As is evident from both the booklet notes and their playing, Jörg Widmann and András Schiff share a love of late Brahms. To paraphrase Othello, perhaps they love him just a little too well, for their performances of the two clarinet sonatas on this new ECM disc are a little too gentle, a little too deferential to old Johannes.

Widmann and Schiff have performed these sonatas together many times and there’s the comfortable feel of pipe and slippers about their interpretations. This suits the outer movements of the E flat Second Sonata very well, amabile in spirit, mellow in mood. Phrases are caressed tenderly, wrapped in a warm, nostalgic haze, in no particular hurry to reach their destination. But the Allegro appassionato lacks the necessary Hungarian impetuosity – ironic given Schiff was born in Budapest – the pianist’s foot too often favouring the brake in this most ‘Magyar’ of movements. Widmann’s slimline tone matches Schiff’s coolness, his technical control faultless.

Their emotional reticence is more of a problem in the F minor First Sonata, where I often felt the players holding back where more overt expression is called for. There’s hesitancy on Schiff’s part at bar 168 or 1'30" in the first movement, so that the resulting passage feels like the musical equivalent of treading on eggshells, particularly when heard alongside the likes of Michael Collins or Robert Oberaigner, my modern-instrument choices in a recent Gramophone Collection (5/20). The inner movements have much wistful beauty, the Allegretto grazioso nicely poised, but Schiff never gets close to the Vivace marking for the finale.

Between the two sonatas come five piano Intermezzi – not Brahms’s but Widmann’s own, composed for Schiff in 2010 and drawing on the Brahmsian atmosphere of the late piano pieces. There’s a fragile, fragmented quality at play here, some of the pieces being very brief. Others employ the parallel thirds and sixths that frequently appear in the late miniatures that Brahms termed the ‘lullabies of my sorrows’ (the fourth is even entitled ‘Wiegenlied’). At 12 minutes long, the third Intermezzo is by far the weightiest of the five, and contains dark rumbles peppered with brief snatches of Brahms including, I believe, the First Piano Concerto. Schiff gives polished performances; I imagine they work very well in recital too.