Mozart Clarinet

Unquestionably, the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms have earned time-honored and well-deserved places in the repertoire of clarinetists worldwide. In the informative and well-written annotations by Eric Hoeprich, we read that “they embody the maturity, depth, experience, and possibly even a premonition of an otherworldliness soon to be experienced firsthand.”

This album contains two masterworks for the clarinet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Performing with Volker Hartung and the Cologne New Philharmonic Orchestra, Greek clarinetist Miltiadis Moumoulidis is soloist in this brilliant recording of Mozart's Clarinet concerto. Also presented here is a lovely recording of Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet in A major, played by Mr. Moumoulidis and soloists of the orchestra.

One year after the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death, American musicologist Pamela Poulin was rummaging through the archives of the Latvian Academic Library in Riga and came upon announcements and programs for three concerts given in Riga in 1794 by Mozart’s friend, fellow Freemason, and clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler. The programs also included an engraving of what Stadler termed an Inventions Klarinette. This led to the discovery of several basset clarinets and basset horns in various European collections. These instruments are fashioned from boxwood with brass keys and are virtually identical to that shown in the engraving on the concert program.

The Finnish clarinettist Kari Kriikku is best known for his performances of contemporary works, many of them composed specifically to exploit his phenomenal virtuosity; his recording of Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto was one of the finest of the last year. But as this disc of Mozart and Molter with the Tapiola Sinfonietta shows, Kriikku is an equally impressive interpreter of the mainstream clarinet repertory. Like a number of soloists these days, he opts for a basset clarinet in his wonderfully fluid and constantly alert performance of the Mozart concerto, taking advantage of that instrument's extended lower register to restore the original shape of some of the solo lines. But there is not much he can do enliven the three routine concertos, by Johann Melchior Molter, which will be welcomed by clarinettists more than anyone else. The music leaves little impression, though Kriikku's performances on the high clarinet in D are technically impeccable.

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622, and Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, are masterpieces of the period at the end of his life, and they've been recorded hundreds if not thousands of times. To come up with a standout recording at this point, and indeed without doing anything radical, is quite an accomplishment, but that's what Israeli-German violinist Sharon Kam does here. These performances can be classified with those that use modern instruments but show a distinct influence from historical performance practices; the Austrian-Hungarian Haydn Philharmonic is a small group designed for the dimensions of Haydn's work spaces at Esterházy castle, and Kam uses a basset clarinet (a modern one), with the somewhat extended range of the instrument for which Mozart wrote the two works.