Clarinetist Michael Collins and the Escher Quartet present one of the masterpieces of the clarinet chamber repertoire: Johannes Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet. Composed at the twilight of his career, Brahms’s quintet radiates aching nostalgia and a poignant sense of lost love, ultimately settling into a melancholy serenity. Modeled on those by Mozart and Brahms, Max Reger’s Clarinet Quintet complements the Brahms on this album. “Throughout this deeply elegiac work we feel the resignation of one who has turned away from the hustle and bustle of the world and abandons himself to a transfigured peace.” Those are the words of a German critic reviewing the first performance, not of Brahms’s Quintet but of the one by Reger in 1917. It was his final composition before his untimely death.