Brahms was fascinated by Hungary and its music for most of his life, though his use of Hungarian inflections in his work here has often been described in terms of exoticist attempts at “local colour”. Austro-Hungarian clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer has set out to prove that its influence ran much deeper by comparing the Clarinet Quintet with traditional folk music, which, he argues, had a strong impact on it. He’s joined for the Quintet itself by Leonidas Kavakos, Antoine Tamestit, and the Koncz Duo, Christoph and Stefan. Their performance is then followed by arrangements of Brahms’s waltzes, Hungarian dances, and traditional Transylvanian folk music, all for the same ensemble, to which double bass, cimbalom and accordion are eventually added. The links become very obvious in the melancholy clarinet flourishes and oscillating string phrases of the Quintet’s Adagio, but seem tenuous elsewhere. The folk music brings things to a spirited close, though the disc works better if you programme it to play first: the performance of the Quintet is among the most beautiful I know, and almost impossible to follow.
