Album

Nicolai Pfeffer and his clarinet are undoubtedly kindred spirits. He showed this when he recorded a dreamlike Mozart with Markus Stenz and the Orchestra della Toscana, and this is unmistakable in his Echi d'Opera, which were written with the same instrumentation: initially "tragic and dramatic ... then girlish and exuberant and finally longing and loving", his instrument sings, as Klassik-Heute wrote in 2022 - which of course means that the circle of dazzling facets is far from complete ...

... as the extraordinarily versatile artist now demonstrates with three miniatures that he recently recorded with the Bad Reichenhall Philharmonic Orchestra and its chief conductor Daniel Spaw.  The pieces are connected in several ways: They are all by renowned French composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and all belong to the chamber music literature for clarinet and piano, but can be heard here in orchestral versions produced by the soloist.

While Nicolai Pfeffer's arrangements of the opera paraphrases on his previous album were based on Giuseppe Verdi's original orchestral writing, he now succeeds with enviable flair in conjuring up the valeurs slumbering in the piano parts of André Messager, Gabriel Pierné and Henri Rabaud on delicate canvases, and Henri Rabaud on delicate canvases, over which the clarinet moves in almost all its paces - no wonder, since two of the compositions published here digitally were nothing more and nothing less than "Pièces de Concours" at the beginning of their existence, in other words competition pieces for the Conservatoire de Paris. And its venerable professors did not want sonatinas ...