Stamitz reviews

Paul Meyer, Michel Portal (clarinet); Royal Chamber Orchestra of Wallonia (Alpha Classics)

Ana de la Vega (flute), Ramón Ortega Quero (oboe); Trondheim Soloists (Pentatone)

A mood of nostalgia and ineffable sadness envelops Martin?’s Rhapsody-Concerto, a work written in the early 1950s during a period when the composer, then living in New York, came to realise that the deteriorating political situation in Czechoslovakia meant he would never return to his beloved homeland. Delivering an expansive account of the solo part, violist Jitka Hosprová certainly captures the essence of Martin?’s writing, but also ensures that its few sections of animated material are projected with a welcome degree of feistiness.

It is difficult to understand why Johann Stamitz (1717-57), the father of Carl, has always received more attention than his son, whose music is much more pleasing to the ear. Possibly one reason was that German musicologists a century ago were very anxious to prove that the Mannheim School, led by Johann Stamitz, invented the symphony, and that its composers were therefore the pioneers of the greatest musical form in history. In fact, Carl’s symphonies are delightful. The four on this CD make very easy listening, especially when they are as gracefully performed as they are here.

Although this disc of solo flute music spans three centuries, Hansgeorg Schmeiser devotes a third of it to pieces from the last three decades, and, unusually, to composers from the East. Working chrono-unlogically backwards, he starts with Takemitsu’s Air (1996), a typically elegant fantasy. Schmeiser doesn’t fill, but rather feels the evocative silences. He swells in and out of ghostly legato passages or punchy, recurrent motifs with complete conviction.

Although Mozart is today recognised as the most important 18th-century composer of solo clarinet works, Carl Stamitz was at the time considered the leader of this field, with 11 solo concertos, the Double Concerto and Concerto for Clarinet and Bassoon all written between 1770 and 1790.

Mozart wrote his Quartet K370 in Munich in 1781, following the successful debut of Idomeneo. He composed it for the virtuoso oboist Friedrich Ramm, a friend who had championed his Oboe Concerto and also performed in Idomeneo. The Quartet catches Mozart in high spirits, its sunny Allegro and dreamlike Adagio capped by an effervescent Rondeau that makes cheery use of Ramm’s talent for high notes.

‘An army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle as to fight one’ was musical diarist and traveller Dr Charles Burney’s celebrated appraisal of the Mannheim Court Orchestra in 1773. ‘Indeed, there are more solo players and good composers in this, than perhaps any other orchestra in Europe,’ Burney continued, and this latter group is honoured with this admirable new disc.

Johann Stamitz is chiefly remembered as one of the founders of the Mannheim School, which made dramatic advances in orchestral playing styles, and though only 40 when he died he wrote over 70 symphonies and 30 concertos. Few of these works are performed these days, but his place in the history of the clarinet is important since he bridges the gap between the earliest works of Baroque composers such as Vivaldi and the ground-breaking compositions of Mozart.

Perkins has played in the Manchester Camerata for nearly 30 years. They are clearly attuned to each other, and to Boyd, their new conductor. Perkins’s notes identify his aims in the Mozart concerto – ‘humour without caricature, virtuosity without note-spinning, and... lyricism’. While his modern