4 Hungarian Dances

arranged for clarinet    and piano by Martin Fröst and Roland Pöntinen (after Joseph Joachim)

No.1 in G minor: Allegro molto

No.12 in D minor: Presto

No.13 in D major: Andantino grazioso

No.21 in E minor: Vivace – Più presto

Brahms was first seduced by Hungarian gypsy music, its distinctive dance rhythms and exotic harmonies, by way of his duo partnership with the young Hunagarian violinist Eduard Reményi, with whom he gave several concerts in the early 1850s. Although his love of the idiom shows in much of what he wrote from that time until his very last works in the 1890s, its most popular manifestation has always been the the 21 Hungarian Dances for piano duet, which he assembled into four sets between 1858 and 1879. Unfortunately, when the first two sets were published in 1868 Reményi accused the composser of plagiarism and, indeed, although Brahms claimed to have done no more than “arrange” them, some of the dances are based on tunes he had got to know through Reményi. Not that this bothered Joseph Joachim, the other Hungarian violinist in Brahms’s life who, no doubt recognising the essentially violinistic nature of many of them, arranged the complete set for violin and piano.

At one further remove –    aware, obviously, that the clarinet has a pitch range not far short of the violin’s and that it is capable of similar colour variety – Martin Fröst and Roland Pöntinen have arranged a selection of Joachim’s violin-and-piano versions for their own use. One can imagine, for example, the passionately expressive opening theme of No.1 in G minor sounding just as effective in the chalumeau register of the clarinet as on the G-string of the violin. The clarinet is well equipped for the contrast between the husky Presto beginning and the sweetness of the slower major-key episodes of No.12 in D minor and, although it clearly cannot manage the octaves Joachim introduced into the violin part, neither the graceful Andante grazioso opening nor the rough-and-tumble of the B minor Vivace middle section of No.13 in D should be lacking in colour. As for the brilliance of the E minor opening section of the last of the dances and the still greater brilliance of the quicker coda in E major, the clarinet has the lustre and the agility to accomplish it..