Mozart: Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major, K314

In the year of his 80th birthday, Claudio Abbado and his superb orchestra continue their Mozart celebration with critically acclaimed solo concerto performances.

The third of a three album series of Mozart wind compositions puts Claudio Abbado’s inimitable, refined stamp on this music of vigour, grace and beauty. Guilhaume Santana’s bassoon – mournfully and boisterous by turn – exploits every interpretive possibility in Mozart’s earliest surviving wind concerto, the Bassoon Concerto , K. 191. The arcadian chase that is the Flute Concerto No. 2, K. 314 proves an exhilarating and easy conquest of perfection by flautist Jacques Zoon and clarinettist Alessandro Carbonare spins tonal majesty out of thin air in the reflective Concerto in A, K. 622.

The second movement of the clarinet concert is known for its use in famous movie " Out of Africa " (1985) by Sydney Pollack (starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep).

An understanding has been passed down to us that Mozart had a somewhat jaundiced view of the flute, that he had not the inclination to lavish upon it the love and care and idiomatic poetry which give rise to the concertos for clarinet and horn and the wind parts of the operas and piano concertos. But, as Graham Rogers points out in his note, the evidence for this misunderstanding is at best circumstantial. When we listen to these concertos and fragments, we find solo parts every bit as quintessentially Mozartian as those cited above. They may not rival the piano concertos of his mature Vienna years, but they are masterpieces in their way, and are indeed the best of their kind.

Best of all is the concertante piece he wrote for a wealthy French count and his harp-playing daughter. From the ceremonial C major first movement, through the gracefully fluent triple-time Andantino, to the joyous bustling finale, the music’s cloth is cut peerlessly to the technical possibilities and individual timbres of both instruments.

These 1972 recordings were made by the cream of the Dutch early music movement, led by one of its alma parens, Frans Brüggen. They date from a time when early-music values of transparency, buoyancy and lightness of touch and tone were just beginning to filter through to performances of music from the Classical era, and they stand the test of time.

No composer wrote better for wind instruments than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and it is our good fortune that most of his output in this sphere has survived to delight us. Many of these recordings feature legendary soloists and conductors with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Belgian player Henri Helaerts (1907–2001) was principal of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande for almost half a century (1929–77) and made many recordings, usually with Ernest Ansermet conducting. On this occasion he was imported to London for sessions on 9–10 August 1954. Anthony Collins conducted. A month earlier, on 13–14 July, conductor and orchestra collaborated with the young British virtuoso Gervase de Peyer (b.1926) in the Clarinet Concerto. The performance of the Flute Concerto comes from a famous LP on which the American flautist Claude Monteux (b.1920) collaborated with his father, the French violist and conductor Pierre Monteux (1875–1964). The sessions, produced by that distinguished Mozartian Christopher Raeburn and engineered by the legendary Kenneth Wilkinson, took place in Decca’s West Hampstead Studios in November 1963. Our brief horn recording was part of an LP of all the Mozart Horn Concertos, made by the famous Australian-born LSO principal Barry Tuckwell (b.1931). The sessions were held at Kingsway Hall in November 1959 and April 1961 – the E major Fragment came from the latter set – and the stereo tapes were engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson.

The recordings of both the Bassoon and Clarinet Concertos make their first appearance on CD and the fascinating documentation for the CD is provided by Tully Potter.

French master autist Jean-Pierre Rampal had a formative influence on the development and importance of classical flute playing during the 20th century – and his exemplary career helped the instrument gain a degree of popularity that prompted one of Washington Post‘s reviewers to pose the question: “Can any other autist since Frederick the Great boast as many fans as Jean-Pierre Rampal?” Through Rampal‘s international career as a virtuoso - and his work as a conductor - the musician made a crucial contribution to the flute being accepted as a solo instrument on the international concert scene. These recordings, made in 1954 and 1955, prove the flute virtuoso to be not only a lover of Mozart‘s music but also a connoisseur of his art.