Messrs Collins & Hough prove to be a dream-team in Brahms’s Opus 120 – the Two Sonatas for Clarinet & Piano. With well-balanced and unrestricted sound (Henry Wood Hall, London, 6/2020) the music’s intimacies, passions and dynamism are persuasively wrought in these sensitive, colourful and bravura accounts, vividly projected and lovingly shared and tapered, and what a fund of melody Brahms left us – soulful, winsome and heroic. Also included is the Opus 100, A-major, Violin Sonata in Collins’s adaptation for the clarinet, which fits the ‘new’ instrument like a glove and can easily be thought of as an original. BIS-2557 [SACD].
Michael Collins & Stephen Hough record Brahms for Bis.
