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Tempo

An album which ‘both ’does what it says on the tin’ and at the same time is a rich feast to get your teeth into. Gemini’s latest release is one to indulge in. There is a lot going on, and stimulatingly so. For Clarinet and Strings features six works by British and Australian composers (plus one bonus track), spanning 1941 to 2020, with an equal offering of music by male and female composers (in disc order: Cyril Scott, Nicola LeFanu, Howard Skempton, Tony Coe, Rebecca Clarke and Sadie Harrison). The recordings themselves span 25 years, from those recorded in 1995 to those captured in the midst of 2020. Five of these works are multi-movement offerings, and the album consists of quintets, quartets and duos as well as introducing clapping sticks and narration. This is a beast of an album, expertly spearheaded by Gemini’s director and clarinettist, Ian Mitchell.

The opening track, Cyril Scott’s Clarinet Quintet (1953), recorded 26 years ago in East Finchley, is a magnificent and uncomplicated start to the album. Its rhapsodic style speaks to the episodic nature of the following six multi-movement pieces, but the pacing of this single movement provides a welcome simplicity to begin with. Gemini’s playing is vibrant  throughout, but shifts in colour are subtler here than in other moments on the disc, seemingly light-touch and personal. This makes for a great frame to listen to more telescopic explorations in later works, or for that beautiful shift at 7’40″ into somewhere glassy and cool, planned decisively and illuminating a strong, unwavering core, which holds the piece cohesively from beginning to end. There even seems to be a glowing, molten quality in Mitchell’s playing here, reflected in the fullness and momentum of Gemini’s playing throughout.

Ian Mitchell tells the listener in his detailed booklet that Clarke’s Prelude, Allegro and Pastorale, for clarinet and viola (1941), was another record waiting for release on the Gemini shelves, having been recorded a few days after the Scott, in 1995. The work was still relatively unknown at the time of recording, with Mitchell and Inoue having given the UK premiere only four years prior. This 2021 release suspends the track in an interesting space and time and there is a quality in the duo’s playing that seems to reflect this. Perhaps this is created by the context given by the rest of the album (being set against Harrison’s 2020 work or Scott’s brighter Clarinet Quintet), but there is a rawness in the detail of the duo’s playing, like light glimpsed momentarily through a rough glass edge. It’s beautiful. The complexities in the coarse edges of these two alto instruments are presented formidably, Inoue and Mitchell carving stunning new surfaces into each other’s voices to create new tones, new textures.

When Mitchell began putting this album together, he had a trio of works in mind that would form the basis of the compilation. LeFanu’s Songs without Words (2005) joins Scott and Clarke in this cornerstone position and is one of four works on the album to have been written for Gemini. The piece presents another contrast in this varied mix of forces (this time for clarinet and string trio) and is another multi-movement work, the first movement of which is dedicated entirely to a clarinet solo, fashioning a space in which to listen to Mitchell’s versatile palette. This has glimpses of tones so soft in the upper registers that the white noise of the breath almost becomes spoiled with a drip of resonant pitch, and this more delicate moment was perhaps something I needed in this rich album. LeFanu’s third movement introduces another thread that weaves through this dense compilation – the use of folk art. This is brief, and we quickly move into In Memoriam (Remembrance), written to remember those that have died in the Middle East, a sharp and effectively dislocating shift of gear.

Wrapped around these three initial works on the album are pieces by Skempton, Coe and Harrison, with Skempton’s Lullaby  the first of the three duets to appear (here for clarinet and cello). I was once again reminded of the presence of unfolding time on the album, in this instance through Skempton’s flowing cello line evoking Bach. This is a lovely track and is positioned poignantly to follow LeFanu’s emotive last movement.  There is more space here than elsewhere on the album, providing a significant moment to reflect before diving back in. Mitchell’s gentle playing is warm and sweet: the perfect place to do so.

Coe’s Dream Odyssey, for clarinet and string quartet, is contextualised by Mitchell as an encore to the earlier Clarinet Quintet, and I did enjoy chuckling in the shared knowledge that this encore was recorded 25 years after the preceding work and by a different line-up, too. The compact nature of these little miniatures did seem to draw my attention to the busy nature of this album again, and I became aware I was holding multiple threads at once, threads that I gave up trying to untangle on my first listen to the album in full, but that became more like intricate woven patterns to unpick thereafter (though not before encountering Harrison’s determined Fire in Song, which seemed to rethread the whole picture).

Fire in Song was commissioned when Mitchell sought a new duet for clarinet and viola to sit beside the Clarke. The most recent work on the disc, Harrison certainly expands the two alto voices beyond anything heard previously on the album. In brilliant contrast to Clarke’s more delicate palette, the strength and energy resonating from Mitchell and Balding’s pitch bends in the two outer movements presents a new physicality to the listener, hammering home the intensity of the climate crisis, which these movements are written about. The inner movements, written to tell the creation story of fire (as told by the Yolngu group of Aboriginal Australians), speak back to the folk song heard in LeFanu’s third movement, and also add Aboriginal clapping stick and narration from Gemini’s Aleksander Szram and Sophie Harris to the mix. This all makes for quite a new listening context and I found myself in a completely different space here. I have questions about whether Harrison worked with the Yolngu group on their story, but I must say I did very much enjoy unfolding the rest of the album again from this new acoustic context; there is something about the strength and community created by Harrison and Gemini in this piece that completely recontextualises moments of celebration and strength in Clarke’s Allegro, LeFanu’s ‘Catalunya!’ and Scott’s Clarinet Quintet.

The album ends grandly with Gemini Dances, a bonus piece from Skempton that seems to drawthe entire experience together with a comforting balm that almost says ‘fine’ in a seven-movement flourish (with added flute, piano and percussion).

This entire album presents a many-layered structure to carefully open up, piece by piece, and the listener is most rewarded by doing so. Skempton’s Gemini Dances perfectly concludes this gloriously rich process, and Mitchell becomes one with the wider ensemble again, his sparkling playing having led me resolutely through this multifaceted compilation.