Clarinet Trio in A minor Op.40 (c 1905)

Mässig schnell

Anmutig bewegt

Andante

Allegro vivace

Little known though he is, Carl Frühling would be even less known if the British cellist Steven Isserlis hadn’t discovered him and made efforts to make his music – what little he has been able to find – more widely heard. “A Viennese Jew,” Isserlis says, “he had a reputation as a chamber-music pianist and played with Sarasate, Hubermann, Leo Slezak, but had no success at all as a composer.” Even so, it is clear from the Clarinet Trio in A minor, the one work which has found its way into the present-day repertoire, that he was a composer of considerable accomplishment with an attractive melodic personality and a thorough understanding of chamber-music textures.

The Mässig schnell (moderately quick) first movement betrays a distinct allegiance to Brahms, whose Clarinet Trio he must have known, but the thematic material is entirely Frühling’s own and its development is both resourceful and poetic. It was a delghtful idea to convert the opening melody of the first movement into a waltz in the second movement, where it is offset by a Ländler-like second theme and a more animated and colourfully scored middle section. While Brahms could well have done something like that, the thoughtful and very much more individual slow movement is well away from his world. The Andante derives from Frühling’s Jewish background, or so it seems from the opening cello cantillation and a extended episode of exotic chromaticism later on. The abundantly tuneful closing Allegro vivace, on the other hand, makes a cheerful return to the Viennese mainstream with a hint of the Hungarian idiom Brahms liked so much and a brief display of classical learning in a fugato towards the end.