Reger: Clarinet Sonatas

Album review

The three clarinet sonatas of Max Reger clearly follow in the footsteps of Brahms' two late ones. It would take a special kind of late Romanticism geek to find Reger's equal to Brahms', but they undeniably offer music to sink your teeth into, and they're not quite as forbidding as the composer's organ music. The textures, with clear (if often technically challenging) clarinet melodies over piano accompaniment, which carries the bulk of the harmonic and motivic complications, are similar to Brahms'. To separate out the many strands happening in the music and yet retain the low-key, calm mood takes an accomplished performance, and that's exactly what you get here from clarinetist Michael Collins and pianist Michael McHale. They clearly delineate the large-scale arc even of the substantial, multi-sectional Clarinet Sonata in B flat major, Op. 107, the latest of the three works. But for a way into Reger's rather arcane language, you might try sampling one of the shorter central movements of the two earlier sonatas, perhaps the "Larghetto ma non troppo" third movement of the Clarinet Sonata in A flat major, Op. 49, No. 1, of 1900. Here the piano plunges into considerable harmonic complications, but moves along at a regular pace; in a clean, sensitive performance like this one, you come to understand why each chord is where it is. Collins and McHale are aided greatly by the sound; Chandos always does well with Suffolk's Potton Hall, but this outing qualifies as exemplary chamber music work in which the nature of the music has been profoundly considered. Strong recommendation for those fascinated by Reger.
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