DE 3020

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 (29:36)1.Allegro (12:21)2.Adagio (7:52)3.Rondo - Allegro (9:09)

David Shifrin, clarinetGerard Schwarz, conductorMostly Mozart Orchestra

Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581 (32:23)4.Allegro (9:16)5.Larghetto (6:31)6.Menuetto (7:05)7.Allegretto con Variazioni (9:10)

David Shifrin, clarinetChamber Music Northwest:Ida Kavafian, Theodore Arm, violinsToby Appel, violaFred Sherry, cello

Total Playing Time: 62:09

Mozart’s original versions — played on an extended-range clarinet

7 W 1985 Delos Productions, Inc., P.O. Box 343, Sonoma, California 95476-9998(707) 996-3844 • (800) 364-0645 • contactus@delosmusic.com

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Executive Producer: Amelia S. HaygoodRecording Co-Producers: Marc Aubort, Joanna NickrenzRecording Engineer: Marc Aubort

Recorded: July 1984, Masonic Temple Auditorium, NewYork City (Concerto)December 1984, Rutgers Presbyterian Church, New York

City (Quintet)Photos:Jack Mitchell (front and inside back covers)Christian Steiner (back cover)

Design: Tri Arts, Inc.Graphics: Steven Dudeck

“If there is a bel cantoschool of clarinet playing,Shifrin is surely its finestexponent.”

Los Angeles Times

In March of 1784, the great 18th-century clarinet vir-tuoso Anton Stadler (1753-1812) held a benefit con-cert at the National Court Theater in Vienna. Johann

Friedrich Schink, a writer who attended the concert, re-ported: “My thanks to you, brave Virtuoso! I have neverheard the like of what you contrived with your instru-ment. Never should I have thought that a clarinetwould be capable of imitating a human voice so decep-tively as it was imitated by you. Verily, your instrumenthas so soft and lovely a tone that nobody can resist itwho has a heart...”

Schink went on to write that he “heard music for windinstruments today, too, by Herr Mozart, glorious andsublime!” The work heard on that occasion was the greatSerenade in B-flat for 13 winds, K. 361, but Mozart wenton to write several “glorious and sublime” works specif-ically for Stadler, including the two recorded here. Allclarinettists owe an enormous debt of gratitude toStadler; because of his remarkable abilities and hisfriendship with Mozart, the repertory for the instrumenthas been infinitely enriched.

Stadler grew up in a musical family in the Austrianprovinces, eventually settling in Vienna along with his

brother Johann, himself a first-rate clarinettist. The twobrothers regularly played together and were engaged bythe imperial wind band in 1782, then by the court or-chestra in 1787. Anton most frequently played secondclarinet to his brother, not because he was a lesser player,but because of his partiality for the instrument’s lowerrange. Both brothers were also expert basset-horn play-ers, inspiring Mozart to write numerous works for thecrescent-shaped alto clarinet.

The association between Anton Stadler and Mozart mayhave begun as a purely musical one but it eventually de-veloped into a close friendship, in part because of theirmutual interest in the tight-knit world of Vienna’sfreemason lodges. Stadler’s name appears several timesin Mozart’s letters, often by such irreverent nicknamesas “Stodla” and “Redcurrant Face,” an affectionatehonor usually reserved only for the inner circle ofMozart’s friends. By all reports, the clarinettist’s greatfailing was money; he borrowed relentlessly fromMozart and their friendship managed to survive despiteregular financial setbacks.

A week after Stadler’s benefit concert in 1784, the clar-inettist and the composer played together in Mozart’s

N O T E S O N T H E P RO G R A M

Quintet for piano and winds, K. 452. That began a musi-cal collaboration which culminated in Mozart’s ClarinetQuintet, K. 581 in 1789 and the Clarinet Concerto in1791. But Mozart also created the great obbligato clar-inet and basset-horn parts for La Clemenza di Tito forStadler, along with the florid clarinet lines in his CosiFan Tutte. Even the second version of Mozart’s G-minorsymphony, K. 550, with its added pair of clarinets, isthought to have been written specifically with theStadlers in mind.

According to Mozart’s own catalogue, his ClarinetQuintet was completed in Vienna on September 29,1789, presumably concurrent with work on Cosi FanTutte. A select group of Viennese musicians, headed byStadler, gave the first performance of the quintet laterthat same year at the old Vienna Burgtheater. The greatMozart scholar Alfred Einstein has given us this elegantdescription of the work: “Here is a chamber work of thefinest kind, even though the clarinet predominates asprimus inter pares and is treated as if Mozart was the firstto discover its charm, its ‘soft, sweet breath,’ its cleardepth, its agility. There is no dualism here between clar-inet and strings, only fraternal rivalry...The develop-ment section [of the first movement] has a concertante airabout it, but for all five participants. The cantabile char-acter of the second theme is resumed in the Larghetto

and nursed into full flower. The Minuet contains oneTrio in minor for the string quartet alone, and another, aLändler, in which the clarinet becomes the rustic instru-ment that it was... The Finale is an Allegretto with varia-tions; brief and amusing with all its variety andrichness, serious and lovable.”

Not long after the composition of the Clarinet Quintet,Mozart began work on sketches for a Concerto in G forbasset horn and orchestra [listed as K. 584b], also in-tended for Stadler. The composer wrote only a fragmentof the first movement before stopping work; two yearslater, in the fall of 1791, Mozart used those sketches (nowtransposed up to A Major) as the basis for the ClarinetConcerto, K. 622, the last major work he was to com-plete. As Alfred Einstein writes, “the greatness and tran-scendent beauty of this work are such as its high Köchelnumber would lead us to expect. One almost has the im-pression that Mozart felt impelled to express again, ingreater and dramatically animated form, what he had al-ready expressed in more lyric form...in the Quintet.”Mozart surely knew the extent of his final illness whilewriting this work; it is profoundly personal in tone, aheartbreaking sadness underlying the utter serenity ofthe music.

The manuscripts for both the quintet and concerto had

disappeared by the time Constanze Mozart set abouthaving inventories made of her husband’s works. Whenan early edition of the concerto was published by Bre-itkopf and Härtel in 1802, an anonymous reviewer in theAllgemeine Musikalische Zeitung noted that “Mozart com-posed this concerto for a clarinet going down to the C”[a range lower than the conventional clarinet]. Hepointed out that certain parts had to be transposed andacknowledged the work of the editors “for those trans-positions and variations for the usual clarinet.” And so,the Mozart Clarinet Concerto became known in a stan-dardized edition which included substantial changesfrom the composer’s original. The question of the ex-tended range — those notes beyond the reach of thestandard A — remained a mystery.

During the late 1940s, scholars in England and Czechoslo-vakia began a methodical study of the clarinet writing inthe concerto, paying careful attention to those passageswhere ascending or descending scale patterns seem tohave been “dislocated.” It became apparent that the miss-ing original of Mozart’s concerto was intended not for theclarinet as we know it but for an unusual extended-rangeclarinet which included four notes lower than the stan-dard instrument. Stadler himself was known to own sucha specially-adapted instrument, a relative to the then-common basset-horn. [Some modern commentators take

note of this by calling the hybrid, extended-range clarineta “basset-clarinet.”] In addition, Mozart’s own incompletesketch for the basset-horn concerto, K. 584b, provided avaluable model for how he scored the solo passageworkfor the lower-range instruments.

Armed with this information, several scholars have sincepublished careful, imaginative reconstructions of theoriginal clarinet parts for both the quintet and concerto.The differences are more readily apparent in the con-certo, where the revised solo passages often dip downinto the instrument’s distinctive lower range; in thequintet, the changes are minimal. In the performancesrecorded here, David Shifrin plays on an extended-rangeclarinet built for him by the distinguished wind instru-ment maker Leonard Gullotta.

Ara Guzelimian

Editions: Mr. Shifrin based his performing version of theConcerto, K. 622, on the reconstruction by Fritz Giegling(Neue Mozart Ausgabe V:14/iv). For the Quintet, K. 581,Mr. Shifrin used the edition by Ernst Fritz Schmid (NeueMozart Ausgabe VII:19/2) with alterations suggested byGeorge Dazeley (see Dazeley, “The Original Text ofMozart’s Clarinet Concerto,” in The Music Review, IX(1948).pp. 166 ff.).

David Shifrin, “one of the world’s great clarinetists”(Los Angeles Times), received Stereo Review’s “Record ofthe Year” award for this recording. As Artistic Directorof the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, andMusic Director of Chamber Music Northwest, Shifringuides two of the finest chamber music series inAmerica. He appears on Delos with both groups.

The Mostly Mozart Orchestra, which developed fromNew York’s celebrated Mostly Mozart Festival, has longbeen a favorite of New York audiences and critics, andis rapidly becoming an international favorite as well,through its expanding recording and touring schedule.

Chamber Music Northwest, the nationally acclaimedsummer chamber music festival in Portland, Oregon,attracts some of the brightest American chamber musicstars through the efforts of its director, David Shifrin.