Lachner: Octet and Nonet – Klöcker

History has not been especially kind to Franz Lachner, and listening to this reissue — Dieter Klöcker and friends, recorded in 1974 — you understand why, and also why the neglect is not entirely just. Here was a man who knew everyone worth knowing in Vienna and Munich, who conducted Wagner before Wagner was fashionable, who held Schubert’s hand — literally, apparently, in those last feverish weeks — and who wrote, by some counts, more than the sum of most catalogues by composers we still bother to program. The proximity to genius seems to have been contagious only in patches.

The Octet gets the more persuasive reading here, oddly, though on paper it’s the lesser piece. Klöcker’s clarinet has that woody, slightly reedy tone you don’t hear from modern French-school players chasing homogeneity — there’s grain to it, a little rasp on the attack, and it suits Lachner’s four-square themes better than a creamier sound would. The scherzo bounces along with real charm; you can practically see powdered wigs coming loose. Ensemble isn’t pristine — the horn occasionally arrives a hair late to the party, and intonation between winds and strings wobbles in exposed unison passages — but there’s an unmistakable sense that these players like this music, which counts for something Klöcker’s booklet notes, quoting Lachner’s own reminiscence of those Schubert mornings — “the merriest rapport,” days dissolving into months of exchanged songs and ungrudging endeavor — read almost more touchingly than anything in the scores themselves. That friendship produced lieder none of us have heard. I’d trade both these chamber works for a disc of them, frankly, though I suspect that’s a minority position, since nobody’s rushing to record them either.

The nonet, if less consistently inspired, has its startling moments — a clarinet-led trio in the second movement where the part-writing suddenly opens into something genuinely felt, not merely competent, and a theme in the Adagio that Klöcker phrases with unusual tenderness, drawing the tone down to a near-whisper before letting it bloom again. These passages arrive almost by surprise, embedded in music that otherwise ambles pleasantly through post-Schubertian harmony without much risk-taking. Lachner reminds you, in these stretches, that he studied counterpoint seriously and orchestrated with real ear — he simply lacked whatever compels a listener to sit forward in the chair.

Is there a rival version worth chasing instead? Not really, not for these specific works — the field is thin, and this 1974 tape, remastered without excessive scrubbing, still has presence and warmth, the winds set forward but not spotlit, the room around them audible. If you already love Schubert’s Octet, D. 803, and wonder what came after in that tradition, minor-key curiosity is reason enough to acquire this disc. Go in expecting genius and you’ll be disappointed; go in expecting agreeable craftsmanship from a well-connected, generous, largely second-rank composer, and you’ll come away satisfied, occasionally more than satisfied. That’s not nothing.