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Wigmore Hall/BBC Radio 3The clarinet’s turn to shine in these online recitals brought familiar works sprinkled with rarities, such as Saint-Saëns’ Clarinet Sonata, in a finely balanced performance
There might be no harps or harpsichords, trumpets or trombones, but woodwind instruments have been respectably represented in the Wigmore Hall’s current lunchtime series. After the recitals by the oboist Nicholas Daniel and flautist Adam Walker came clarinettist Michael Collins, who was partnered by Michael McHale in Saint-Saëns, Weber and Poulenc.
There was nothing particularly adventurous in their programme, but the Saint-Saëns’ Clarinet Sonata, at least, was a rarity – a late work, composed in 1921, the last year of his life. It’s typically fluent and generally good-humoured, apart from a sombre slow movement in the unusual key of E flat minor, whose opening seems so growlingly pictorial it could almost have been a movement Saint-Saëns had left out of his Carnival of the Animals. Continue reading...