This programme note was written for the brilliant Lewes Chamber Music Festival.
Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major is one of his very finest chamber works, and its composition in the summer of 1789 makes it the chamber music companion to his opera Cosi fan Tutte. Something happens to Mozart’s style around this time which points to the clarity, boldness and calm of the very final works which some have labelled ‘masonic’ – both Cosi and this clarinet quintet seem bathed in Mediterranean sunlight and possess a curious symmetry, poise and transparency that feel like a paring down after the boundless energy, white hot intensity, and lush extravagance of the immediately preceding Symphonies No. 39, 40 and 41, and the operas Figaro and Don Giovanni. The level of musical complexity remains unaltered however, it’s just that it’s subsumed beneath the honeyed surface – harmonically the palette is wider than ever, and the compositional range as great as it ever was. Although written for the basset horn of the virtuoso Anton Stadler, this isn’t merely a clarinet concerto in microcosm – the clarinet blends, converses, leads and accompanies as a true chamber partner. Only in the endlessly rapt slow movement does it take on the clear role of a soloist in a pliant, drifting cantabile line of beatific serenity. The charming minuet is accompanied by two trios: the first, for strings alone, much more delicate and mysterious than the minuet would suggest; the second, insouciant, cheeky, and not without its own strangeness. The Finale is an easy going set of variations – a more lovely last movement to this most lovely of chamber works would be hard to imagine.
Copyright 2015 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your concert, please get in touch on the contact page.