The Art Of The Clarinet

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Cat No: 8557232

Release Date: 01 November 2003

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313223220

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: THE ART OF THE CLARINET

Description
Chamber Works for ClarinetBeethoven • Brahms • Berg • MendelssohnA Short History of the ClarinetThe clarinet is one of the youngest instruments in the history of music. While its sisters, the oboe and the flute, flourished in the baroque period, the clarinet was taking only the first steps towards that technical and musical development that would later ensure it a glittering career. Rameau and Johann Christian Bach were the first significant composers to include the clarinet in their scores in the middle of the eighteenth century. The instrument was first introduced into orchestras in Vienna in 1767 and Gluck made use of it from 1774. The subsequent prima donna of the woodwind family has its roots in the Near East, derived from the ancient Egyptian arghúl and the Arabic z??mmarah. The original form of the clarinet was the medieval chalumeau, a primitive cylindrical reed instrument without a bell and with an integrated mouthpiece. The term comes, like schalmei, from the Greek kalamos, a reed. The chalumeau, that is still used in Gluck’s operas Orfeo and Alceste, has now virtually disappeared and is only found in reconstructions. Nevertheless the lower register of the clarinet shows its respect for the ancestry of the instrument and is known as the chalumeau register. About 1690, shortly after the birth of J.S.Bach, the Nuremberg instrument-maker Johann Christoph Denner paved the way for a modest development of the chalumeau towards the form of the clarinet through extending its range. About the middle of the eighteenth century the clarinetto, developed from the chalumeau, began to win through. There arose virtuosi who made exceptional contributions to the development and repertoire of the instrument. The Stadler brothers in Vienna, for instance, sometimes unjustly disparaged in the literature for the cheese business they ran, initiated not only technical improvements but also inspired Mozart to write the first masterpieces of the clarinet repertoire. Nevertheless, when we admire his Clarinet Concerto (Naxos 8.550345) and Clarinet Quintet (Naxos 8.550390), we are often not aware that Mozart was never able to hear these works performed as they can be today, with the technical possibilities of the modern instrument. This still leads to lively controversy between those who favour the ‘original sound’ and the advocates of the romantic orchestral sound. Until the time of Beethoven the instrument was known as the clarinetto, a word taken from the Italian with some justification, meaning ‘little trumpet’. The sound was hard and inflexible, so that Mozart in Così fan tutte had two trumpets as support for the clarinets, a request that, with the weaker sound of the modern clarinet, can only be carried out if the trumpets are actually muted. The second movement of the Clarinet Concerto, however, in which Mozart virtually created musical romanticism, is neither hard nor inflexible. I mean that Mozart
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