Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, K477 (Meistermusik, Maurerische Trauermusik, Ode funèbre maçonnique)

This concert was given as a memorial to the British publisher, liberal humanitarian and music-lover Sir Victor Gollancz (1893-1967). The founder of the influential Left Book Club, Gollancz started his own publishing company in 1927 which came to specialise in left-wing and American books. He was also a prolific writer on political and humanitarian subjects and, eventually, on music. His life was informed by his unconventional religious beliefs – a combination of the Judaism into which he was born, his individual version of Christianity and readings into other faiths. This motivated a life-long activity in human rights issues. It was typical of Gollancz to have been a campaigner both for rescuing Jewish victims of Nazi persecution (and the first to predict a six million death toll) during the Second World War and for giving increased aid to German civilians once the war was over, contesting Field Marshal Montgomery’s plan to allow the population only a little more than concentration-camp rations.

The repertoire for the concert was chosen by Gollancz’s widow Ruth and his daughter Livia and represented all his favourite composers bar Verdi. The programme opened with an appreciation by his friend, The Observer music critic Peter Heyworth, and incorporated quotes from Gollancz’s own writings on the music being performed.

The Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart were old friends of Klemperer’s repertoire; he had first recorded the Unfinished and the Beethoven item with the Berlin Staatskapelle in the 1920s, re-recording them with the Philharmonia in the 1960s. The Love Scene from Roméo et Juliette harked back to Klemperer’s Strasbourg days under Pfitzner when, in 1910, he gave the complete symphony its local première.

The concert programme ended with Gollancz’s praise of music from his 1952 autobiographical sketch My Dear Timothy. ‘Why has no one ever included, among the various “proofs” of the existence of God, the musical? Music is as much mimesis, imitation, as any other of the arts: Beethoven doesn’t invent anything, he perceives something and tries to reproduce it. Then how does it happen, what Beethoven tries to reproduce in, say, the E flat quartet? Can anyone imagine that it happens accidentally?’

In 1992, a programme for a concert given by Anton Stadler in Riga in March of 1794 was discovered, where he played the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. Amazingly, this programme includes an engraving of the special 'Inventions Klarinette', or basset clarinet, that Stadler had with him to play Mozart’s music. Up until this time, no one knew what the basset clarinet looked like, and it came as a shock to see a long instrument with a bulbous bell on the end. This release on the Glossa label was the first time the work appeared played on an instrument as Stadler possessed.

In this recording Mozart’s music for the clarinet and basset horn is heard in various settings, and all the works are associated with the clarinettist Anton Stadler (1753-1812). The Clarinet Concerto is the composer’s last concerto work, and shows the depth of his mature style. The selections from the opera 'La Clemenza di Tito' date from the same period (1791), representing yet another musical form. Lastly, the two works associated with the Masons, the 'Adagio' and the 'Maurerische Trauermusik', illustrate the quasi-religious underpinnings of the masonic movement expressed through the music’s majestic solemnity.

Listening on the same disc to the marvellous timbres of both Eric Hoeprich’s clarinet and Joyce DiDonato’s voice is a sublime experience.

When compared to the many German conductors whose discographical archives have in recent years been rediscovered enthusiastically, Eugen Jochum has been somewhat left behind. And this is despite his having left his mark on two of the world’s leading orchestras of both his day and ours, for he was chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich and later of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. And he was furthermore one of the hand-picked group of conductors who re-founded the Bayreuth Festival in the years after the Second World War. Nor was Jochum successful just with Wagner or Bruckner, but also with contemporary works and with 'classics' in the truest sense of the word. In short, his repertoire was all-encompassing.

The trilogy of the last Mozart symphonies that he recorded with the Bamberg Symphony in 1982 offers eloquent testimony of his style of music-making, which had nothing trendy about it, but was timeless and captivating. Neither in his dynamics nor in his tempi did Jochum seek the extremes that some of his colleagues did but when it came to clarity and variety of the orchestral voices and colours, Jochum was supreme. The Jupiter Symphony KV551 is convincing in its cheerful exuberance, just as are the two previous symphonies from the year 1788. The dark colours of the G-minor Symphony KV550 and the slow introduction of the E-flat Symphony KV543 are played in a manner that audibly emphasises their proximity to the music of the Magic Flute, and they remain fixed in one’s memory.

This re-issue as a digipak for the price of a single CD is topped up with the rarely heard Masonic Funeral Music KV477, which is particularly moving here – another, highly expressive late work by Mozart that was written in honour of two brethren who died in 1785. It corresponds perfectly to Jochum’s approach to the Salzburg master – serious and without any airs and graces – and it forms a fine close to this welcome re-acquaintance with Jochum’s art.

Jordi Savall’s recordings of Mozart are few and this album reminds us of what we are missing. Recorded in 1991, it bears the signature of Jordi Savall’s talent as a conductor: breadth, clarity, beauty of singing. Mentioned on Building a Library as one for reissue - please!