Gervase de Peyer

The internationally celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pré died a tragically early death. Among her best chamber music recordings is this reading of Beethoven's Clarinet Trio made together with Daniel Barenboim and clarinettist Gervase de Peyer, who also presents great Romantic repertoire in the shape of the two clarinet sonatas by Brahms.

Two distinguished soloists – soprano Suzanne Danco and tenor Robert Tear – contribute to this disc of Schubert songs. Both of the composer’s ‘obbligato’ songs (Der Hirt auf dem Felsen and Auf dem Strom) are included, as are five of Schubert’s most popular Lieder in recordings by Danco previously unreleased on CD. But at the centre of this recital is a selection of Schubert’s Partsongs. Their origins lie in the vital demand for this kind of music in the context of the social life of Vienna during the composer’s lifetime. The male-voice quartet was a staple feature in the city’s concert halls, but even more so in the homes of the cultured middle-classes. Much of Schubert’s writing for this medium is in an ‘unbuttoned’ mood, providing material for friendly gatherings. Even so, we find among these partsongs for men’s or mixed voices, many which carry the unmistakable stamp of his genius – the gorgeous Ständchen, or the tranquil, other-worldly Nachthelle.

No composer wrote better for wind instruments than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and it is our good fortune that most of his output in this sphere has survived to delight us. Many of these recordings feature legendary soloists and conductors with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Belgian player Henri Helaerts (1907–2001) was principal of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande for almost half a century (1929–77) and made many recordings, usually with Ernest Ansermet conducting. On this occasion he was imported to London for sessions on 9–10 August 1954. Anthony Collins conducted. A month earlier, on 13–14 July, conductor and orchestra collaborated with the young British virtuoso Gervase de Peyer (b.1926) in the Clarinet Concerto. The performance of the Flute Concerto comes from a famous LP on which the American flautist Claude Monteux (b.1920) collaborated with his father, the French violist and conductor Pierre Monteux (1875–1964). The sessions, produced by that distinguished Mozartian Christopher Raeburn and engineered by the legendary Kenneth Wilkinson, took place in Decca’s West Hampstead Studios in November 1963. Our brief horn recording was part of an LP of all the Mozart Horn Concertos, made by the famous Australian-born LSO principal Barry Tuckwell (b.1931). The sessions were held at Kingsway Hall in November 1959 and April 1961 – the E major Fragment came from the latter set – and the stereo tapes were engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson.

The recordings of both the Bassoon and Clarinet Concertos make their first appearance on CD and the fascinating documentation for the CD is provided by Tully Potter.

If for many British music students in the early 1960s, modern music ended with Bartók and the neo-classical Stravinsky, the two recordings on this CD disc helped to change all that.

Roger Nichols’s note goes on to relate: ‘The story behind the quartet has often been told: its composition in a wash-house in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia in 1940, its first performance on 15 January 1941 before an audience of 400 fellow prisoners with a piano whose keys kept sticking, and the audience’s response to the work’s life-affirming properties – “I was never listened to”, the composer said later, “with such attention and understanding”.’

The work treats of ‘the abolition of time itself, something infinitely mysterious and incomprehensible to most philosophers of time, from Plato to Bergson’.

In this great recording from 1968, Nichols singles out Gervase de Peyer as supremely equal to his starring role: ‘surely no clarinettist has yet matched his “désolé” tone and phrasing at the start of the third movement solo’.

The substantial coupling is the far less accessible Chronochromie, recorded in 1964 and written just four years earlier. This came about through a subvention from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and had the further benefit that Antal Dorati had conducted the work’s stormy Paris première in 1962. Here the BBC SO respond to the considerable challenges with playing of remarkable accuracy, energy and colour: as Nichols says, with repeated listening, the work’s difficulties become beauties.

Again, both works are newly transferred and remastered to ART standard at Abbey Road Studios.