Crusell: Clarinet Concertos

Billman:Uppsala Co

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Cat No: 8554144

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943414422

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: CRUSELL

Description
Bernhard HenrikCrusell (1775-1838) Clarinet ConcertosThe Finnish composer Bemhard Henrik Crusell was born in Uusikaupunki,the Swedish Nystad, in October 1775, the son of a bookbinder, Jakob Crusell.His musical abilities were early recognised and he had his training, from theage of eight, as a pupil of a regimental clarinettist, Westerberg. He won thepatronage of a certain Lieutenant Lorenz Armfelt, who in 1788 opened for himthe possibility of a career as an army musician. With the encouragement of MajorOlof von Wallensterna at Sveaborg he was able to join the regimental band ofthe Queen Mother's Life Guards, moving to Stockholm in 1791 and, before he wasyet seventeen, assuming the direction of the band. In Stockholm in 1793 he wasrecruited as first clarinettist into the Hovkapellet by the Court KapellmeisterGeorg Joseph Vogler, the Abbe Vogler, who owed much to Mannheim and hadentered the service of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus III in 1786, toreturn in 1793, after the King's assassination, in the employment of his formerpupil, now Gustavus Adolphus IV. From 1794 to 1796 he was principalclarinettist in the wind ensemble of the Prince Regent and in 1798 he was ableto travel to Berlin to study further with the virtuoso Franz Tausch, the teacherof Heinrich Baermann, and himself a product of Mannheim, now in the service ofKing Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. In 1803 he took the opportunity oftravelling to Paris for lessons in composition from Gossec and Henri-MontanBerton and in clarinet from the virtuoso Jean Xavier Lef?¿vre, who had joinedthe staff of the Paris Conservatoire at its foundation in 1795. In the Swedishcourt music establishment, to which he returned after a few months in Paris, heserved, from about 1808, as acting Kapellmeister but in 1818, on theaccession to the throne of Count Bernadotte, had to content himself with thepost of music director of the band of the Royal Grenadier Life Guards, aposition he retained until his death in 1838. Crusell won wider distinction inStockholm. Not only was he recognised as one of the great clarinet virtuosi ofhis time, but, a man of wide culture, he also won distinction as a linguist,with translations of opera libretti. His own opera Den lilla slafvinnan ('TheLittle Slave Girl'), a version of the work of the French 'Corneille of theboulevards', Guilbert de Pixerecourt, won success, as did his setting of adozen poems by the Swedish poet Esaias Tegner, drawn from his historicallyinspired Frithiofs Saga, among other songs. Crusell was awarded the GoldMedal of the Royal Swedish Academy in 1837.The first of Crusell's three clarinet concertos, the Concerto inE flat major, Opus 1, dedicated to Count Gustav Trolle-Bonde, is thoughtto have been written at some time between 1803 and 1805 and was published inLeipzig in 1811. The work opens with the expected orchestral exposition, afterwhich the soloist enters with a characteristically embellished version of thefirst subject, leading, in writing that disp
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