Label: Another Timbre

激推しのクラリネット五重奏曲!!Wandelweiser派の作曲家であり現在まで多くの名作を残して来たスイスの作曲家Jurg Frey。本作は氏の最も研ぎ澄まされた側面を示したという、最小限の手法にて驚くほど広大な内的世界を切り開いたクラリネット五重奏曲。クラリネットと弦楽四重奏の為に書かれた本作は、長く静かに弧を描きながら展開、優しく脈打つ音色が揺蕩い、コンポーズというよりはむしろスローに解き明かされていくような浮遊感の強いハーモニーを特徴とする内容。兎に角Apartment Houseの演奏が秀逸です。





On his Clarinet Quintet, Jürg Frey stretches time until it feels almost weightless, using soft clarinet breaths and hushed strings to trace a slow, luminous drift where tiny inflections become whole landscapes of feeling.
Clarinet Quintet presents Jürg Frey at his most distilled, working with the barest means to open a surprisingly spacious inner world. Scored for clarinet and string quartet, the piece unfolds in long, quiet arcs, with gently pulsed tones and suspended harmonies that seem less composed than patiently uncovered. The clarinet line rarely asserts itself as soloist in the traditional sense; instead it moves as one voice among five, offering small curls of melody, held notes and soft entries that lightly colour the surrounding strings. What emerges is not a concerto‑like drama but a shared field of sound, where every entrance and decay matters.

The strings, for their part, provide a kind of slowly shifting ground. Often they move in close, almost chordal formation, gliding between neighbouring pitches or sustaining delicate dyads that beat and shimmer in the air. At other moments, a single line will peel away, tracing a sparse counter‑melody around the clarinet’s tone before sinking back into the texture. Frey’s concern is less with harmonic progression in the traditional sense than with the quality of each chord as a present tense: how it speaks, how it resonates in the room, how it changes once a single note is added or withdrawn. Silences and near‑silences are treated as full participants in this process, framing sounds so that even the softest gesture carries weight.