Brahms & Khoury: Clarinet Quintets

Album review

Some of the interest in this release from the new Paladino label may come from the presence of clarinetist Dimitri Ashkenazy. He's the son of pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, although readers would never know it from the biographical material included here (online he's referred to simply as an "Icelandic clarinetist" -- his mother was Icelandic, although he was born in New York). Are there familial traits? There may be. Performing with an ad hoc group of string players rather than an established string quartet, Ashkenazy seems to direct the performance, and it's a distinctive one in a work, the Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op, 115, for which there is no shortage of interpretations. Ashkenazy's reading is lyrical and episodic, avoiding both a blank reading that stresses the motivic intricacy of the work and an autumnal mood that assumes Brahms had death on his mind. (He might have had, and the argument is more convincing in this case than in that of Mozart, for example, but it's always risky.) Instead, Ashkenazy gives the clarinet a variegated tone and set of attacks. He can be glassy and abstract when he wants to, as in the theme of the finale's set of variations, but the work as a whole comes across as highly expressive. Ashkenazy is more impressive in the Brahms than in Gardens of Love (2008-2009), by composer Houtaf Khoury, a Russian-flavored clarinet-and-ensemble piece that Ashkenazy is said to admire, but that does not lie as easily under the clarinetist's fingers as one might wish. To create a really distinctive Brahms Clarinet Quintet is a tall order, and Ashkenazy fulfills it here.

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