John Denman (1933-2001) will be remembered with admiration and affection by the many who saw or heard him. Training at the Royal Military School of Music gave him an excellent grounding for a future career as orchestral player and soloist – solo clarinettist in the Life Guards, principal clarinettist of many London orchestras as well as the Tucson Symphony after his emigration to America in 1976. He was also a teacher of distinction, notably as Professor of Clarinet at Trinity College. His many recordings gave an indication of his interests and enthusiasms – that marvellous Lyrita Finzi Concerto, never so far transferred to CD, his promotion of the British chamber tradition for the British Music Label (Bax, Stanford, Ireland, York Bowen among others and all standing with the best recordings made of them), not forgetting his Mozart and Brahms with the Flesch Quartet, his Spohr and his jazz discs with Buddy de Franco.

Here he plays a bravura collection of pieces, which range widely and take in mild exotica, competition showpieces, baroque transcriptions, virtuosic variations, operatic paraphrases and some Kreislerian sweetmeats. It makes for a heady programme. He is partnered by pianist Paula Fan, whom he married in 1982 and who proves herself a most musical and alert accompanist and one who relishes the opportunities for characterisation. The recital begins with Alfred Pratt’s Souvenir d’Ispahan. Pratt was a conductor and repetiteur at Covent Garden and the notes are spot-on to acknowledge some Fauré influence because it opens, despite the exoticism of its title, not unlike his Elégie. Denman’s middle register is prominent here in this luxuriant but non-pictorial pseudo-oriental piece. Rabaud’s Solo de Concours was a Paris Conservatoire competition piece and whilst it’s couched in vernacular showpiece style it manages, as was the point, to examine registral competence, scalar passages, tonguing and trills; especially effective is the deliciously romanticised quasi-baroque slow middle section. It’s hard not to be moved by the simplicity of the Denman arranged Marcello; with his breath control and dynamic variance he shades this with delicacy and charm. One clarinettist pays admirable tribute to another in Louis Cahuzac’s Variations sur un Thème du Pays d’Oc; delightfully sprung with an episode in the minor that gives depth to the variations and adds consequent demands to the player. Meister’s operatic paraphrase, the Erwinn Fantasy, was arranged by another stellar clarinettist, Gustave Langenus, and is an operatic paraphrase of leaping and diving animation – up and down the scale and genuinely exciting.

Ronald Binge’s The Watermill – which may be better known as the music for the British television series ‘The Secret Garden’ – was originally written for oboe and strings. It’s true that the clarinet and piano duo can’t quite replicate the plangency and wistfulness of the original but it’s still a gorgeous tune. Crusell’s forceful and clever variations receive a suitably engaged performance, one full of vivacity and energetic virtuosity, fully worthy of Crusell’s frequently exceptional demands. The two Kreisler pieces feature Denman in particularly naughty mood; his rubati in Schön Rosmarin are certainly daring, allowing elasticities of line to bend and inflect the music; a violinist probably wouldn’t get away with it. And in Caprice Viennois he indulges in some register changing (for dramatic purposes) as well as lavishing affectionate phrasing on the evergreen. Denman and Fan are as adept in the ballet warm-up piece The Fantasie-Ballet of Mazellier as they are in the romantic glow of Bozza’s little Aria or in the grandly imposing Lamento and subsequent sprightly Tarantelle of Gabriel Grovlez, a Fauré student who was involved in the Monteverdi revival in France.

Plenty of vivacious enthusiasm on display here; the sound is excellent and the typos on the back of the jewel case aren’t replicated in the booklet notes. No recording dates but an otherwise charming and delightful disc.

Jonathan Woolf

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