Melbourne and Socrates in Chichester

Henry Melbourne, clarinet, and Ben Socrates, piano, Chicherster Cathedral, Sept 26th

The clarinet wouldn't be my favourite instrument, it's fair to say. Once we've had the Mozart and Stranger on the Shore, all that's left for it are the tootling emellishments in trad jazz. So it's a credit to Henry Melbourne that he made today's Chichester concert a worthwhile one with some music away from the mainstream of populat taste.
Poulenc, however, does rate quite highly among C20th composers, the lyricism and peace afforded by passages in the Sonata being a further reason to admire him. Written in 1962, athe year before his death, we were warned that it was full of grief and other such dark thoughts but it was lively enough in its acrobatics and high energy ending and it would need to be grrimmer than that to be too dark for me.
Two songs by Rachmanninov gave Henry the opportunity to bring out his bass clarinet and I'll retain my pose of clarinet philistinism by wondering why Adolphe felt the need to invent the saxophone when there was already such a thing as that. She is as beautiful as the day (in Ben's translation) was a somnolent beauty and the highlight of the set, Rachmanninov being a bit of a dab hand at the lush and gorgeous.
Herbert Howells, the Gloucestershire man, always reinforces m preconceived ideas of him as the A.E. Housman of music, redolent of lost soldierrs and loss of faith, or at least the struggle to retain faith.  His Clarinet Sonata might have benefitted from me not knowing who had written it. Ben put in some fine work as accompanist and I'd like the opportunity to see him in the main role as pianist one day, which I might get as he returns to Chichester from time to time.
Fine, convoluted expressions of anxiety, sorrow and fracturing probably do transmit the artist's state of mind, if I'm reading it correctly, but I'm on safer ground with the less idiosyncratic baroque.
But top marks to Henry and Ben for their adventurous programme. It would do us no good at all to listen to Brandenburg Concertos all day long.
I would have been back down to Portsmouth Cathedral on Thursday for some restorative baroque, and wish I was, but I saw the local poetry Master of Ceremonies on my way out of the cathedral who kindly invited me to present myself and poems in Havant for a poetry day event so perhaps I ought to be doing that. Kind of him to ask.