We had the fortunate opportunity to be introduced to Don Oehler, clarinetist and professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Don is the foremost expert on clarinet quintets and he recently catalogued over 600 works that he personally collected throughout his career as a clarinet soloist, chamber musician, and professor. Matthew met up with Don in London last month to chat with him about his research, findings, and the state of the clarinet quintet genre.

It was a neat experience to learn that there’s someone else out there promoting the genre who also believes in its significance. We talked about how Don discovered much of the repertoire, contacts he made in his research, and creating a website to document his ever growing list of quintets. Make sure to check out his site to see what’s out there.

We now have an even larger pool to draw from and a more pressing goal to perform these works. You may notice that our number of existing quintets quickly jumped from 160 to 600 after meeting Don! We also made plans with Don to collaborate on future projects to promote some of these quintets. A touring lecture/concert seems inevitable…stay tuned for more details.