ちび本当にあった笑える話 – 11月 2021

This, the third in the series of Beethoven’s late quartets from the Ehnes Quartet deviates from the official ‘late’ works to include the last two of Beethoven’s ‘middle period’ quartets: The sunny and amiable E flat, known as the ‘Harp’, and the terse and irascible F Minor, known not surprisingly, as ‘Serioso’. Beethoven had a habit of working on two works of wildly differing emotional ranges at the same time - never more clearly illustrated as in these two masterly quartets.

Clarinettist Barnaby Robson performs a rich programme of 20th-century and contemporary music for clarinet and piano, including world-premiere recordings. The release opens with Barnaby Robson’s collaboration with BAFTA-winning sound designer Martin Cantwell: a recording of Steve Reich’s intricate New York Counterpoint, which involves eleven pre-recorded clarinet lines. Herbert Howells is celebrated for his choral music but his instrumental works are less famous; with pianist Fiona Harris, Robson performs the 1946 version of Howells’s Clarinet Sonata, never recorded before.

Spanish music reached a peak early in the 20th century, with Enrique Granados Goyescas numbered amongst the crowning masterpieces of its day. Infused with the innovations of Debussy and Ravel, and inspired by the colours and emotional depth of Goyas paintings and engravings, the Goyescas are like brilliant and psychologically elaborate improvisations filled with seductively ornamented harmonies. The cycle also conceals a narrative of love and death that Granados would later develop into an opera. Multi-award-winning pianist Viviana Lasaracinas playing was admired for its beautiful liquid tone and summed up as breathtaking in the New York Concert Review.