Frühling & Zemlinsky: Clarinet Trios

Bandieri, Davide;
Marosi, Joël;
Marosi, Marja-Liisa

95394

Once a pianist accompanying the likes of Bronislaw Huberman, Pablo de Sarasate and the Rose Quartet, Carl Frühling is now little known. He wrote several orchestral and chamber works, songs and salon pieces, but his best and most-recorded work is this Clarinet Trio, published in 1925 but cast in an idiom at least a generation before its composition. Born in 1868, and dying in reduced circumstances in 1937 after the Crash had left him in need, he was and remained a musical Romantic, whose language is perfectly fitted to this most Brahmsian of genres. From that earlier generation, Zemlinsky’s 1896 Trio surges with D minor expression and passion. He wrote it as a 25-year-old for a Viennese chamber-music competition. While the syntax and mood certainly echo Brahms, the chromatic harmony is the composer’s own: so too the intense songfulness which surges through the long opening movement and then a central, richly textured Andante. Even the brief finale is restless and filled with agitated, virtuoso writing for the piano in particular, while the clarinet sings a troubled descant line.

CD

Muzyka klasyczna

Brilliant Classics

13-11-2019

5028421953946