Classical Music | Clarinet Music

Camille Saint-Saëns

Clarinet Sonata in E-flat Major, Op.167  Play

Daniel Broncano Clarinet
Andrea Swan Piano

Recorded on 04/30/2015, uploaded on 04/30/2015

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

I.     Allegretto
II.    Allegro animato
III.   Lento
IV.    Molto allegro

Although he remained a very active composer throughout his very long life, even the biggest fan of Camille Saint-Saëns will admit (as Saint-Saëns himself sometimes admitted) that by the 1920s—nearly 70 years after his rise to fame—he was something of a dry well. Still, some of the pieces he composed during the last years of his life have real value; perhaps it is hard to take a work like the choral piece Hail California (1915) seriously, but the three woodwind sonatas of 1921, one of which is the Sonata for clarinet and piano, Op. 167, are cherished by many performers. 

Saint-Saëns' Clarinet Sonata has four movements, and thus might be said to reach back past the Romantic sonata tradition, with its normal three-movement vessel, to the Classical tradition that Saint-Saëns loved so dearly.         Notes by the Steve Shaw Clarinet Trio