Some of the interest in this release from the new Paladino label may come from the presence of clarinetist Dimitri Ashkenazy. He's the son of pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, although readers would never know it from the biographical material included here (online he's referred to simply as an "Icelandic clarinetist" -- his mother was Icelandic, although he was born in New York). Are there familial traits? There may be. Performing with an ad hoc group of string players rather than an established string quartet, ... Read More
Some of the interest in this release from the new Paladino label may come from the presence of clarinetist Dimitri Ashkenazy. He's the son of pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, although readers would never know it from the biographical material included here (online he's referred to simply as an "Icelandic clarinetist" -- his mother was Icelandic, although he was born in New York). Are there familial traits? There may be. Performing with an ad hoc group of string players rather than an established string quartet, Ashkenazy seems to direct the performance, and it's a distinctive one in a work, the Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op, 115, for which there is no shortage of interpretations. Ashkenazy's reading is lyrical and episodic, avoiding both a blank reading that stresses the motivic intricacy of the work and an autumnal mood that assumes Brahms had death on his mind. (He might have had, and the argument is more convincing in this case than in that of Mozart, for example, but it's always... Read Less
