‘Breath of the statues” is an apt title, given the way clarinettist Chen Halevi and pianist Noam Greenberg have taken some of the monuments of the clarinet repertoire and imbued them with life. But they have also continued a thread of tradition with a new piece.
Only two decades separates Brahms’s two sonatas – fluid, quietly eloquent performances of which bookend this disc – and Berg’s Op 5 Four Pieces, played with the kind of understatement that draws in the ear. Sven-Ingo Koch’s Hommages is a response to the Berg, written for Halevi in 2007 and cut from the same dense cloth. It’s full of note-bending for the clarinet and has a piano part that takes in the extremes of the keyboard. At the centre of the programme, Schumann’s three Fantasiestücke bring out the swing and swagger in Halevi’s playing. He and Greenberg make a focused and ideally balanced team.
