Radiant Brahms and slapstick Dohnányi for Ensemble 360’s Sheffield season closer

The word "autumnal" adheres to Brahms’ late chamber works like a damp autumn leaf to a woodland path. Much of that is hindsight, of course – Brahms was still only in his fifties when he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, though we now know that the extraordinary pieces which that playing inspired were to be the final chamber works produced before his death at the age of 63. "Fräulein Klarinette" was Brahms’ affectionate term for Mühlfeld, and whilst not wishing to engage in too much gender stereotyping, the latter’s lyrical vibrato-laden voice prompted a tenderness in Brahms’ often rather rugged musical language.

That was evident in spades in this performance of the Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op.115 by members of Ensemble 360, and particularly the fluid playing of the recently appointed clarinetist Robert Plane. It was an occasion that made much of the work’s major/minor ambiguity, especially in the shifting moods of the first movement. The central section of the slow movement, a sudden eruption of mock-cimbalom effects on the strings over which the clarinet’s rhapsodic figuration gives voice to Brahms’ characteristic Gypsy vein, was another highlight. The hushed ending, a fading chord after we’ve revisited the music of the work’s opening, provides no comforting resolution. The memory of that sound hung in the air for many seconds in the Crucible Playhouse before the audience gave the players the ovation their performance deserved.

Though obviously not directly influencing Brahms’ four sets of late solo piano pieces, one might hear Mühlfeld’s voice behind those too. Tim Horton opened the second half of the programme with the Three Intermezzi for Piano, Op.117, and these "lullabies of my sorrows", as Brahms described them, were given a singing performance that nevertheless did not try to disguise their mood of mixed comfort and desolation. We’re back with the autumnal metaphor again: everything dies, these pieces seem to be saying…but nevertheless there’s consolation in that too. These little gems are often interpreted by pianists in ways that pull them about in search of expressiveness. Horton played them straight, as it were, and the music was able to speak for itself.

It was quite a jolt to move from this studied introspection to the raucous close to the evening provided by Ernst von Dohnányi’s Sextet in C major, Op.37. The remarkable stand-in horn player Stephen Stirling, in introducing the work, observed how much Dohnányi must have been a fan of those early silent movie stars, and the riotous finale to this piece was like the aural equivalent of an encounter with Buster Keaton or the Keystone Cops. It’s striking in some ways to think that Dohnányi was writing this rich, essentially tonal music in the mid-1930s, when musical revolutions had been going on all around him over the previous two decades. But it’s certainly not conservative music. The opening movement plays provocatively with the tritone interval before finally accommodating it into the lyrical melody that dominates what follows. The middle movements have their abrupt contrasts, too. A sinister, slightly haunted funeral march disturbs the tranquility of the slow movement, and the third movement variations pull the mood in one direction after another. But it’s in the finale that Dohnányi throws caution to the wind: 1930s jazz, a sentimental waltz and echoes of ragtime tumble helter-skelter over each other. The performers addressed this anarchic mixture with verve and precision. The cheers at the end proved how fruitfully neglected masterpieces can be revisited. Dohnányi might have begun his career in the footsteps of Brahms, but by the end of the evening we were in a wholly different musical world.