Blumina

Grigory Frids politically and morally ambitious operas have made him known to a broader public even outside his native Russia. His chamber music is not so popular, but it too holds discoveries in store, as John Finucane and Elisaveta Blumina impressively demonstrate on this recording premiere of his two clarinet sonatas. Musical wit, tonal beauty, and virtuosity in the treatment of tonality and instrumentation reveal a compositional talent stimulated by exchanges with the greatest of Frids times. Elisaveta Blumina is especially fond of much too little known music from the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

The music of Mieczys?aw Weinberg continues to be issued, and continues to impress. Like his British counterpart, York Bowen, Weinberg was a composer trapped in time and place, and it is good that their very different musics are now coming to the fore with such regularity. One of the wonderful things about this disc, aside from the committed, intense playing of the instrumentalists, is the sound: crisp and clear, with only a very little reverb, which brings the sound of the instruments into sharp focus and makes the listener pay attention to the music.