Repertoire hole plugged
The clarinet sonata by Adolf Busch, composed in 1939, has finally appeared in print.
There is no shortage of good clarinet sonatas - so it is all the more pleasing that the clarinet sonata by Adolf Busch (1891-1952), which has been known since 1991 in the CD recording by Thomas Friedli and Ulrich Koella, has finally appeared in print. Last year, the Karlsruhe clarinettist Bettina Beigelbeck recorded the sonata and has now published it with Breitkopf. The work was composed in 1939 and is dedicated to the English clarinettist Reginald Kell (1906-1981). The Swiss composer Adolf Busch was still living in Riehen near Basel at the time, but had to emigrate to America in November 1939, where he immediately revised the sonata. Stylistically, it continues the line from Brahms via Reger, but is far more accessible than Reger's clarinet works. In three different movements, Busch covers an entire panorama of music history, from Bach to his own time. Both parts are technically demanding; when composing the piano part, Busch probably had a pianist of the caliber of his son-in-law Rudolf Serkin (1903-1991) in mind.
The edition fulfills all the requirements of a modern edition. On the one hand, this means that the score and clarinet part are crammed onto 46 and 8 pages respectively in large A4 format, which means deciphering rather than fluent reading, and on the other hand that the differentiated use of accidentals in Busch's original - especially in music with such rapidly changing keys - has been sacrificed to the rigid scheme of "always applies to the length of a bar".
The days when "obvious errors and inaccuracies are tacitly corrected" are actually over. Changes are always based on a prior understanding on the part of the editors, which they have to account for: Where does the ges in bar 17 of the third movement, why was the leading note in bar 70 eliminated, etc.? Nevertheless, this edition is a long overdue remedy to a serious gap in the repertoire.
Adolf Busch, Sonata for clarinet and piano in A major op. 54, edited by Bettina Beigelbeck, EB 8899, € 22.90, Edition Breitkopf, Wiesbaden 2016
