Interview with Jürg Frey by Marat Ingeldeev

First off, could you tell us about Clarinet Quintet? I believe it's a relatively recent piece. How did it come about? I also love that the title is purely descriptive, keeping the work open rather than framing it in advance.

It all began with a commission from Simon Reynell, though this is only superficially a mere external detail. It is not the first time I have received a commission from him, and each time he has sparked something that has led me to new horizons. And so it was this time too: perhaps Simon spotted or sensed a gap in my catalogue of works, or perhaps he simply wanted to hear a piece by me for this instrumentation; whatever the case, it came at exactly the right time, and his idea and my work were able to form a perfect symbiosis.That said, the commission gave me a great deal of freedom: it simply called for 'something for clarinet and strings'. I began with clarinet and string trio; clarinet and string quintet, or even an ensemble of six strings with clarinet were also ideas on my desk. I initially avoided the clarinet and string quartet line-up, partly because of the well-known pieces for these instruments by Mozart, Brahms or Feldman, all of which I have played frequently.

But then I realised that the quintet best matched my vision of depth and breadth in the piece-and I decided to take up the challenge.

The music is teeming with moments of wonder: dense clouds of harmony that seem to strain towards release or shift colour without warning, passages of clarity giving way to brooding haziness, intimate confessional duets, unexpected rests, lonely pizzicato. The finale alone is worth the journey-I'll spare the reader any spoilers. What strikes me most is a sense of stasis that retroactively reveals itself as movement, which feels very lifelike. How did you piece the form together?

I can say a few words about the term 'lifelike', because your comment matches my own feeling. Though I must say straight away that I never had any plan to write a 'lifelike' composition. Thinking that way would hinder my work, even make it impossible; plans of that sort are like evil spirits that must be driven away, as they seek to destroy the piece.

But Clarinet Quintet isn't without a plan either, not at all. It's a web of associations, constructions, sketches, decisions, durations, marvelling at ideas, rejecting efficiency, desires, memories-if there is a plan, then the creation of the piece and the plan are one and the same. That means my aim is to develop a feel for the piece whilst working, to get a sense of what's possible. And that's probably how this 'lifelike' quality emerges.For a while, the piece was also titled Ce lent rythme humain (This slow human rhythm), a short phrase I discovered in a text by Gustave Roud whilst working on it. In the end, it remained Clarinet Quintet, and that's just as well.

I rarely ask questions like this, but I'm curious about the harmony and its shifts in colour. How did you devise them and what's your approach to harmony more generally?

I'm not sure whether I really think in terms of the category of 'harmony', or at most only marginally, as an afterthought. The category of 'sound' as an abstract phenomenon is just as important. I work somewhere on the threshold, or in no-man's-land between harmony on the one hand, and sound and colour on the other.These are questions of the presence and absence of harmony, and related to this is also what you mentioned earlier, 'a sense of stasis that retroactively reveals itself as movement'. I want to bring a clear architecture and, at the same time, an organic form into balance. Harmony and colour stand in a subtle relationship to one another: allowing things to move forward, but also allowing them to stand still. Actually, it's mostly stillness. It's simply time passing, but in the end you've arrived at a different place.

Do you have a compositional routine, and how strictly do you keep to it? What tends to serve as the entry point into a new piece? Do you compose in short bursts or longer spans?

There is already a consistent compositional process that I stick to. The paradox, perhaps, is that this routine often consists of 'hanging around and not doing much'. And that's why I can never really say what the entry point into a new piece is. It's more a case of it looming on the horizon, and then I try to stick with it. A lot of material is produced that just lies around in my sketchbooks, and through composition I try to transform it into something meaningful. Or as William Carlos Williams puts it: 'The same thing exists, but in a different condition when energized by imagination'.

Review by Dominic Hartley at Music Web International

For most of his career, Jürg Frey has been a clarinettist as well as a composer. Over fifty years he played across Europe and taught in Swiss schools, carrying the instrument's character in both body and mind. As Philip Thomas memorably put it, to understand Frey's music 'is to know that underlying each event, each phrase, each rest, each relationship, is the beating heart of a performing musician.' Around 2022, illness forced Frey to stop playing. He has spoken of this without regret, noting that while someone else can always pick up a clarinet, nobody else can write his music. The Clarinet Quintet, composed between 2023 and 2025, is the first major work for his own instrument that he has completed since that withdrawal. Whether it amounts to a farewell, a distillation of his performing experience, or simply the next piece he needed to write is a question best left open. What matters is the music itself.

And the music is quietly extraordinary. Over fifty-four minutes, five instruments pursue a conversation of such gentle purpose and unforced warmth that the effect is less like listening to a performance than overhearing one. The clarinet is not a soloist here. It is an equal participant, woven into the string texture, breathing with it. Frey knows exactly how to place a clarinet inside a quartet of strings so that it belongs there completely. The result is a work of deep, unshowy beauty.

When I reviewed Frey's Je laisse à la nuit son poids d'ombre earlier this year I was struck by his ability to sustain a 52-minute span with an apparent effortlessness that disguised considerable craft. That piece deployed a large and colourful ensemble: strings, brass, woodwind, percussion, analogue synthesiser, two soprano voices. The Clarinet Quintet could hardly be more different in its means. Five acoustic instruments. No voices, no electronics, no percussion. The most familiar chamber instrumentation imaginable, the same combination that Mozart and Brahms chose. Where Je laisse achieved its atmosphere through timbral variety, the Quintet works with concentration: a narrow palette demanding close attention.

Frey has written about the piece in terms worth hearing directly. He describes the listener encountering a 'paradoxical situation: it is music that seems to stand still, yet continues to move forward, and after 50 minutes we arrive at a place we could not have imagined at the beginning.' This is an accurate account of how the Quintet feels. The harmonic world is tonal. The opening minutes possess a settled, sympathetic territory that seems to promise very little drama. And yet, listened to across its full span, the piece covers a remarkable amount of ground. The harmonies shift so gradually that the ear cannot quite locate the moment of change, but by the final pages the music has arrived somewhere altogether different from where it began.

The large-scale shape is worth describing. The first half builds slowly from spare, quiet phrases towards the most assertive passage in the entire work, around the ten-minute mark. From there it subsides, the textures thinning, the dynamic level dropping, until it reaches a passage of extraordinary delicacy around twenty-three minutes in. This is not silence, exactly, but something very close: a repeated, faint, single-instrument pizzicato. From this threshold the second half emerges with a different character. It is fuller, more sustained, the instruments more continuously present. The music ends with a long, unhurried withdrawal.

The sound world is distinctive. The strings play almost entirely in their middle and lower registers. The clarinet sits in its warmest range for much of the first half, rising higher and with more mobility thereafter. The overall effect is intimate and blended, without rhetoric or virtuoso display. The writing has an apparent simplicity: open strings, gentle dialogues between individual instruments, and passages where the clarinet drops out entirely and the strings converse alone. The clarinet's subsequent return has a particular quality of arrival, each time slightly changed.

The tonal language avoids strong directional harmony, inhabiting a space that is settled without being static or predictable. The ear can rest inside each sound rather than being pushed forward to the next. In the second half there is an enrichment, the harmonic language broadening, admitting more colour. And the rhythmic profile shifts too. The strings move to shorter, more animated figures. The clarinet begins to play what sounds like fragments of melody, phrases that hint at a song we are never quite given in full. It is deeply affecting, partly because of how much restraint has preceded it.

What comparison helps here? The endorsements that accompany the album invoke Brahms and Schubert, and I understand why. But listening repeatedly I found myself drawn to an older sound-world. The strings, in their colour and the intervals they favour, reminded me at times of a viol consort. The clarinet became a complementary voice, not unlike a singer. Think of a Dowland song at its most tender and bittersweet. I don't want to push the analogy too far, but there is something in the pace of the writing, the sense of each note being placed with care, and the melancholy that never quite declares itself, that made the connection feel real.

This is music for repeated listening, not because it is difficult to grasp but because each listening seems to open another layer. A phrase that seemed incidental on first hearing turns out to carry weight. A harmonic shift that passed unnoticed reveals itself as the pivot of an entire passage. And Apartment House are the ideal performers. Every detail of Frey's quiet, apparently spontaneous conversation is rendered with care and naturalness. Heather Roche deserves particular praise. Her clarinet playing is beautifully integrated, sensitive to the strings around her, never imposing, always present. The recorded sound, captured by Simon Reynell at City University London, is superb. The balance places the listener close to the ensemble without any sense of clinical proximity.

This is a very fine addition to Another Timbre's substantial Frey discography. I should note that I've been working from an advance copy without supplementary material. Another Timbre plan to publish an interview with Frey on their website in time for the CD release, and it will be worth seeking out. But the music truly speaks for itself with an eloquence that needs no commentary.