Cover of the album being discussed, presumably on the Dorset coast of England, near where the album was recorded
A new Orchid Classics album of quintets for clarinet and strings is due for release from Orchid Classics one week from today. The composers are from two centuries on either side of the nineteenth century: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gordon Jacob. The latter’s quintet was composed in 1940.
I must confess that I know very little about Jacob other than his textbook The Elements of Orchestration, which was used for the orchestration class I took at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since my “primary” instrument was the clarinet, I was well aware of Mozart’s K. 581 quintet, even if I never had an opportunity to work on it with a willing string quartet. The album concludes with a “bonus track” of sorts. K. 516c is a fragment of the first movement of an earlier Mozart quintet in B-flat major. On this album that single movement was provided with a completion by Duncan Druce.
From a purely personal point of view, there was little on the track to draw my attention. However, 75 minutes has become a familiar maximum duration for CD; and that last track comes to close to filling out that duration. Where the Jacob quintet is concerned, I am just beginning to get to know it; but I found myself enjoying its contrast against the all-too-familiar K. 581. It is also worth noting that Mozart extended the range of the clarinet in that quintet, which the clarinetist on the album, Richard Hosford, managed by switching to a basset clarinet when necessary. The members of the string quartet with which he performed, violinists Marieke Blankestijn and Ulrika Jansson, Iris Juda on viola, and cellist Ursula Smith, did not have to worry about any “out-of-range” notes in the score!
No comments:
Post a Comment