Mozart, Mahler

The works featured in our new recording are commonly performed on the modern clarinet, but they seem to have been composed, originally, for the instrument played by Stadler, which had a wider extension in the bass register. The basset clarinet was tuned in A and enjoyed some popularity when the clarinet was not yet a stable orchestral instrument. The attribution of these Mozart works to the basset clarinet is quite recent, for neither the Concerto KV 622 nor the Quintet KV 581 have come down to us in the original manuscripts and both works are known through early 19th-century printed editions, destined for the clarinet. An 1802 review of the first edition of the Concerto KV 622, however, reveals that the work had originally been conceived for the basset clarinet, for the reviewer states to have before his eyes the original score and points out all the differences between it and the printed edition.Completed on 7th October 1791, less than two months before Mozart’s death, the Concerto KV 622 is here performed on the instrument for which it was, therefore, composed. Definitely one of Mozart’s most famous and beloved symphonic works, this masterpiece, which was created on the ultimate threshold of life, is beautiful beyond description. It was written in between The Magic Flute and the Requiem, thus being Mozart’s last instrumental work, a sort of serene but melancholy farewell, where the detachment from earthly things becomes music, in a higher vision of the world and of reality.The debut of Gustav Mahler on the international symphonic scene could hardly have been more sensational. When his Symphony No. 1 in D Major, which the composer had begun in early 1885 and completed in 1888, was premiered in Budapest on the evening of 20th November 1889, Mahler’s revolutionary nature became unmistakably manifest, as well as the fact that a new era for music had begun.At the time of Mahler’s First Symphony, Brahms had recently finished his Fourth (com