Master Chamber Quintets

The BBC Music mag cover disks are always worth having when they feature Radio 3 New Generation artists. Featured on this disk of core repertoire chamber music are the Karol Szymanowski Quartet who are joined by clarinettist Ronald van Spaendonck on Brahms's Clarinet Quintet in B minor and by violist Laurence Power in Mozart's String Quintet in D. The Clarinet Quintet was written towards the end of Brahms's life and he was inspired to come out of planned retirement to compose it for clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld. It is an intellectual, emotional and poignant work given its' due by the performers here. With his string quintet, Mozart was following a path started by the younger, less celebrated Haydn, Michael. It is another work written near the end of the composer's life but of course with Mozart, there was no reason for him to believe that the end was close a year before it came. It has the hallmarks of a work commissioned for a connoisseur, thought to be a Hungarian merchant, highly sophisticated yet concealing its' art.