During the last period of his life, Morton Feldman wrote music that you have to listen to under a microscope. It's not because the pieces are short. On the contrary: the American Feldman is the composer of enormous durations. His Second String Quartet, with a duration of five and a half hours, became (in)famous. His good friend John Cage once said he found that duration a-social towards the audience. Within Feldman's time spans, his sound world is one of the small gestures. The composer repeats, varies, colours with microtones, preferably soft and with little material. After ten minutes or so, you don't listen to the notes anymore, but to the calm pacing and the soft skin of the music. 'Clarinet and String Quartet' (1983) is a beautiful example of Feldman's late style. The endless colour gradations of the string quartet, but most of all in the clarinet are incredibly well played by Roger Heaton. No easy task: he has to perform high and soft, without audible attacks and microtonal. After [compared to] Feldman's quintet, the one of Christopher Fox seems short and expressive with its thirteen minute length, although these would by the last categories you would normally use to describe his music. Fox is one of England's most important composers. He evokes whole worlds with little material. As in the repetitive, subtle 'Clarinet Quintet', a fragile landscape of microtones.
Anthony Fiumara

MUSICWEB:
I’m not sure whether these recordings have been released before but they were made in September 1999 and are now released by Metier with a comprehensive sleeve-note by Christopher Fox, who, together with Feldman taught in Darmstadt between 1984 and 1986. Feldman’s work, very specifically titled Clarinet and String Quartet preceded the two composers’ meeting by a year and was dedicated to Alan Hacker, who premiered it with the Brodsky Quartet that year in Newcastle. It’s a work lasting some three-quarters of an hour and therefore not the same kind of animal as his more extended chamber works. It’s also a late work and focuses closely on clusters and repetitions of intense concentration. The specificity of the writing is reflected in the ever-changing patterns Feldman unfolds, ones that reappear with subtle rhythmic changes. Sometimes there are gaps in the texture and then the music starts up again with renewed life; sometimes, too, the clarinet takes on a more yearning, personalised tone. The effect is one of seamless-sounding change and an inevitability of utterance.

Fox’s Clarinet Quintet dates from almost a decade later. He too uses repetitions and patterns, occasionally slowing down for more refractive material. The clarinet seems to have life both inside and outside the quintet medium; it takes hold of opportunities for solo display whilst also weaving into the unfolding textures of the quartet. Fox ensures there are lots of timbral contrasts and colour, some pizzicati too, though the music remains essentially "quiet." There is a falling motif for the string quartet which Fox revisits in different guises; real concentration of utterance here in its thirteen minute span but there is also a real sense of space and vista. As it progresses, unlike the Feldman, we find a growing stripping down to the essentials.

Some might conjecture that these two works share a rather forbidding austerity but that’s actually not the case. Patterns, reflections, repetitions, colour and subtlety are in attendance in both cases, whether it’s the more extensive hypnosis of Feldman or the more active localised dramas of Fox.
Jonathan Woolf

THE SUNDAY TIMES:
This inspiringly abstract disc juxtaposes two items for clarinet and string quartet, both of which are essentially reflections on the medium, the sonority itself. Feldman’s Clarinet and String Quartet (1983) is a late work and a haunting one, an unbroken 43-minute span across which eloquent, subdued yet somehow incisive ideas unfold in phases with an autumnal serenity that is positively Brahmsian. The 13-minute movement of Fox’s Clarinet Quintet is comparably repetitive but differently flavoured (lots of microtonal tunings) and far more extrovert. Heaton plays beautifully, as does the quartet specially formed by Mieko Kanno, Davide Rossi, Bridget Carey and Sophie Harris. ×××
Paul Driver

THE GUARDIAN:
By the standards of late Feldman, the proportions of Clarinet and String Quartet (1983) are modest - its single movement lasts just over 40 minutes in this nicely judged performance. It is a wonderful showcase of the techniques that Feldman explored towards the end of his life; the music seems determined to exhaust the possibilities of the smallest possible collection of pitches, but its gradations of rhythm and colour become endlessly fascinating. Like that work, Christopher Fox's 1992 Clarinet Quintet takes nothing for granted either, moving through a world of microtones, barely perceptible pulsings and intensely fragile textures in a way that confers enormous significance on the smallest nuance. ×××
Andrew Clements