Customer Reviews

Reger: Clarinet Quintet, Op. 146/String Quartet, Op. 109

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's thrilling to have Reger's beautiful Clarinet Quintet, Op. 146 on a budget Naxos CD--- Fuchs and the Berliners do quite an excellent job: warm, heartfelt, sincere.

The only fly in the ointment is the String Quartet, Op. 109, which is quite heavy weather: thick in texture, dense in harmony, lots of bluster with a minimum amount of substance. The promise of revelation never comes, not even repeated listenings. Poor Max!

However, as far as I can see, the Clarinet Quintet, all too rare on CD, anyway, is worth the budget outlay. (The only alternative, I believe, is a full-priced CD, same coupling, with Karl Leister.) When one speaks of clarinet quintets, there are, of course, the monuments: Brahms and Mozart. Less monumental is the Weber. Reger stands next to Brahms, easily (and stylistically), if not as strongly or deeply, but is still well worth acquiring, regardless.

Good, clear sound.

[Running time: 73:36]

Performances of music by Max Reger (1873-1916) are quite rare in the USA, and recordings rarer still. Partly this is due to Reger's reputation as a composer of charmless, contrapuntally turgid scores. That reputation is unfair as proven by the two works on this marvelous Naxos CD. The gloriously melodic, autumnal Clarinet Quintet is one of Reger's last compositions and it has always been viewed as a worthy successor to Brahms's great, late Clarinet Quintet, written about 15 years earlier. It receives a beautifully poised (and superbly recorded) performance by Wenzel Fuchs and the Philharmonia Quartet Berlin. The other reviewer warmly welcomes both music and performance, but then goes on to disparage the other piece on this CD, Reger's Fourth String Quartet which dates from 1909. He's entitled to his opinion, but I don't agree with it: this last but one of Max's canonical string quartets (a youthful effort by the 19 year old Reger exists in manuscript), is a positively luminous work, packed full of interesting ideas and presented with a delightful transparency of texture. But don't just take my word for it; Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Adolf Busch all considered this quartet to be a superb achievement. I'll hang out in their company any day of the week! The performance and recorded sound are just as fine per the string quartet as per the Clarinet Quintet. The members of the Philharmonia Quartet Berlin are all members of the Berlin Philharmonic (or were at the time the CD was recorded in the late 1990s) and I have always been favorably impressed by their regretably few recordings, most of which have disappeared from the catalog. (Check out their lovely performances of Mozart scores on Denon, or their wonderfully incisive CD performances of Beethoven, Reger, and Shostakovich on Thorofon, if you can find them!) As for this so very reasonably priced Naxos release, five stars are not enough praise IMHO.

The level of playing doesn't really get much better than this.
The pieces are rather rarely performed and are rather good!
All and all, a very good album. Anyone with the Clarinet close to one's heart should own it.