This album of clarinet quintets earned a Grammy Award nomination in 2023 for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and indeed, the performances by clarinetist
Anthony McGill
and the
Pacifica Quartet
are excellent, with clear textures and plenty of attention to the small programmatic details in all four of these works. However, the music itself is equally attractive. These are all contemporary pieces, but they revive the spirit of Romantic program music, and they rise to great heights of evocativeness. Actually, the level of specificity increases as the program proceeds through
Richard Danielpour
's
Four Angels
, based on the white terrorist murders of four girls in a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963; the
Quintet for clarinet and string quartet
of
James Lee III
, which refers to historical events and also to music by
Nathaniel Dett
and
William Dawson
; and the
High Sierra Sonata
Ben Shirley
, suggested by the mercurial weather of those mountains. Perhaps the most remarkable is
Valerie Coleman
Shotgun Houses
, with the title referring to the neighborhood in which
Muhammad Ali
grew up in west Louisville. The three movements are based in various episodes of his life, with the finale being an almost blow-by-blow depiction of
Ali
's fight against European champion
Zbigniew Pietrzykowski
in Rome in 1960. Everything on the album is beautifully detailed, fully accessible, and impressively performed. Another strong contemporary release from the
Cedille
label. ~ James Manheim