Originally composed for clarinet, Swerts revised the quintet for alto saxophone and string quartet. It is a large chamber music piece of 30' with five movements, consisting of a Serenata, a Notturno, a light Scherzo, a melancholic Elegia and finally a Rondo.
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NOTE OF THE COMPOSER
That a composition can often be with me a reflection on an earlier “attempt” in the genre can also be said of the clarinet quintet. Prior to that, I had already composed a clarinet concerto, accompanied by strings, percussion, piano, and harp. In retrospect, I felt that the concerto could be even more lyrical, and that feeling was worked out in the quintet, especially as the choice of a La clarinet with its more rounded tone certainly played a role in this.
The procedure with longer works of starting first with the main part is present in both works: in both the string quartet and the clarinet quintet, I composed the finale first. From there it is much easier to maintain an overview towards which a composition of longer duration (ca. 30') should focus.
The chronological order of composition for the clarinet quintet was 5,4,3,1,2, for the string quartet 4,3,2,1b,1a.
The choice of character in the movements was a response to the substantial character of the finales: a slow movement that had to appear contemplative for a finale, in the string quartet very dark; in the Elegia in the clarinet quintet very esoteric; the lightness of the scherzi, with a deliberate quotation to J. Strauss in the clarinet quintet; the cinematic nature of the beginning in the clarinet quintet, with here and there the desolation, but sometimes the bitterness of a Shostakovitch, the infinite idea of the timeless bass pizzicato as a distortion of the Aria of Bach's third suite, notated in three in an unreal five-fourths measure; each composition in itself has that clear sense of unity. One movement cannot exist without the other, because there is a musical content connection.
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