Brahms and Weber Duo Works – Jack Brymer

Jack Brymer died in 2003, largely retired since the late 1990s. The tributes at the time dwelled on the obvious things: the Mozart with the London Wind Soloists, the years in the LSO and BBC Symphony, the unmistakable sound, honeyed but never sticky. What got lost was how good a chamber musician he was. This Nimbus reissue, drawn from two album dates two decades apart, goes some way toward correcting that.

The Brahms F minor Sonata, op. 120 no. 1, and Weber’s Grand duo concertant were taped in 1973 at Nimbus’s old Birmingham facility and had a brief LP life in 1979 before vanishing. The balance is peculiar: Brymer close and forward, pianist David Lloyd pushed back as if playing from an adjoining room. You stop noticing after a minute or so. The clarinet tone is so faithfully caught that you forgive the engineers almost anything: rounded, never edgy even at the top of the chalumeau break, with a vibrato so discreet it registers more as warmth than as effect.

In the Brahms, Brymer breathes the opening phrase out. He resists every temptation to underline. The finale, a rondo that plenty of clarinetists turn into a sprint, he takes with unhurried poise. Some will find it too settled, wanting more bite, more autumnal desperation. I didn’t miss it. Brahms wrote these sonatas as an old man mourning his own vitality, dazzled by Richard Mühlfeld’s playing, and there is a case for hearing the music from the far side of that regret.

The Weber is showy, faintly absurd in its demands, and Brymer and Lloyd clearly relish it. The first movement’s con fuoco marking doesn’t panic them into scrambling; the rhythm has a coiled elasticity that lets the fireworks land cleanly. The slow movement sings, genuinely sings, with the kind of vocal shaping you’d want from a Schubert lied. The finale is pure comic timing. Sly hesitations, mock-serious asides.

The bulk of the second disc comes from sessions at Wyastone Leys in April 1992. Nimbus prepared edited tapes, then shelved them, and neither performer ever received a copy. Nearly two decades separate the two recording dates, and you can hear it: the tone has thinned very slightly at the edges, there’s a shade less bloom on sustained notes. The musicianship, if anything, has deepened. Wyastone’s hall acoustic is more sympathetic to ensemble than Birmingham’s studio was, if a touch swimmy (climaxes can blur if you’re listening on anything less than a decent system), but it suits repertoire that trades intimacy for a slightly more public voice.

Against Brymer’s blend of elegance and unforced lyricism, Gervase de Peyer sounds more overtly virtuosic, sometimes at expressive cost. Karl Leister’s Brahms digs deeper into the music’s melancholy undertow but sacrifices the silvery ease Brymer commands so naturally. It’s a question of which kind of company you want to keep for forty minutes.

David Lloyd deserves better billing than history has given him. His contribution throughout is alert and never just accompaniment, and the two men clearly trusted each other completely, the trust of decades of shared platforms. That trust is what this release documents, more than any single interpretive insight. Nimbus’s Rediscovered Recordings series has done this kind of quiet rescue work before, but rarely with a player this underrepresented on disc.

Recommended to anyone who has not yet heard the clarinet as a singer’s instrument in wooden disguise.