Two contrasting works from the Nash Ensemble made for a fine evening of the very best quality chamber music at Wigmore Hall, gratefully received in the hall and by many online. Richard Hosford produced a rich tone throughout his performance of Brahms' late Clarinet Quintet in B minor, which was entirely appropriate for this work. While it sees Brahms adopting the melancholy, resigned mood of those works from his last few years, it also represents a renewed enthusiasm for composition, inspired by his admiration for the playing of clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. So, while there are aspects of the work that seem to echo the rarefied atmosphere of Schubert's String Quintet, it also has a freshness and lightness which is sometimes missed, though not by the Nash here.
The first movement was robust and sensitive by turns, without ever lingering or losing momentum. The slow movement was not given the hypersensitive treatment that is often the way, but its delicate and warm emotions were presented without sentimentality. As in the first movement, the tempo was quite swift and maintained with some discipline. However, the final bars were as exquisite a pianissimo as anyone could have hoped for.
The Andantino continued the same open-air sensibility and had the wit and whimsy necessary in these trademark Brahmsian intermezzo-type movements. The variation form finale saw each of the five sections nicely characterised, with the overall impetus maintained, leading inevitably to the melancholy return of themes from the first movement by way of a coda. Here for first time, appropriately, the performance succumbed to a Schubertian sense of loss and sadness.
Dvořák's Piano Quintet no. 2 in A major that followed is a work of confidence and optimism, written at a time when the composer was at the height of his career. Not that this is a shallow work, in fact it is one of the joys of Dvořák that he is able to produce music that depicts happiness with true depth of feeling.