David Bruce has been on UK audiences’ radar most recently as a composer of operas for young people – The Firework Maker’s Daughter, and Glyndebourne’s Nothing. Gumboots, written in 2008, is a quintet for clarinet and strings in which he looks to Gumboot dancing – born out of how black miners in apartheid South Africa, forbidden to speak, communicated by slapping their boots and chains. After a long opening movement of heat haze, come five increasingly complex dances, reverberating with the smack of wood and bow on string and with the wheeling, almost klezmer-like playing of Julian Bliss, who flits seamlessly between regular and bass clarinet. The joyous rhythmic barrage of the finale could almost be out of a Falla ballet. Brahms’s Op 115 Clarinet Quintet is an odd counterweight; Bliss and the Carducci Quartet offer a worthwhile, well-balanced performance with especial spark in the third movement.
