 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-08 12:29
I recently mentioned Eugene Bozza as a fine composer that wriote a tremendous amount of works involving clarinet. Another one: Alexandre Tansman; a very fine 20th century composer that was a friend of Sravinsky. Aubert Lemeland, a French composer whom I knew quite well. You are welome to add more composers to the list. There was a whole generation of fine composers that were seldom played because the avant-garde and atonality ruled the roost -often for extra-musical reasons! How about American and British composers? Latin Americans?
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-08 12:35
I wrote: "unerrated", but who rates whom? Maybe: "deserving more recognition" would be a more appropriate way of putting it.
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Author: Bsharp
Date: 2025-10-08 15:45
York Bowen
(Stephen Schiffman is my name/signature - not a composer to recommend!)
Stephen Schiffman
Post Edited (2025-10-08 15:48)
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-08 20:15
Any particular piece by York Bowen to recommend?
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-10-09 13:25
Quote:
I recently mentioned Eugene Bozza as a fine composer that wriote a tremendous amount of works involving clarinet.
His clarinet pieces are very nice. Have you listened to any of his larger works? I'm asking because I've haven't and would like some recommendations!
Somewhat similar to Bozza, I find Francaix to be an excellent composer: tuneful melodies, colorful orchestrations, and very polished harmony and counterpoint. I think because Francaix's music isn't particularly serious (on purpose, of course), he gets overlooked outside the clarinet world--perhaps not unlike Bozza. But as far as composition goes, he was an excellent craftsman.
With clarinet music, I think the Sigfrid Karg-Elert sonatas are very nice and not often played. The Reger clarinet works are also often overlooked. When I once scoffed at playing the Reger sonatas, Charlie Neidich told me I just needed to figure them out, and I'd see they're among the finest clarinet sonatas. I've been lazy I suppose and still haven't figured them out. But I'll take his word for it!
As far as underrated composers who happened to write for clarinet, Mendelssohn wrote a little sonata for clarinet when he was young (in addition to all the great orchestral parts). I find Mendelssohn to be one of the greatest composers certainly of the Romantic era but really of the entire tonal tradition. The Songs Without Words, to me, are up there with Schumann's and Chopin's music for piano. And his preludes and fugues show a comfort with counterpoint and fugal technique far beyond that of the other romantic composers.
Although I haven't played, analyzed, or thought as much about him as Mendelssohn, I always found Chausson's music to be excellent too. His clarinet piece Andante and Allegro is obviously one of the great romantic clarinet works. But the rest of his unfortunately small output is great as well.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-10-09 22:59
I feel like I've listened to a lot of Reger over the years, but looking at his l-o-o-o-ng list of works, well, no. I don't love/hate him, but sort of like/dislike him. The clarinet sonatas aren't bad, but they sound so reminiscent of Brahms's at times, especially harmonically, that my ear strays. And there's a problem with Reger and some other underappreciated composers: unless you just want to explore something new, your listening time may be better enjoyed with better known composers whose inspiration tends to strike you as more consistent.
Back to the thread: Bohuslav Martinu. I don't seem to have the problem referred to above in his case. Endlessly creative, (and not only in his clarinet-containing works,) his music doesn't remind me of anyone else's.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHVPYDDpiac
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Author: donald
Date: 2025-10-10 12:34
Bryson- my wife Marie Ross just recorded the Karg Elert unaccompanied sonata, it will probably be released in the middle of next year. I heard the final edit a few months ago and I LIKE IT!!!!!
Also, the Reger Quintet is very beautiful once you get over the opening minute. However an indifferent performance can really sabotage this work (eg the recording I have by BPO players)
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-10 13:22
Philip: By all means, Martinu!! I would still love to play his Serenade for two clarinets and string trio. If you come to Paris, we'll play it together.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-10 14:02
I've played the Reger Sonatas and the Reger Quintet. I think he wrote great music. The only trouble is that it doesn't seem to be very audience-friendly. It would take repeated hearings to register and I can't see audiences coming back to hear the Sonatas and Quintets again. Also, here in France he is considered too Teutonic. Do any of you have any Latin-American composers or American composers they would like to recommend? -Cubans, Mexicans, etc.? One of my favorite Latin-American compsers is Revueltas. Unfortunately, there is only one chamber piece involving the clarinet. His string quartets are alost up there with Baertok's!
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-10 14:05
Let's get some women composers on the list! -Louise Farrenc. She wrote a lovely clarinet, cello, piano trio.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
Post Edited (2025-10-10 14:07)
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Author: graham
Date: 2025-10-10 15:27
The York Bowen is the Phantasy Quintet for bass clarinet and strings.
Benjamin Frankel’s clarinet quintet fits the agenda as being harmonically adventurous. Much more conservative, but good, is Hans Gal’s quintet.
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Author: graham
Date: 2025-10-10 15:35
I should add John Casken’s quintet, now available: https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/product/misted-land-22679791.html This is very atmospheric. Needs quartertone note bending.
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-10 23:36
Graham: Hans Gal is very unfairly forgotten. -a really expressive composer.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-11 00:17
Brycon: My good friend, Philippe Cuper, is a great fan of Jean Francaix's music and knew the composer and worked with him. I must admit that I have reservations about Francaix; have always considered him a sort of inferior Poulenc. Plus the fact that his music is hard as hell to play!
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-10-11 09:19
Quote:
I feel like I've listened to a lot of Reger over the years, but looking at his l-o-o-o-ng list of works, well, no. I don't love/hate him, but sort of like/dislike him.
I'm kind of with you on Reger's clarinet music. But throughout school, my organist classmates lived on Reger. I heard quite a few of his organ pieces that I rather liked, so maybe the clarinet pieces are better than I remember?
Quote:
The clarinet sonatas aren't bad, but they sound so reminiscent of Brahms's at times, especially harmonically, that my ear strays. And there's a problem with Reger and some other underappreciated composers: unless you just want to explore something new, your listening time may be better enjoyed with better known composers whose inspiration tends to strike you as more consistent.
Yes, I see what you mean and, for the most part, agree. But recently, with Mozart's piano sonatas, I decided that, because I had listened to these works and (poorly) played bits and pieces of them for years, I wanted to look at something similar but different. So I downloaded some of the Cimarosa sonatas to play through. And wow! Cimarosa is very much an underrated composer: just brilliant music! Indeed, so brilliant that I began to wonder why Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven remain in the canon while Cimarosa, CPE Bach, and others were sifted out.
But then last weekend, I again played through the first movement of Mozart's F major sonata. And it hit me immediately during the first phrase: "Oh, this is why Mozart's in the canon." I think it can be instructive to play just very fine composers, the ones who do everything at the highest level but perhaps lack the daring of the greatest composers, because there's an oddness with the greatest composers, such as Mozart starting his sonata in the subdominant (which Beethoven picked up on in his "pastoral" sonata in D), that can be overlooked unless you know how things "ought to go."
(For the same reason, I never teach Bach chorales to theory students. There's a large repertoire of fine Lutheran chorale harmonizations against which Bach's stand out in relief as the mini-masterpieces they undoubtedly are.)
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Brycon- my wife Marie Ross just recorded the Karg Elert unaccompanied sonata, it will probably be released in the middle of next year. I heard the final edit a few months ago and I LIKE IT!!!!!
Great! I'll have to listen! His sonata with piano is very nice too.
Quote:
My good friend, Philippe Cuper, is a great fan of Jean Francaix's music and knew the composer and worked with him. I must admit that I have reservations about Francaix; have always considered him a sort of inferior Poulenc. Plus the fact that his music is hard as hell to play!
Yes, I can see the Poulenc thing. In fact, I once played a double quintet by Francaix that was an arrangment of Poulenc's music, so perhaps there was some strong influence there. But with Poulenc, the sense of irony is palpable, no? With Francaix, the fun always seems so earnest. At any rate, Francaix has a very nice piano concerto, which he recorded with Nadia Boulanger conducting and himself playing piano. It's a fun listen, especially whenever you're preparing some of his fiendishly difficult clarinet music!
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-11 13:25
The 20th century Hungarian composer: KOKAI REZSO. He composed a splendid quartet: string trio and clarinet. Also: Four Hungarian Dances for clarinet and piano.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-10-11 17:43
Hi brycon. There is almost no end to good music out there, rewarding to hear and worthy of performance, but as you note there is indeed a rather undefinable but immediately recognizable difference the very good Cimarosa and great Mozart. If you listen to Mozart's childhood compositions, even the K.1 Minuet and Trio, **it** is right there - undeveloped, but there.
Note, the performer's hat is not the same as the listener's hat. The list of underrated composers may differ depending on which hat one is wearing.
It should also be mentioned that an individual performance can bring an underrated piece to greatness. Some performers really "get" certain composers.
Back to the thread: Ferrucio Busoni, another serious, fascinating and rewarding composer who rarely is cited as great. (He comes to mind because I've been meaning to relisten to one of his most intriguing piano pieces, Fantasia Contrappuntistica.) His father was a clarinetist, and he wrote numerous pieces for clarinet and piano, plus a Concertino for cl & orch, and those works occasionally are heard.
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Author: paulyb
Date: 2025-10-11 23:27
I was about to chip in with Busoni - plenty of fine and interesting (and underplayed) clarinet music.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-10-12 09:12
Quote:
If you listen to Mozart's childhood compositions, even the K.1 Minuet and Trio, **it** is right there - undeveloped, but there.
Mozart's earliest piece, composed at the age of 5, is actually rather bad (I know, I know: he was only 5!).
You can check it out in the NMA on imslp here:
https://imslp.eu/files/imglnks/euimg/0/0c/IMSLP174703-PMLP119983-Mozart,_Wofgang_Amadeus-NMA_09_27_Band_01_I_53_KV_1a_scan.pdf
Within just the first bar, nearly every beat has something the matter with it, not unlike a freshman theory composition assignment: beat 1 is a bare 5th, the upbeat of beat 1 is a hidden 5th, beat 2 is a bare 4th, and beat 3 is a 7th that doesn't resolve, and so on throughout the piece. In short, it's a mess. But Mozart, of course, learned rather quickly. In his book Music in the Galant Style, Robert Gjerdingen devotes a chapter to the growth of Mozart from a child composer into a slightly older, and much more proficient, child composer. It's nice to know even he had to work at it! (The only composers I'm aware of whose earliest works show complete fluency are Mendelssohn and Chopin, though no doubt there are others.)
Quote:
There is almost no end to good music out there, rewarding to hear and worthy of performance, but as you note there is indeed a rather undefinable but immediately recognizable difference the very good Cimarosa and great Mozart.
Reception history, canonization, and other related topics are very fascinating to me. Is Cimarosa noticeably less good than Mozart? I think if you played, even for connoisseurs, this Cimarosa piece and said it was Mozart, no one would think twice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07xz-WRUzLg&list=RD07xz-WRUzLg&start_radio=1
It could be a bit of a Mozart fantasia or something: it's absolutely beautiful. But is it overlooked for Mozart because the brand recognition of the latter? Maybe cognitive scientists would say we just like listening to what we're already familiar with? Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, suggests that more technically challenging repertoire had an easier time making it into the canon because virtuoso performers had more fun playing it. (Maybe there's hope for Francaix!)
Quote:
Back to the thread: Ferrucio Busoni, another serious, fascinating and rewarding composer who rarely is cited as great.
Yes! Busoni is excellent! He also had a great scale exercise that was shown to me by Carl Schachter.
Post Edited (2025-10-12 09:16)
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Author: graham
Date: 2025-10-12 15:44
I wholly endorse Karg-Elert’s unaccompanied sonata. Such a good piece. You can download the part for free. You can play it any tempo you want. While talking of him, try his trio for clarinet, oboe, and cor anglais (English horn). Just lovely!
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Author: ruben
Date: 2025-10-12 17:32
Graham: thank you for the Karg-Elert oboe-cor anglais-clarinet suggestion. I can't wait to play it.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: cigleris
Date: 2025-10-12 21:58
Here’s my list of underrated British composers:
Susan Spain-Dunk
Elizabeth Maconchy
Ruth Gipps
Peter Wishart
York Bowen
William Matthias
David Gow
Arthur Benjamin
Cecil Armstrong Gibbs
Denis ApIvor
Freda Swain
Cecil Hartog
Elsewhere
Hidas Fryges (Hungary)
Myroslav Skoryk (Ukraine)
Fernande Decruck (France)
Walter Mourant (USA)
Anyone here interested in the clarinet works of the composers I’ve mentioned drop me a line and I’ll try and help.
Peter Cigleris
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-10-13 10:22
Peter,
Thank you for that list!
In the U.S., most British composers (maybe aside from Holst and Elgar) are pretty underrated. There's an incredible solo piece, for instance, by Alexander Goehr called Paraphrase on Monteverdi's 'Il Combattimento' that I've never seen programmed here. And among opera folks, I've heard George Benjamin's Written on Skin called the best opera since Berg. But again, it's not particularly well known here. It's a shame, for sure.
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The Clarinet Pages
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