Mozart: Clarinet Concerto / Clarinet Quintet

CD Details

Product Description

All clarinettists owe an enormous debt of gratitude to 18th-century clarinet virtuoso Anton Stadler (1753-1812); because of his remarkable abilities and his friendship with Mozart, the repertory for the instrument has been infinitely enriched. The clarinetist and the composer began a musical collaboration in 1784 that culminated in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in 1789 and the Clarinet Concerto in 1791.
The Clarinet Concerto was the last major work Mozart was to complete. As Alfred Einstein writes, “the greatness and transcendent beauty of this work are such as its high Köchel number would lead us to expect. One almost has the impression that Mozart felt impelled to express again, in greater and dramatically animated form, what he had already expressed in more lyric form . . . in the Quintet.” Mozart surely knew the extent of his final illness while writing this work; it is profoundly personal in tone, a heartbreaking sadness underlying the utter serenity of the music.
The manuscripts for both the quintet and concerto had disappeared by the time Constanze Mozart set about having inventories made of her husband’s works. When an early edition of the concerto was published by Breitkopf and Härtel in 1802, an anonymous reviewer in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung noted that “Mozart composed this concerto for a clarinet going down to the c ” [a range lower than the conventional clarinet]. He pointed out that certain parts had to be transposed and acknowledged the work of the editors “for those transpositions and variations for the usual clarinet.” And so, the Mozart Clarinet Concerto became known in a standardized edition which included substantial changes from the composer’s original. The question of the extended range – those notes beyond the reach of the standard clarinet in A – remained a mystery.
During the late 1940s, scholars in England and Czechoslovakia began a methodical study of the clarinet writing in the concerto, paying careful attention to those passages where ascending or descending scale patterns seem to have been “dislocated.” It became apparent that the missing original of Mozart’s concerto was intended not for the clarinet as we know it but for an unusual extended-range clarinet which included four notes lower than the standard instrument. Stadler himself was known to own such a specially-adapted instrument, a relative to the then-common basset-horn. In addition, Mozart’s own incomplete sketch for the basset-horn concerto, K. 584b, provided a valuable model for how he scored the solo passagework for the lower-range instrument.
Armed with this information, several scholars have since published careful, imaginative reconstructions of the original clarinet parts for both the quintet and concerto. The differences are more readily apparent in the concerto, where the revised solo passages often dip down into the instrument’s distinctive lower range; in the quintet, the changes are minimal. In the performances recorded here, David Shifrin plays on an extended-range clarinet built for him by the distinguished wind instrument maker Leonard Gullotta.

Review

David Shifrin is one of the world’s great clarinetists. If there is a bel canto school of clarinet playing, Shifrin is surely its finest exponent. — Los Angeles Times

Listening to this superb recording of these two great works is like hearing them for the first time…the entire disc is a gem. Not to be missed. — Ovation

Record of the Year — Stereo Review