<iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-K3L4M3" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">

Music

Bored by Brahms

19 November 2015

3:00 PM

19 November 2015

3:00 PM

Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal melancholy over the whole piece: the evanescent sweet-sadness of autumn, beautiful in its dying’.

This being late autumn, I listened to the quintet on Sunday to see if its ‘distillation of Brahmsian yearning’ still made an overwhelming impression on me.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Easter flash sale:
10 issues for $1

Subscribe this Easter and get the next 10 issues of the magazine, plus website and app access, all for just $1.

  • Weekly delivery of the magazine
  • Unlimited access to spectator.com.au and app
  • Spectator Australia podcasts and newsletters
  • Full access to spectator.co.uk
Or

Unlock 3 articles a month

REGISTER


Comments

Easter flash sale: 10 issues for $1

Join the conversation with other Spectator Australia readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Close