RENCONTRES INÉDITES VII

At the very end of his life, Brahms developed a passion for an instrument often neglected by great composers: the clarinet. In 1894, after the Quintet of 1891, he left these two Sonatas as his last chamber music works. These compositions were inspired by concerts at which Brahms heard Weber’s works for clarinet, which fascinated him. The composer struck up an intense friendship with the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. The result is a warm, woody sound that develops with the narrative elegance of the Lied, as in the Allegro Appassionato of the First Sonata, harmoniously distributing the drama between the two instruments, engaged in a dance of perfect symbiosis.

Very different circumstances led to the composition of the Overture on Jewish Themes, Op.34. Prokofiev, newly exiled in the United States, was commissioned by a Russian-American sextet. The brief was to draw inspiration from a collection of supposedly Jewish melodies… but the sources of this collection have never been traced, and one hypothesis is that it was written from scratch by Simeon Bellison, the ensemble’s clarinettist, a former soloist with the Mariinsky and soon to hold the same post with the New York Orchestra!

As for Rhapsodie Nègre, virtually Poulenc’s first work, it provoked the anger of the Paris Conservatoire as much as the admiration of Satie, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. The last even had the score published in London. The premiere of the work, which shone with its exotic atmosphere and the depth of its blends of timbre, was a triumph, the birth of the young Poulenc’s recognition in the parisian artistic world.