Mozart Clarinet Quintet and Fragments – Colin Lawson

Stadler must be smiling somewhere, wherever clarinetists go when they die. Anton Stadler, the wayward virtuoso who talked Mozart into writing for that new, mellow-toned instrument he’d had built with an extended lower range — the “basset” mechanism, all those extra semitones dipping down to low C — has been vindicated again and again over the past thirty years as scholars and instrument builders have labored to reconstruct what Mozart actually intended before nineteenth-century publishers simplified it all into oblivion. This new disc from Colin Lawson and the Revolutionary Drawing Room takes up that cause with real seriousness, and mostly wins the argument.

Yes, the Clarinet Quintet in A, K581, is glorious, and yes, you already own three or four versions of it. Lawson’s is a good one, warm-grained, unforced, playing the weirdly bent basset clarinet in A that the booklet photograph shows off like a family heirloom — which in a sense it is. His larghetto breathes naturally, songful without fuss, though my ear kept drifting back to Martin Fröst’s account, or to Pascal Moraguès with the Quatuor Ysaÿe, both of whom find an extra ounce of vulnerability in that movement that Lawson doesn’t quite locate. Call it a difference of temperament rather than of artistry. Lawson has always been a scholar-performer first, a projector of ideas; the sheer sensuous “give” some clarinetists bring to that slow movement isn’t really his game.

But the quintet, familiar as an old coat, isn’t really the news here.

The news is the wreckage — the false starts, the abandoned drafts, the eight bars that just… stop. Mozart left behind a startling amount of unfinished business for clarinet and strings, and this disc gathers up four pieces of it, one of them (the Allegro in F, K580b, scored curiously for clarinet, basset horn, and string trio) completed by Franz Beyer, Mozart specialist and sometime Mahler orchestrator, in a version so idiomatic you’d swear he channeled the man. Two others — the Rondo, K581a, an earlier draft toward the finale of the quintet itself, and the substantial Allegro in B flat, K516c — come to us via Robert Levin. He works from manuscript evidence, sketches, marginal jottings, the occasional scholarly hunch dressed up as detective work, and the results don’t sound like ventriloquism. They sound inevitable.

And then there’s the eight-bar fragment. Forty-two seconds, and gone. It arrives, states its business with a kind of shy melodic confidence, and vanishes before you’ve adjusted your ears to it — the aural equivalent of glimpsing someone extraordinary across a train platform, gone before the doors even open. I’ve listened to it probably a dozen times trying to talk myself out of wanting more. Doesn’t work. Whoever programmed this disc knew exactly what they were doing, tucking that fragment in among the completed movements like a splinter that won’t come out.

The playing throughout has the tang and immediacy period instruments bring: reedy, a little astringent at the top, gut strings speaking with less vibrato-cushioned uniformity and more individual character in the inner voices. Michael Harris’s basset horn in the K580b Allegro deserves particular mention — dusky, covered in tone, blending with Lawson’s clarinet in thirds and sixths that Mozart clearly relished writing. He wrote for this pairing elsewhere, in the Serenade for Winds, K361, and knew exactly what alchemy those two horns, one straight, one bent double, could produce together. It’s a shame the annotation doesn’t dwell longer on the instrument itself; general readers deserve to know why a basset horn looks the way it does and why it sounds like nothing else in the wind family.

Lawson’s own booklet essay is personal, informed, occasionally a touch dry, but it does its job of situating these fragments historically, reminding us that Mozart’s late Vienna years were littered with unfinished scores, interrupted by commissions, health, money troubles, the general chaos of freelance composing life in the 1780s and ‘90s. We tend to romanticize the finished Mozart, forgetting how much of his output exists in this twilight state, gorgeous and incomplete.

Sound engineering is clean, close without being clinical, giving the winds real presence against the strings without artificial spotlighting.

Is this a first choice for the quintet alone? No. Keep your Fröst, your Moraguès, your King if you already own it. But as a documentary project, illuminating corners of Mozart’s clarinet imagination that modern audiences almost never encounter, this disc is close to indispensable. A world premiere album, worth your attention, moving in its glimpses of genius caught mid-thought.