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The Concerto lacks joy (especially in the orchestra) as well as light and shade. It's all a bit bland and monochromatic, though perfectly well played. The recording is too close to permit much light and shade either, - it's a quite nice but very narrow sound(stage) and the clarinet is recorded too closely for Martin Frost's already (slightly) thick and watery tone to seem more lustrous.
Matters seem to improve for the Quintet. The excellent Vertavo quartet (I saw their win at the Melbourne Chamber Competition and can tell you that, apart from producing nice sounds, this all-female quartet boasts two drop-dead gorgeous members - lucky Martin Frost)) provides more than capable support to Frost but the sound is best when they play just as a quartet. Again, the closeness of the recording of the clarinet means that true chamber interplay is restricted. It also means that, quite apart from a lot of breathing and key noises, there's sometimes a bit of distortion (metallic sounding and otherwise) around the clarinet, particularly on re-entries.
The surround channels are almost irrelevant given the narrowness of the sound stage, but they do provide a lift into the air for the instruments compared to the two-channel layer.
For a recording of these two works together you probably won't do better than the lovely Hyperion disc with Thea King, the Gabrielli's and the ECO. The sound there, whilst redbook stereo, is warm as well as clear, and adds to performances full of light and shade. Given that that recording won't appear on an SACD, I'd wait a while yet for something which is better than just competent. If it's the quintet only you want on SACD, I can cheerfully recommend the marvellous Pentatone recording, where it's coupled with Schubert's Trout.
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