Once a pianist accompanying the likes of Bronislaw Huberman, Pablo de Sarasate and the Rose Quartet, Carl Fruhling is now little known. He wrote several...

Once a pianist accompanying the likes of Bronislaw Huberman, Pablo de Sarasate and the Rose Quartet, Carl Fruhling is now little known. He wrote several orchestral and chamber works, songs and salon pieces, but his best and most-recorded work is this Clarinet Trio, published in 1925 but cast in an idiom at least a generation before its composition. Born in 1868, and dying in reduced circumstances in 1937 after the Crash had left him in need, he was and remained a musical Romantic, whose language is perfectly fitted to this most Brahmsian of genres. From that earlier generation, Zemlinsky’s 1896 Trio surges with D minor expression and passion. He wrote it as a 25-year-old for a Viennese chamber-music competition. While the syntax and mood certainly echo Brahms, the chromatic harmony is the composer’s own: so too the intense songfulness which surges through the long opening movement and then a central, richly textured Andante. Even the brief finale is restless and filled with agitated, virtuoso writing for the piano in particular, while the clarinet sings a troubled descant line. Clarinet music by Zemlinsky’s contemporaries, Busoni and Hindemith, has been the subject of previous Brilliant Classics albums by the clarinettist Davide Bandieri. According to MusicWeb International, reviewing the Hindemith collection, he has ‘an attractive woody tone and fine phrasing and articulation.’ He is joined here by Joel and Marja-Liisa Marosi, husband and wife, who teach and perform in Switzerland.