Claves Record

Reto Bieri: in communion with Schubert and the clarinet

He is one of the most promising clarinetists of his generation. Born into a Swiss family of folk musicians in Zug in 1975, he studied with François Benda at the Academy of Music in Basel and then with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. But it was the chamber music courses in Basel with composer György Kurtág and pianist Krystian Zimerman that truly left a mark on him. Reto Bieri does not like crowds and does not believe in mass movements: he feels genuinely alive in the intimacy of a dialogue. And he shares a particularly close bond with Schubert, a serendipitous communion. “I know that millions of people have heard his music before me, but I nonetheless have the feeling of being the only one to know certain details about him, certain facets of his musical personality.” Originally written for violin and piano, the three sonatas recorded on his debut album for Claves are accompanied by a recording of ten German Dances (in his own transcriptions) and the celebrated “Ständchen” from Schubert’s Schwanengesang. He is joined in this magnificent laudation of human fragility by a poet on the piano: Gérard Wyss.