Here with You

Album review

The "Here with You" title of this release refers to its recording sessions in a deserted Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic, of course, has had deep ramifications for classical music that will be playing out for years to come, but there have been a few recordings in which its effects have been perversely positive. This is one; Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, and pianist and chamber music specialist Gloria Chien have performed together in the past, but here, having plenty of preparation time, they reach a deeper kind of communion. Details and textures in the two Brahms clarinet sonatas of Op. 120, works of the composer's last years that manage to be both autumnal and profoundly intricate, are worked out thoroughly so that the music remains transparent even in its thicker passages. McGill has an uncanny sense for its transitions, which all contain some kind of subtlety, and one is left with the feeling that he should be a household name and is not one only because of the limited audience for chamber music in his native U.S. The two players conclude with the virtuoso Grand duo concertante in E flat major, Op. 48, and they make it elegant. As an interlude, there's a new work by Jessie Montgomery, the jazzy Peace, also written as a response to the pandemic. Throughout, this is chamber music at its best, intimate and exploratory, at a very high level of musicianship.
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