Berg, Bernstein, Bax, Honegger, Brotons, and Salonen

Cristo Barrios (clarinet) and Clinton Cormany (piano)

Metier msv 28505 [58 mins]

A nice balanced programme to extend 20 C clarinettists' repertoire, without venturing too far into extended techniques etc.

Bax is typically romantic, Berg's aphorisms searching and forward looking, Bernstein and Honegger bring lighter relief, Salonen's '70s modernism rather faceless and disappointing. Barrios hails from Tenerife where the disc was recorded. The item by the local composer, Salvador Brotons, proves to be a welcome novelty.

If you can't read the first page of the notes* on our illustration, nor can I. Legibility improves with the following pages of Clinton Cormany's notes, printed black on white, but I still need a magnifying glass, which is counter-productive.

Who needs arts editors for CDs? On the back page it gets worse, with names of composers and for credits white on yellow... And don't artists themselves get to see how their far too all-inclusive CVs will look in multilingual booklets after it is decided how many pages are affordable?

All well played and recorded by Simon Fox at the Conservatoire of the Canaries, October 2007. I hope to give this CD to my local Conservatoire, Trinity College of Music, where some student clarinettist might pick it up for exploration?

Peter Grahame Woolf

* See also http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/articles/CD_InsertBooklets.html#yc