Clarinet Quintets

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from 15 Jan 2016. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast213

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This week, we dust off another selection from the Podcast Vault, dating back January 2016. The original post for this montage featuring three clarinet quintets presented this music in two contexts – it completed a two-part series on the late compositions of Johannes Brahms dedicated to clarinet chamber works, and discussed the tradition of the clarinet quintet as a whole.

Missing on that podcast, primarily because we had featured the work in our Benny Goodman montage, was Mozart’s Stadler quintet. Here is a YouTube performance featuring clarinetist Sabine Meyer

The “german” tradition of this specific type of work – Mozart, Weber and Brahms – makes the following anecdote (recounted in the original musing) that much more noteworthy:

English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet came about after the esteemed composition teacher at the Royal College of Music Charles Villiers Stanford’s comment to the effect that after Brahms produced his Clarinet Quintet no one would be able to compose another that did not show Brahms’ influence. Coleridge-Taylor took this as a challenge and Stanford, on examining the result, remarked, ‘you’ve done it, me boy!’.

Stanford showed the piece to Brahms’ friend Joseph Joachim who shortly thereafter played it with colleagues in Berlin.

I think you will (still) love this music too.