French and German Composers for Clarinet

Anthony McGill with his clarinet (photograph by Martin Romero, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances presented the final program in The Shenson Great Artists and Ensembles Series. The “great artist” was clarinetist Anthony McGill. accompanied at the piano by Gloria Chen. McGill prepared a “two nationalities program.” He began the evening with an engaging diversity of French composers: Claude Debussy, André Messager, and Camille Saint-Saëns (the “order of appearance”). The second half was devoted to two German composers from either end of the nineteenth century, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

In the first half Messager could have won a prize for the abundance of notes in his “Solo de concours.” Actually, all those notes were conceived for the end-of-term examination of clarinet students at the Conservatoire de Paris (Paris Conservatory). This could not have been a better offering for McGill to unleash the full extent of his technical skills without devolving into banal “exercise music.” Messager was preceded by Debussy’s “Première rhapsodie” (first rhapsody), which he composed as an examination piece for students at the Conservatoire de Paris. The “French portion” then concluded with Saint-Saëns’ Opus 167 sonata in E-flat major for clarinet and piano. The third movement involved the lower register of the clarinet, which was my favorite area back when I played the instrument. (Sadly, I never had an opportunity to play bass clarinet.)

The second half of the program began with Schumann’s Opus 73, a three-movement duo entitled simply “Fantasiestücke.” This was followed by the second of the two Opus 120 clarinet sonatas composed by Brahms. Those sonatas were the composer’s final chamber music compositions, written about three years before his death. They were composed for Richard Mühlfeld, who had impressed Brahms with his performances of Carl Maria von Weber’s first clarinet concerto and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 581 clarinet quintet.

Taken as a whole, this was an impressive diversity of rhetorical approaches to chamber music. Fortunately, McGill captured the unique foundation for each of the five selections, providing the attentive listener with an engaging journey (which probably included at least one “way station” of discovery in Messager’s competition composition). McGill made his first SFP debut in November of 2021, and his most recent visit was in December of 2024. The clarinet is a rather sophisticated instrument with registers in three distinctively different sonorities, and McGill had no trouble making the most out of all of them.