Fairy tales and hopeless love, folksongs and subversive jazz each spurred these four composers. Schumann and Brahms give us classical works with enigmatic sources, Kapustin and Vaughan Williams transmute popular music into high art.

SCHUMANN Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales) Op. 132 (1853)

KAPUSTIN Sonata no. 2 (1989)

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Six Studies in English Folksong (1926)

BRAHMS Piano Quartet in C minor Op.60 (1875)

David Griffiths, clarinet; Dimity Hall, violin; Julian Smiles, cello; with guest artist Christopher Moore, viola and Konstantin Shamray, piano

Classical music has always welcomed inspiration from other sources. For Robert Schumann, master of brilliantly evocative musical miniatures, that included folk tales and fairy stories. In this work for clarinet, viola and piano, though, he leaves the precise details to our imaginations.

When the young Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann in 1853 it changed all their lives. Inspired partly by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Brahms’s magisterial Piano Trio of 1872, with its mixture of emotional turmoil and bright serenity uses a musical motif based on Clara’s name, revealing his deep feelings for her.

Nikolai Kapustin and Ralph Vaughan Williams both found precious material in demotic music. Ukrainian-born Kapustin insisted that he was never a jazz composer, but his exciting Second Cello Sonata is suffused with blues rhythm and harmony. In his Six Studies, Vaughan Williams uses elements from recognisable folksongs to create new, atmospheric and abstract works for clarinet and piano.