Jos van Immerseel has been one of the most fruitful explorers of past performance practice, recently reaching as far as Carmina Burana in his search for vanished sonorities. He celebrates his 70th birthday with this totally charming project: French clarinet music of the early 20th century, bringing together a quite reedy clarinet of 1930 with an earlier Bechstein piano of 1870 whose sound is supple and nuanced. The highlight is Saint-Saëns’s sonata, one of the very late group that also includes sonatas for oboe and bassoon, a marvellous work. There is light relief in miniatures by Bloch and Pierné, and Lisa Shklyaver blossoms in Milhaud’s famous Scaramouche suite in an arrangement possibly not by the composer that Immerseel has partly rewritten – so it’s more authentic than the original!
