This release spans 43 years of Clementi’s output, although 1956’s Studi, its asperities influenced but not dictated by Darmstadt serialism, feels isolated musically and conceptually from the remainder.
Clementi once commented that if the Western classical tradition were indeed dying, it at least deserved a decent burial. Not that his music is lachrymose or nostalgic: it looks to the past obliquely; as a world where we may have done things differently, if only we could remember. You sense this genial malaise in Impromptu, where a clarinet quintet quietly and respectfully recalls that it once gave rise to works by Mozart and Brahms, and again in ... im Himmelreich, where a wind-based ensemble seems about to reveal its antecedents, only to withdraw back into its harmonious sound world.
Don’t be taken in by this. Clementi is no apologist: his music, intricate and ironic, is always of the present. In Duetto listen to the alto flute and clarinet conjure up a trumpet as their lines lovingly interconnect; or the way that Madrigale’s two pianos and percussion create a sound-machine that teasingly winds itself down. Only the relatively lengthy Due Canoni disappoints: Clementi shares Morton Feldman’s love of sound, but not quite his ability to draw profundity from restricted material.
This remains a well-planned and beautifully executed introduction to a composer whose music is required listening, not least for what it tells us about the much-debased act of listening.'