The thought of pairing Brahms and Finzi hadn’t occurred to me before but it makes perfect sense, particularly with the clarinet music. Did Finzi have Brahms in mind when composing the second of his Five Bagatelles? Certainly the title Romanza is Brahmsian enough, as are those lovely triplets in the clarinet part, and the way Helen Habershon draws them out so tenderly has me thoroughly convinced.
She plays all the Bagatelles marvellously, in fact. I love how innocently she begins the first one, as if it’s a warm-up scale, and then the poco meno mosso at 1’14” brings to mind Elgar’s phrase ‘play it like something you hear down by the river’, for it seems to come from a pure, pastoral source. The Forlana is delicately done too, with a gentle swing, and the Fughetta seems to smile, with both Habershon and pianist John Lenehan using articulation to keep the textures light.
Lenehan’s Brahms arrangements are simple but effective. In the two songs, the clarinet merely takes the voice part, but in the A major Intermezzo (originally for solo piano), the clarinet sometimes has the melody and other times a secondary line. Curiously, Nicolai Popov did something comparable in his arrangement of the same Intermezzo for Andreas Ottensamer. In any case, Habershon’s phrasing accentuates the wistfulness of all four pieces, and in ‘Meine Lieder’ I particularly like the way she and Lenehan evoke falling leaves. There’s a little too much wistfulness, perhaps, in the F minor Clarinet Sonata. I miss the breathless yearning in the opening melody’s melodic leaps, for instance, and although Brahms marks this movement Allegro appassionato, passion is in rather short supply here. Habershon and Lenehan are most compelling in the slow movement, which they play with mesmeric forthrightness, but the third movement doesn’t swing enough for me, and I want at last a hint of hearty humour in the finale. Technically, both musicians are beyond reproach, and others may find the understated grace of this performance more satisfying that I did.
