RIES: Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 29 and 169 / Clarinet Trio, Op.

“He ... wrote much chamber work and six symphonies. All these works, however, are dead. Beethoven once said of his compositions, ‘he imitates me too much.’ He caught the style and the phrases, but he could not catch the immortality of his master’s work. One work of his will live – the admirable Biographical Notices of Ludwig van Beethoven, which he published in conjunction with Dr. Wegeler (Coblenz, 1838)”. So writes A.W. Thayer in the 1940 edition of Grove. “Beethoven is reported to have made the most damaging remark about him (‘he imitates me too much’), which, though probably apocryphal, is only partly fair”. So writes Cecil Hill in the New Grove of 1980. Hill – somewhat grudgingly and partially – acquits Ries of the charge of being merely a slavishly derivative imitator of Beethoven or, in the terms in which Thayer puts it, of being little more than a plagiarist. The more I hear of the music of Ries, the more I feel that it deserves better even than Hill’s half-hearted acceptan