Eduard Mrikes Briefe

Jean Xavier Lefèvre was chief clarinettist in the Paris Opera for many years. As a composer, he produced a succession of chamber music and concertante pieces that are in every way worthy of the attention now being paid to them.

Eduard van Beinum's 1958 account of the Water Music captures the magnificent wind section of the Concertgebouw Orchestra at its early post-War peak, and rather than fuss over every phrase and rhythm, as so many of today's "authenticists" do, Beinum offers lively harmonic and rhythmic support while encouraging his nonpareil players to really enjoy themselves–and do they ever! Listen to the those magnificently brazen but always golden-toned horns at the opening of the Menuet (Pomposo), the brilliant trumpets in the famous Alla Hornpipe, and the soulful oboes and bassoons in their many solo turns (the oboist in the Adagio e staccato deserves a standing ovation for that movement alone).

An invigorating journey over the landscape of modern music, Swiss clarinettist Eduard Brunner's solo recital is a tour-de-force of extended technique and high musicality applied to intensely-demanding composition. Brunner's album is titled after Helmut Lachenmann's Dal niente (out of nothing) whose sounds bleed into and out of the resonant silence of the church of St. Gerold. Where Lachenmann's concluding piece calls for nothing less than a new way of hearing, the Isang Yun composition that opens the programme is a deeply moving assertion of the inviolability of the human spirit which has its genesis in the two years that Yun spent in a South Korean prison under sentence of death. The recital also includes a hitherto unpublished Stravinsky miniature alongside the well-known Three Pieces for clarinet, Boulez's daunting Domaines, some brightly optimistic Stockhausen, and Scelsi's shadowy Preghiera per un'ombra. BBC Music Magazine: "Although a disc comprising 70 minutes of 20th century music for clarinet might be thought to appeal to enthusiasts only, there is such an enormous range of sounds contained within these pieces that one's attention is held throughout.