Cutting in, from time to time, is an achingly sentimental tune simply surging with a breast-heaving need to share.

Bachs fugue subject looks in again about halfway through to see how everyone is getting on, and after getting dragged into the party, nally gets the last word.

Thinly scored and sparse in texture, this collection features frequent changes of time signature that evoke the improvised quality of village dance music.

The suite is arranged in an alternating pattern of fast and slow movements.

The concluding Allegro molto moves upbeat again, adding a note of merry taunting with its obsessive repetitions in the clarinet that seem to say to the piano: Im in E at and youre not.

Its balanced sectional contrasts and ingenious construction around the opening motif announced by the clarinet, developed thorough a panoply of moods from dreamy reverie to scherzando friskiness, reveal how Debussys burgeoning interest in structure was replacing the pictorialism of his earlier works.

At base atonal, and eventually coalescing around the abstract compositional procedures of the 12-tone system, its proponents existed on a continuum of extremes, from the grandiose, hair-pulling, dental-procedure expressionism of Schoenberg to the almost-Canadian-level politeness of musical gesture in the silk-spun miniatures of Anton Webern.

Of the three, Alban Berg was the composer who ranged most freely among the options presented by the new movement, even venturing back, at times, into a 19th-century sense of tonality.

What these pieces lack in shower-humming tunefulness they amply make up for in atmosphere, and an almost indenable Viennese charm.

As the pace picks up, the pianos chugging rhythmic ostinato give us the rst clues that West Side Story is only a decade away.

While the movements formal outlines are quite loose, and development kept to a minimum, this movements melodic lines evoke a kind of cool yearning that presages the composers urbane Broadway creations of the 1950s.

With the Great Masters bust looking impassively down on him from the wall of his Vienna apartment, feeling behind him the great footsteps of a giant jiggling every teacup on the shelf, Brahms was over forty before he published his first symphony and first string quartet, the two genres that his towering predecessor had dominated.

Both his Symphony No.

C minor, making them tonal step-siblings to the Pathtique and Op.

Fifth Symphony.

This key, however, had more than mere commemorative value for the score of Brahms first string quartet.

C-natural is also the lowest pitch on the cello, allowing the composer ample space for expressive depth in his string writing.

It opens with an anxious orchestral tremolando, recalling similar effects in the C minor quartet from Beethovens Op.

Pathtique.

Over top races an urgent rising figure that culminates in a downward leap of a diminished 7th, the same interval that opens the Op.

After a bit of metrical vertigo induced by the cross-grouping of rhythmic and harmonic patterns, we are stopped short by two sharp exclamation point chords.

In a mere seven breathless measures, Brahms takes us from a furtive piano to a defiant forte, from a textural spacing of a single octave to a gaping expanse of four and a halffrom the low C on the cello to a high-high A flat in the first violinand from a pulse- quickening pace to an abrupt crash-test halt.

Following an emotional climax in cascading stretto, the exposition closes with graceful arabesques from the first violin to spread soothing melodic oil over the troubled textural waters.

The recapitulation is remarkable for its coda, an intense accelerando of fz accents that pulls back in its final bars to end with a written out ritardando in the major mode.

The Romanze is a Mendelssohnian voyage into the domestic coziness.

This is music to curl up with in front of a fire, with a cat in your lap.

The close spacing of the string writing and restrained dynamic range add to the feeling of intimacy in this movement, which alternates between a warmly expressive opening theme, brocaded with melodic variation at its second occurrence, and a slightly more heart-fluttering B-section featuring pleading groups of sigh motives.

While nominally in F minor, it coyly refuses to either confirm or deny the fact for most of its duration.

Bernstein Clarinet Sonata Program Notes