Rachel Vernon (clarinet), Aroha String Quartet
Wellington Chamber Music Trust 2022
St. Andrew's on the Terrace
1 May, 2022
It’s a cliché to call the music of Brahms autumnal, but the word seems to sum up how many feel about the late romantic composer’s music. Yet in the case of Brahms and the music he wrote for the clarinet at the end of his life, it’s a perfect metaphor.
In the early 1890s, Brahms was tired of composing and was talking of retiring, that is until he happened to hear the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld play, among other things, the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. He was so taken with the man’s playing, he wrote to his lifelong confidant, Clara Schumann about the experience. “Nobody can blow the clarinet more beautifully than Herr Mühlfeld,” he wrote. The two met and promptly became fast friends, and the result was the last four chamber works he wrote: a Trio, two clarinet sonatas and this Quintet.
