The Music of Brahms at the Town Hall Concert Chamber

By WILLIAM DART


Auckland Chamber Orchestra came up with a novel way of launching its 2004 season with director Peter Scholes joining a handful of colleagues in a celebration of Brahms chamber music for clarinet.

Despite an ill-judged programme note that described the composer as "ever pedantic and devoted to the classical musical architecture", the music offered was some of the freshest to fall from Brahms' pen.

Ironically, these were works written in his twilight years, inspired by the extraordinary artistry of clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld.

Scholes, James Tennant and Katherine Austin gave us the Opus 114 Clarinet Trio, which may well contain material that might have gone into Brahms's Fifth Symphony had he completed the score.

Among its beauties are a brooding Adagio and a Finale that positively bristles with rhythmic inventiveness.

It was a considered performance and, although there were some minor blurs in intonation they were not enough to mar the intense connection these three musicians were making with the music, particularly when Scholes and Tennant were in telling dialogue.

For the first of Brahms Clarinet Sonatas, Scholes and Austin revealed a keen sense of the overall structure of the work. Scholes unfurled the composer's arching lines, only slightly compromised by a pinched tone in the upper register and the central movement made much of the contrast between the fiery and the mellow.

After interval, Scholes and Tennant were joined by violinists Dimitri Atanassov and Lara Hall and violist Robert Ashworth for Brahms' mighty Clarinet Quintet , which unfortunately proved something of a let-down.

This work is a big ask for anything but a permanent, professional chamber group and we were treated to some alarmingly scrappy ensemble, particularly in the more forthright passages of the opening movement. Intonation, too, was a constant bugbear, despite a number of retunings between movements.

George Bernard Shaw, an ardent Wagnerian and by no means an admirer of this Quintet, did admit that the first movement allowed the occasional excursion into dreamland. On Sunday, these excursions came in the Adagio, in which all five musicians came together and the autumnal beauties of Brahms' score were given voice.