Brahms: Clarinet Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 120 No. 1

On this Hybrid SACD of music for clarinet and piano, the piano parts have been arranged for strings by Geert van Keulen. The well-known pieces given this unusual treatment are Brahms’ Sonatas, opus 120 Nos. 1 and 2, and Schumann’s Fantasistucke, opus 73. The performers are the soloist Arno Piters and members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam. Born in 1980, Arno Piters studied clarinet with Jan Cober and Willem van der Vuurst at the Maastricht Conservatory, where he earned an honours diploma. He then went on to study with George Pieterson at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and was again awarded an honours diploma. Piters has been a member of the National Youth Orchestra of the Netherlands, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the European Union Youth Orchestra, where he performed under such conductors as Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink and Vladimir Ashkenazy. He has made solo appearances with the Residentie Orchestra and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, among others.

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.

Berio had an abiding fascination with reconciling the past and the present, which can be seen in his orchestral realisations of works by Mahler and Brahms, and most notably, in Rendering (1990), his typically creative completion of unfinished symphonic sketches by Schubert.

In Rendering, Berio – in his own words – sets himself the target of ‘following those modern restoration criteria that aim at reviving the old colours without, however, trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition’. In the ‘restoration’, Schubert’s sketches have been beautifully orchestrated in period style, and the ‘empty patches’ have been filled with music composed by Berio himself, in his own voice – thereby successfully combining the musical worlds of the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries into one convincing whole.

The Clarinet Sonata by Brahms embodies the composer’s taut and concentrated compositional style. In transcribing the work, Berio felt that, when experienced in the less intimate surroundings of today’s concert halls, the extreme compression of Brahms’s late chamber music style was in need of some additional support, and his version, recorded here, includes a fourteen-bar orchestral introduction to the first movement, leading into Brahms’s own, much shorter opening phrase, as well as five additional bars at the beginning of the second movement.

Berio completed his orchestration of six early songs by Gustav Mahler in 1987, and conducted the first performance with the Toscanini Orchestra on 7 December that year, with Thomas Hampson the baritone soloist. The six songs in this orchestrated set are ‘Hans und Grete’, ‘Phantasie’, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’, ‘Erinnerung’, ‘Frühlingsmorgen’, and ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’.

The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Edward Gardner, with Roderick Williams the baritone soloist in the songs by Mahler and Michael Collins the soloist in Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata.

Recorded Radiostudio DRS Zurich 2006

This recording of the complete chamber music works for clarinet by Johannes Brahms is presented with first-rate interpreters: Laura Ruiz Ferreres, one of the most gifted clarinettists of her generation, and pianist Christoph Berner.

Internationally renowned cellist Danjulo Ishizaka and the Mandelring Quartet complete the superb line-up of instrumentalists for this recording.

At the end of his career, when he had already made his will, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was enthused by an instrument which was mainly familiar as an indispensable component of the romantic orchestra: the clarinet. However, since Mozart and Weber, chamber music for clarinet had been somewhat neglected. If it had not been for Richard Mühlfeld, the exceptionally gifted virtuoso of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, who was the source of inspiration for four chamber music works for clarinet between 1891 and 1894, Brahms might never again have written any music. However, the melancholy North German had a predilection for the noble middle register and expressive 'speaking' tone of the clarinet, of which he makes full use in all four works. Whilst the Trio Op. 114 with piano and cello has always been regarded as a subtly constructed work for connoisseurs, the Quintet Op. 115 with the accompaniment of a string quartet is a miraculous blend of sound and passionate lyricism. Alongside the Clarinet Sonatas Op.120, these late chamber works with clarinet constituted a veritable renaissance which continues to the present day.