Music for Solo Clarinet

Eduard Brunner (clarinet) Naxos 8.572470

Eduard Brunner begins his survey of a half-century of solo clarinet music with Jörg Widmann's 1993 Fantasie, its playful indulgence squawking through multiphonics, bending notes this way and that, and sometimes dancing so quietly that the noise of the instrument's keys becomes part of the music. He ranges back to Arthur Lourié's 1956 The Mime(dedicated to Charlie Chaplin) and forward to Toshio Hosokawa's EDI of 2009 (a work written for Brunner and titled after his nickname). In between are pieces from Luciano Berio, Aribert Reimann, Edison Denisov, Alexander Goehr, Henri Pousseur, Hans Ulrich Lehmann, Fabio Nieder and André Jolivet. In Brunner's persuasive hands they all, in one way or another, elaborate on why, since Stravinsky first ventured a solo clarinet piece in 1918, the instrument has been the most successful solo woodwind voice for composers around the world. See url.ie/af6o