appropriate to this work composed in 1797. The recording is over-reverberant for some of the rapid passagework, but all in all this performance is thoroughly enjoyable.'