Iwan Müller deserves better than obscurity, and perhaps better than this disc — though the latter judgment requires some qualification.
He was, after all, a figure of genuine consequence. Born in Tallinn in 1786 when it was still Reval, he ended up in Paris, where his tireless campaign to get the Conservatoire to adopt his newly designed thirteen-keyed clarinet was rebuffed by a committee that included Cherubini, Méhul, and Gossec — names that should have known better. The instrument they rejected eventually transformed clarinet craft. History has a way of vindicating the stubborn.
But historical vindication and musical greatness are different things, and Müller’s concertos, whatever their charm, don’t quite bridge that gap. The problem isn’t melodic — he had a genuine gift for the singing phrase, and Friederike Roth finds the lyrical core in each of these works with intelligence and tonal warmth. The problem is that Müller too rarely takes the instrument to the places it most wants to go. The chalumeau register — that dark, reedy basement of the clarinet’s range, the sonic world that Mozart understood as one of the instrument’s defining glories — is largely left unexplored. The instrument stays in its comfortable middle and upper ranges, producing music that is graceful but seldom arresting.
Compare this to what Crusell was doing at roughly the same time, and the difference is instructive. Crusell’s concertos have a kind of Nordic severity, a willingness to let the clarinet brood, that gives them personality beyond mere elegance. Müller’s concerti are lighter-footed, more Italianate in manner — which isn’t a failing in itself, but it means the music lives and dies by the quality of its ideas, and those ideas, in the Concerto No. 6 in g minor especially, run thin. A slow movement under three minutes isn’t inherently a problem; Haydn compressed entire universes into small spaces. Here, though, brevity feels less like economy than like Müller simply running out of things to say.
There are genuine surprises. The Concerto No. 5 in E-flat condenses the three-movement plan into a single continuous span of roughly twelve minutes — structurally adventurous for the 1820s, and stranger in conception than anything else on this disc. Müller opens it with mysterious pizzicato figures in the strings, a hushed, almost tentative gesture that returns as the basis for the clarinet’s second theme. The idea isn’t fully developed, but it’s genuinely haunting while it lasts. Roth plays the passage with just the right touch of withheld intensity.
The Concerto No. 4 in a minor is the most consistent of the four, and Roth’s playing in the sustained trill passage — an unbroken chain of them that might sound merely mechanical in lesser hands — is fluid and expressive, shaped rather than merely executed. One could almost believe, for a moment, that Müller had written something essential.
The Duo concertante, op. 23, is a different matter. Roth and Johannes Gmeinder — once past an opening that sounds as if it had been left in a drawer too long — play off each other with real wit, trading figures across registers, the interplay occasionally genuinely playful. It’s the disc’s most engaging music and the most convincing argument for Müller’s continued attention.
Evan Christ leads the Philharmonisches Orchester des Staatstheatrers Cottbus with competence, and the orchestral ritornelli have reasonable Classical poise. But the ensemble rarely rises above capable accompaniment — there are moments when the strings seem to be going through the motions, and the winds, though present, don’t add much character. MDG’s recorded sound is clean and well-balanced, the SACD layer giving the clarinet a natural presence without flattering it artificially.
This is, in the end, a disc for the genuinely curious — for those who want to understand why Müller mattered to his contemporaries, and why, on the strength of these works, that mattering was partly a matter of context rather than of enduring greatness. Roth is the best reason to listen. The composer is the most honest reason for caution.
