Mozart: Clarinet Concerto in A major, K622

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).

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.

Michael Collins combines the roles of clarinet soloist and conductor as he leads the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in three works that chart the journey of the clarinet from Mozart’s late eighteenth-century Europe, via Aaron Copland’s 1940s America, to today’s classical scene with a piece written, for Michael Collins, in 2007 by the Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin.

Mozart composed his Clarinet Concerto, just weeks before his death in 1791, for Anton Stadler, the first great clarinet virtuoso. Stadler performed the work on what today is known as the basset clarinet, which features additional low notes without compromising the higher register. Unfortunately, Mozart’s manuscript score has been lost. In recent years, however, editors and performers have made several attempts to determine Mozart’s original intentions, and the version recorded here represents one such reconstruction. The concerto has a quality of serene and resigned beauty, recognisable from Die Zauberflöte, and from Mozart’s Requiem.

Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto was commissioned in 1947 by Benny Goodman, the most famous band leader of the swing era, who has been credited with having made jazz ‘respectable’. Goodman also had a second career as a classical clarinettist. He was eager to enrich the repertoire by inviting major composers to write for him, and Copland was happy to take on the challenge.

Elena Kats-Chernin is one of Australia’s leading composers. Her Ornamental Air was written in 2007 in response to a commission from a group of orchestras including the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, with Michael Collins as the intended soloist. The score is modelled closely on the Clarinet Concerto by Mozart. Not only are the orchestral forces identical – two flutes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings – but the solo instrument is the basset clarinet, for which Mozart also wrote his concerto. Kats-Chernin’s writing here takes full advantage of the exceptionally wide range of the instrument, as well as its potential for both virtuosity and lyricism.

Mozart loved the way the woodwind instruments can almost 'sing', and his Clarinet Concerto is one of his best-loved works. The concertos for oboe and for bassoon tend to be unfairly overshadowed by the clarinet work, as this recording with legendary conductor Herbert von Karajan shows.

Produced by EMI Classics in partnership with the prestigious National Gallery in London, The National Gallery Collection is a budget-price catalogue series bringing together the very best in fine art and classical music.

The collection features a selection of classical masterworks in celebrated recordings from the EMI Classics catalogue, brought together with great artworks from The National Gallery’s permanent collection.

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.