Appendix 2 - A review of the first London performance,The Times,29 March 1892

Summary

On 28 March 1892 at one of the ‘Popular Concerts’ at St James's Hall, Richard Mühlfeld introduced Brahms's Clarinet Quintet to London, with Joseph Joachim, Louis Ries, Ludwig Straus and Alfredo Piatti. The audience included Grove, Parry and Stanford. On that occasion Joachim, ‘apparently to counterbalance the extreme novelty of the opening piece’, gave as his solos the Barcarolle and Scherzo by Spohr, with ‘his own pretty Romance in B flat’ as an encore. The final concerted number was Mozart's Trio in B flat, with pianist Miss Agnes Zimmermann, who also played Schumann's G minor Sonata. Mile Gherlsen, a pupil of Georg Henschel, sang Mozart's ‘Deh vieni non tardar’ and Brahms's ‘Feldeinsamkeit’ and ‘Vergebliches Ständchen’ (the last in a French translation); the critic observed that ‘her agreeable voice and good method have been more favourably exhibited on former occasions’.

The chief event of the present musical season took place last night in the production, in circumstances the most favourable that can be imagined, of the quintet for clarinet and strings lately written by Brahms. In the case of a work of such incontestable genius it is useless to withhold expressions of admiration until after a second hearing; the form in which it is written is, besides, so clear that its general scope and drift need hardly overtax the powers of the merest tyro to appreciate. The quality which first strikes the hearer is that of homogeneity.