Clarinet, Horn

The foremost Czech clarinettist of her generation, Ludmila Peterková, chose to tackle in this her latest project a repertoire from the creative legacy of German and Italian Romantic composers, works that are not widely known and yet proved to offer surprisingly attractive listening material. Apart from Peterková's totally accomplished, sonically flawless performance, the album's other great asset is the presence on its tracks of the basset horn, an instrument that has completely disappeared from modern-time music, reintroduced here in two numbers by France's young and talented NicolasBaldeyrou.

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.

Mozart?s concerto actually began life as a concerto for basset horn (not basset clarinet) and was written in the key of G. The manuscript ended abruptly after the 191st measure of the first movement. Mozart rethought his plan, decided to recast the concerto in A, and overhauled the solo part for basset clarinet, an instrument developed by his friend Anton Stadler The version that entered the repertoire after Mozart?s death was an adaptation of the original.

The case for performing Mozart's horn music authentically on its original natural (valveless) horn is a bit tougher than for music in other genres; it's hard to imagine that Mozart or his audiences wouldn't have preferred the smooth scale of the modern horn to the reedy, clarinet-like tone that emerges on chromatic notes even on a fine recording like this one. Yet the four concertos, two of them incomplete or incompletely transmitted, and the Horn Quintet in E flat major, K. 407, have been recorded often enough on natural horns.

When one evaluates Paul Horn's career, it is as if he were two people, pre- and post-1967. In his early days, Horn was an excellent cool-toned altoist and flutist, while later he became a new age flutist whose music is often best used as background music for meditation…