“This disc is a most welcome addition to the catalogue of recordings of John Ireland’s chamber music… in that its principal focus is the range of pieces that the composer wrote for clarinet, played here with ravishing lyricism and conviction by Robert Plane, who has surely now fully occupied the shoes of the late Thea King in his championship of British clarinet music.”
Plane’s kinship with this music is clear from the more Brahmsian hues of the Sextet (1898), the limpid lyricism of The Holy Boy arrangement (1913), to the extrovert passion of the Fantasy Sonata for Clarinet (1943) where he is arguably at his most impressive.
… Plane, Alice Neary and Sophia Rahman give a sensitive reading [of the Clarinet Trio] of a style that is much more distinctly “Irelandesque” in its assimilation of French sonorities and sound-moments, Plane’s hushed playing being especially enthralling.
