English Clarinet Music – Cigleris and Gray

There used to be a running joke among wind players that English composers wrote glorious clarinet music mainly by accident — a commission here, a wartime radio broadcast there, and suddenly the instrument had a repertoire nobody quite planned. This disc, generously stocked and handsomely played, makes the case that the accident was a happy one.

Peter Cigleris has a tone that doesn’t call attention to itself, which is a compliment of the highest order. No hooting in the chalumeau register, no glassy edge above the staff — just an even, songful column of sound that he bends and colors according to what each piece requires. Antony Gray partners him with the kind of unfussy sensitivity that never announces itself as accompaniment; he listens, he breathes with the phrase, and when the piano writing turns thick and orchestral — as it does constantly in William Alwyn — he doesn’t let it curdle into mush.

The Alwyn Sonata is the real test of the disc, and the performance passes with something to spare. Alwyn made his living scoring films — dozens of them, including The Fallen Idol and Odd Man Out — and you can hear that career leaking into the concert hall here, not as a weakness but as a kind of split personality. One page is chamber music of real intimacy; turn it and suddenly there’s a cinematic surge, huge and unembarrassed, as if a searchlight had swept across a drawing room. Cigleris and Gray don’t try to reconcile the two modes. They let the piece be schizophrenic, which is exactly right, and the closing pages — a genuine athletic scramble for both players — land with real heat.

John Carmichael gets more real estate here than almost anyone, and he earns it, mostly. Fêtes Champêtres wears its Poulenc on its sleeve, amiably, in four dance-movement panels — the Rigaudon’s central episode has an ache to it that Cigleris underlines without overdoing. The Aria and Finale is the more generous piece, both in ambition and in duration — nearly sixteen minutes, migrated from soprano saxophone, and you can hear the saxophone ancestry in the long-breathed, slightly sultry aria that opens it. The finale chatters on delightfully, cadenza and all. Does it overstay? A little. Even a persuasive advocate can’t quite disguise the fact that the material runs out before the clock does.

Clive Jenkins’ Five Pieces, dating from 2003 and dedicated to this performer, are the disc’s sleeper. Small essays, beautifully turned — the middle one drifts in on a breath of Fauré before wandering off somewhere entirely its own, and it’s not hard to hear why a Devon radio producer once seized on it as a signature tune. There’s a fugue tucked in among the five that’s genuinely witty rather than merely competent, and a closing waltz that spins itself dizzy without ever losing its manners.

Armstrong Gibbs — a name mostly kept alive now by song collectors and choral conductors — turns up with Three Pieces from the 1950s that are modest and completely charming, a march that could have scored a British Pathé newsreel and a central “Air” that sings like an English pastoral without ever tipping into cliché.

Then Ireland, to close. The Fantasy-Sonata has never wanted for good recordings — Thea King’s is a classic, Michael Collins made a fine case for it, and there’s the ghostly authority of Ireland’s own off-air reading with Frederick Thurston lurking behind all subsequent readings, a document Cigleris says he studied closely. You can hear it in small things: a rubato held a beat longer than fashion dictates, a hush before the final pages that feels earned rather than applied. Ireland wrote the piece in 1943, in the thick of the Blitz, and there’s an unsettled, almost superstitious quality running under its lyricism that this performance honors without melodrama.

Add it all up and you have an unusually satisfying survey — not a greatest-hits parade, but a genuine act of advocacy for a repertoire that still gets treated as a footnote to the French tradition. It shouldn’t be. Cigleris and Gray make the argument as persuasively as anyone has on disc. Recommended, and then some.