Brahms & Mozart

For the masterful clarinetist David Shifrin, Mozart’s 1789 Clarinet Quintet sets “a standard that has never been surpassed for great music for the clarinet.” In this edition of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival radio series, David Shifrin joins forces with the Escher String Quartet. Escher cellist Brook Speltz tells us, “I have no problem being hyperbolic about the Mozart Clarinet Quintet, and I would extend that to David Shifrin, too. I don’t think there’s an artist out there who could touch that piece the way he does, and for us, it was one of the honors of a lifetime to play that piece with that man.” The hour begins as violinist Cho-Liang Lin and pianist Jon Kimura Parker play the Sonata in A Major, a good-natured, mature work created by Johannes Brahms, in 1886, at the zenith of his creative powers.