Peripheral Visions — Australian Clarinet Trios
Francesco Celata (clarinet)
Roger Benedict (viola)
Daniel Herscovitch (piano)
rec. 2023/2025, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney, Australia
Reviewed from a stream on Apple Music
Heritage HTGCD119 [71]
The first thing that struck me when I listened to this disc was how much variety six Australian composers can wring from the same form and the same three instruments. Clarinet, viola and piano is a combination many listeners know from a single canonical source: Mozart’s Kegelstatt. A particular concern of mine before starting was that the clarinet and the viola, working so often in the same register, might leave the textures monochromatic. The worry turned out to be misplaced. Across these six works, the trio yields a remarkable range of colour, partly because each composer has thought hard about how to keep the two instruments distinct, and partly because Francesco Celata and Roger Benedict are alert to every opportunity the writing gives them. The disc is also, in its own quiet way, a feat of advocacy: the Sutherland is a rediscovery, the Dart is brand new, and the Smalley and Dean make the case that the Australian repertoire in this combination is deeper than it might first appear.
Margaret Sutherland’s Trio in C major (1935) is the most overtly tuneful and harmonically settled thing on the disc, and none the worse for that. The manuscript turned up only a few years ago in the University of Melbourne’s rare collections — donated by the family of a Melbourne violist active in the 1920s and 1930s — and Sutherland’s own arrangement of her original violin-clarinet-piano trio is what we hear here. The piece is pleasingly made: a poised opening Allegro, a short and inward Adagio, and a finale that skips along with real charm. Celata’s clarinet is a lyrical delight throughout, light on the bar lines and singing freely above the texture. There is nothing here that will rearrange anyone’s sense of twentieth-century chamber music, but the Trio leaves a warm impression and is a thoroughly worthwhile recovery.
A stick dance, you might reasonably expect, will be a percussive affair, and Andrew Schultz’s Stick Dance 2 (1989, revised 2005) duly is. The title points to the South Asian and Indonesian shadow-puppet traditions Schultz had in mind, but the music’s identity is its own: alive, edged, full of small sudden gestures, with microtones in the clarinet and slow glissandi in the viola that keep the listener’s bearings just slightly off. Daniel Herscovitch is incisive here — pointed attacks, clean voicing, the rhythmic spine of the piece firmly held — and the playing as a whole has the quickness of mind that this kind of writing demands.
Roger Smalley’s Trio (1999, here in the composer’s later revision) is the most ambitious of the three more substantial works, and a fascinating contrast to the Sutherland in formal terms. Where Sutherland inherits the conventional three-movement design and uses it comfortably, Smalley folds an entire sonata trajectory into a single span of just under eleven minutes. The work opens with what the composer calls a ‘Webern-like’ viola solo derived from the late Brahms Op. 120 No. 2 sonata — a piece Brahms designated as playable on either clarinet or viola, so the choice is loaded — and from this fragment everything else is generated. Benedict’s first entry has the right combination of precision and gravity, and the way the trio negotiates the work’s overlapping recapitulation and march, then the variations that ramp up toward the climax before collapsing, is gripping. This is a serious piece, and it gets a serious account.
Peter Dart’s Peripheral Visions (2022), the title work, is the most directly indebted of the six to a literary source — W.G. Sebald’s poetry collection Unrecounted, with Jan Peter Tripp’s drawings — and what is striking is how successfully Dart finds musical equivalents for the contrasts the texts and images set up. The first movement plays with repeated pitches in different registers and a sustained sotto voce that genuinely seems to retreat; the second, Above the Somme, sets glittering surface against a darker undertow that breaks out memorably in the middle; the third, After Cézanne, captures the slightly averted, “incidental” quality of seeing that Dart wants. The trio’s playing is wonderfully attentive throughout.
Richard Vella’s Tango (1990) is great fun and would make an outstanding encore. Composed in the first instance from a structured improvisation with the clarinettist Peter Jenkin, it is built on the constant interplay between idiomatic tango gestures and ones that pull deliberately away from them — multiphonics, quartertones, glissandi, registral extremes.
For my money the most interesting work here is Brett Dean’s Night Window (1993). This was Dean’s first significant chamber piece — he describes it as effectively his Op. 1 — and the assurance of the writing is remarkable for a composer at that stage. The opening, a pair of cadenzas for bass clarinet and viola, is unmistakably ominous and sets the harmonic frame for everything that follows. The central variations move through serenity to nervousness to a long elegiac stretch of real depth, and the two fast outer sections that frame them are dancing, jazz-tinged things that catch the other side of the title’s meaning: night as a time of movement as well as of vulnerability. Benedict’s viola line in the elegy is one of the most affecting things on the disc, and the whole performance has a rewarding sustained concentration.
The playing throughout is superb: Celata, Benedict and Herscovitch are three musicians who clearly listen to one another with great care, and the recorded sound from Verbrugghen Hall is full and present without ever crowding the music. We are once again in Heritage’s debt for putting out a disc that no large label would have touched and presenting it with the seriousness it deserves: this is a hallmark of theirs, and it matters. Six works, six rather different propositions, all worth hearing — and an unexpected, refreshing way to spend an hour.
Dominic Hartley
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Contents
Margaret Sutherland (1897-1984)
Trio in C major (1935)
Andrew Schultz (b. 1960)
Stick Dance 2, Op. 22b (1989, rev. 2005)
Roger Smalley (1943-2015)
Trio (1999, rev.)
Peter Dart (b. 1953)
Peripheral Visions (2022)
Richard Vella (b. 1954)
Tango (1990)
Brett Dean (b. 1961)
Night Window (1993)
