Haydn Klöcker

f you thought Mozart’s Salzburg serenades were big works, then check out this extravaganza in nine movements, lasting just about an hour. Composed in 1764 and scored for everything but the kitchen sink, the work includes an opening march, two minuets, and major concerto movements for solo clarinet and solo trombone (yes, I did say trombone). Both are often performed separately. Michael Haydn’s proto-classical style is, as you might expect, graceful, tuneful, and easy on the ear, and if you are familiar with any of the other releases from Klöcker and his Prague forces, then you know that you can expect lively, elegant music-making (and some terrific clarinet playing).

The first sound heard in the Concerto for Two Clarinets & Orchestra by Antonio Cartellieri (1772-1807) is a loud timpani roll that you could mistake for the opening of a Haydn symphony. This striking effect sets the stage for a Haydnesque allegro with Beethovenian accents, quite different from the wind concertos of Mozart and his contemporaries. But then Cartellieri had a reputation as an innovator (at a time in Europe when performers and the general public were suspicious of innovations) who made use of the latest advances in clarinet technology for his concertos. The solo writing is highly virtuosic (though the two clarinets often play in unison, or in thirds) and its challenges are fully met by Dieter Klöcker and Sandra Arnold.

Haydn's student Ignace Joseph Pleyel was nearly as prolific as his Austrian parents (he was one of 38 children), and not all of the various attempts to revive his work have found music worth reviving. His music remains mostly unknown, and instrumentalists and ensembles haven't sorted through it to find the gems. This effort by virtuoso German clarinetist Dieter Klöcker, who also wrote the rather abstract but cogent booklet notes, is one of the best contributions yet. The clarinet was a new instrument in Pleyel's time, and was undergoing rapid change.

Bohemian composer Leopold Kozeluch earned himself a negative historical reputation by putting himself forth as a rival to Haydn and Mozart; badmouthing the former to the latter, he received the retort that "even if you were to put the two of us together, you would still not produce a Haydn!" German clarinetist Dieter Klöcker, an indefatigable investigator of the context that surrounded the mighty Viennese trinity, sets out here to rescue Kozeluch from obscurity with performances of a trio of highly idiomatic clarinet pieces. It's hard to disagree with a newspaper critic of the day, quoted in Klöcker's excellent notes, who wrote that Kozeluch showed "great imaginative boldness" but too often offered "mere copies of ordinary life" that were "prettily dressed up like a young woman trying to please her admirers by means of flowers and ribbons."

This collection of ten Classical symphonies concertantes was recorded (quadraphonically!) in 1977 and issued as a five-record set by EMI Electrola. Now it has been licensed by CPO and reissued economically on just three CDs.

Recently, I have reviewed several CDs of works imitating Haydn. Although never reaching the large numbers of pseudo-Haydns, there arose, after Mozart’s death in 1791, a school of followers who produced symphonies, concertos, divertimentos and sonatas. Hence on this disc we have four clarinet works, three of them spuriously attributed to Mozart. The first is the Violin Concerto, K268, long regarded as doubtful, which is now presented as a clarinet concerto after a German manuscript, where it is arranged for clarinet and piano.

Haydn wrote a series of "Notturni" as light entertainment music for the King of Naples, with scoring that included "Lyre Organizate", kind of a barrel organ/hurdy-gurdy like instrument. This CD compiles 6 of them, the first known definite volume of 6 that Haydn composed for the king, and which includes the "Lyre Organizate" in the instrumentation. All the performances on this CD feature two barrel organ players as representing the "Lyre Organizate", along with the viola, clarinet, horn and double bass/cello instrumentation. The musicians uniformly do an excellent job.

Antonio Rossetti (ca. 1750 - 1792) was born Franz Anton Rossler in Bohemia. Like many other central European composers with operatic ambitions (Johann Stich, Johann Christian Bach, and even Mozart), he Italianized his Christian and surnames, and studied the craft of masters such as Pergolesi, Vivaldi, Geminiani, Albinoni. Rossetti's internalization of the fluent Italian style was as thorough-going as Giovanni Cristiano Bach's before him, but Rossetti was able to personalize it, to give it his stamp, in small demonstrations of formal and textural originality.