Mozart Clarinet Works on Basset-Clarinet by Veilhan

The basset-clarinet—that lower-reaching instrument Mozart actually wrote for, before nineteenth-century editors cheerfully mutilated his scores to accommodate the standard instrument’s more limited range—has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent decades. But not all such resurrections prove worth the archaeological effort.

Jean-Claude Veilhan’s 1989 and 1992 recordings present us with what should be revelatory encounters with Mozart’s final instrumental masterworks. The Clarinet Concerto K622 and the Clarinet Quintet K581 were both written for Anton Stadler, virtuoso and Masonic brother, whose extended-range instrument inspired Mozart to those melting descents into the chalumeau register that give these works their particular pathos. Veilhan plays a modern reconstruction, and one can certainly hear those low Cs and even the bottom B-flat that standard editions banished upward.

What one hears less convincingly is any compelling reason to prefer these performances to… well, to dozens of others.

The technical accomplishment is beyond reproach. Veilhan navigates the concerto’s treacherous passagework with security, his tone reasonably warm if somewhat reedy in the upper register. Jean-Claude Malgoire’s La Grande Ecurie et la Chambre du Roy provides alert, historically-informed accompaniment—strings lean, winds nicely balanced, tempos generally sensible. The 1989 Paris recording captures everything with clinical clarity.

But Mozart requires more than correctness. The concerto’s “Adagio” should break your heart; here it merely proceeds, elegantly enough, from phrase to phrase. Veilhan shapes the long-breathed melodies with intelligence but without that final degree of expressive intensity that transforms notes into song. Those newly-restored low notes emerge, yes, but they don’t speak—they simply exist as pitches Mozart wrote rather than pitches later editors substituted. The distinction matters less than advocates of period practice might wish.

The quintet fares somewhat better. The Stadler Quartet (no relation to Anton, one assumes) proves more responsive chamber partners than Malgoire’s orchestra, and the first movement’s conversational exchanges have genuine charm. The “Larghetto” achieves moments of genuine poetry, particularly in the clarinet’s dialogue with first violin. But the finale’s variations—where Mozart’s inexhaustible invention should delight at every turn—feels oddly dutiful. The players execute the notes; they don’t quite inhabit the music.

Comparison proves instructive. Set this alongside Antony Pay’s revelatory Hyperion album with the Academy of Ancient Music, or even Charles Neidich’s period-instrument traversals, and Veilhan’s interpretations seem curiously earthbound. Pay finds wit, shadow, Masonic mystery, and profound resignation in these works. Veilhan finds… the notes Mozart wrote for basset-clarinet.

The 1992 sound for the quintet strikes me as marginally warmer than the concerto’s earlier engineering, though both recordings suffer from a certain dryness—apt enough for French aesthetic preferences, perhaps, but not ideal for Mozart’s autumnal masterpieces.

One hesitates to dismiss any serious attempt at historically informed Mozart reading. K617’s commitment to period practice deserves respect, and completists interested in basset-clarinet discography will want to hear Veilhan’s approach. But as interpretations rather than simply documents of what Mozart’s original texts contained, these recordings remain disappointingly neutral. They restore the pitches without quite recovering the passion.