The basset clarinet — that long-throated, slightly mournful extension of its more familiar cousin — has been waiting a long time for its due. Mozart wrote his last concerto for it, then watched Anton Stadler take the instrument into near-oblivion, and for two centuries most clarinetists played the A-clarinet version instead, lopping off the lower register like a gardener pruning roses in the dark. Michael Collins has been one of its most eloquent modern advocates, and this disc shows why — though it also raises the question of whether advocacy and distinction are always the same thing.
Start with the news, which is the Kats-Chernin. Elena Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent, trained in Moscow, emigrated to Australia, then made her name largely in Germany — a biography that reads like a geography lesson, and one that seems to have left deposits in her music the way rivers leave silt. Ornamental Air, written in 2007, is an extended concerto for basset clarinet that draws on Central Asian modal inflections, folk-dance rhythms, and — eventually, almost slyly — the American vernacular. The piece has a long, spinning melodic line in its solo part that seems to breathe in different directions at once: you hear something that sounds like the Central Asian steppe, and then a phrase turns and it’s jazz, or something that rhymes with Prokofiev, or something that rhymes with nothing you can quite name. Collins plays it with the kind of easy, lustrous tone that makes even technically demanding passages feel like improvisation — the basset clarinet’s lower chalumeau register dark and almost vocal, the upper register floating free. The Swedish Chamber Orchestra under Collins’s own direction provides the right kind of lean, attentive support; there’s a chugging ostinato in the first movement that verges on the cinematic, but it works, because the piece itself has that quality of a film you’re happy to watch twice.
This is the discovery here. Full stop.
The Mozart is another matter — not because Collins plays it badly, but because he plays it very well in a field that already contains at least two recordings that seem to me definitive. Sabine Meyer on EMI brought to it an almost supernatural evenness of tone across the instrument’s wide range, and the Marriner accompaniment had the transparency of old silver. Martin Fröst on BIS brought something more volatile, a sense that the concerto’s slow movement — that long, aching Adagio in E major — was being discovered in real time. Collins navigates the basset clarinet’s idiosyncrasies with fluid grace, and he does something quietly interesting in the second half of the Adagio, adding ornamentation that is either illuminating or presumptuous depending on your view of Mozart’s intentions. I lean toward illuminating, barely. But the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s accompaniment, though elegant and clean, has a slightly retrospective quality — well-mannered in the old-fashioned sense, like a letter written in a exquisite hand about nothing urgent.
The Copland sits in a similar position. It’s a piece that has been recorded by Benny Goodman — for whom it was written in 1948, under contractual circumstances that gave Copland fits — and by roughly every major clarinetist of the past fifty years. Collins plays it crisply and with genuine rhythmic instinct; the Swedish Chamber Orchestra offers the kind of sharp, bright-edged playing that suits Copland’s jazz-influenced writing. But we have Sharon Kam, we have Richard Stoltzman, we have the old Russo release with Goodman himself conducting with his customary high-handedness. Collins is good. Good is not enough.
What this disc amounts to, then, is a compelling case for a piece most listeners haven’t heard, framed by polished but not essential readings of two repertoire warhorses. If you come to it for the Kats-Chernin — and you should — you’ll be richly rewarded. The basset clarinet, in Collins’s hands, turns out to be exactly the right instrument for a composer who has spent her life between worlds, the extra range at the bottom of the instrument giving her harmonies somewhere to root themselves. That’s a genuine match of music and instrument. The rest is very fine background to a real find.
