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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
September 18, 2016
"Clarionet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarionet — two clarionets."
Leaving to one side the question of his spelling, it becomes increasingly evident that one ready explanation for the mysterious disappearance in Mexico in 1913 of Ambrose Bierce, the author of "The Devil's Dictionary", is that the world's clarinetists finally caught up with him.
One can also, I suggest, deduce that Bierce was unfamiliar with the late chamber music of Brahms, all of which features said "instrument of torture".
On Sunday afternoon, Patricia Kostek and the Lafayette String Quartet gave a performance of Brahms' Clarinet Quintet which would surely have caused Bierce at least to reconsider that entry.
The work's opening bars were absolutely gorgeous, intense yet relaxed, and replete with a multiplicity of detail not often heard; throughout the movement balances were excellent and there was, appropriately, no hint of the concertante in the ensemble. Furthermore, any suggestion that, or Brahms, all passion was spent is firmly refuted by the music.
The slow movement was simply sublime: rhapsodic and exquisitely played. The andantino began charmingly and the fleet-footed centre of the movement was lively and engaging.
Brahms is reputed to have remarked, of his fourth symphony, that if a set of variations was good enough for the finale of Beethoven's "Eroica" it was certainly good enough for him. One suspects he might well have made a similar comparison between the finale of his and of Mozart's clarinet quintets.
Here, after the introspection of the theme, Pamela Highbaugh Aloni's cello led us nobly into the first variation; a determined second variation was followed by the thoughtful third, with its "remembrance of things past".
Although the penultimate variation has a decidedly resigned feeling, the last, ushered in by Joanna Hood's plaintive viola, with its reminiscences of the earlier music, particular the quintet's very beginning, shows the composer, unlike Edith Piaf, apparently regretting a good deal and the close is neither resigned nor defiant, but profoundly disturbing.
Unexpectedly the Brahms formed the opening half of the concert. At the interval I did something most unusual for me — I left. I had heard the Lafayettes play Shostakovich's seventh quartet at Prospect Lake in June and will no doubt hear it again as part of their complete cycle next February, moreover, and for no particular reason that I can put my finger on, I have never warmed to the music of R Murray Shafer; the second half, then, particularly after such a fine performance of the Brahms, was only going to be an anticlimax.
But the Brahms will live in my memory for a very long time.
And I didn't use the a-word once...
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