Hans Gál: Chamber Music for Clarinet

Like Brahms and Reger, Hans Gál (1890–1987) expressed some of his last musical thoughts in the form of a Clarinet Quintet, this one written when its composer was 87 years old. But the earlier works here – the Serenade written in Vienna between Gál’s expulsion from Nazi Germany and his flight after the Anschluss, and the Trio, composed in his new home of Edinburgh – reveal that its elegiac, autumnal lyricism was his natural mode of expression. In these three scores, indeed, he produced some of the loveliest music in the clarinet repertoire.