Dieter Klöcker - Mozart & Beethoven: Chamber Works (2005)

This is a digitally re-mastered reissue of recordings originally made in 1978 and 1981. In anticipation, I thought it dangerous to program the relatively slight Beethoven work next to the Mozart masterpiece—“the best I have yet written in my life”—on which the younger man may well have modeled it. But together with that indefatigable clarinetist and animator Dieter Klöcker, pianist Werner Genuit, oboist Gernot Schmalfuß, horn-player Nikolaus Grüger, and bassoonist Karl Otto Hartmann give the Beethoven so vigorous and musically perceptive an outing that it really sounds, this time around, worthy of its place alongside their equally compelling performance of the Mozart. The Mozart trio, too, where Genuit and Klöcker are partnered by violist Helmut Nicolai, is finely played. Incidentally, I had never previously noticed how strongly the phrase that begins 50 seconds into Beethoven’s slow movement resembles Strauss’s setting of the words “beieinand für alle Zeit” in the duet for Sophie and Octavian just before the end of Der Rosenkavalier. Perhaps this is fanciful, but I should like to think that the young Strauss may have heard his horn-player father Franz in a performance of the Beethoven and filed it away in his subconscious for years, before bringing it out to follow the echoes of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (“Könnte jeder brave Mann”) and Schubert’s Heidenröslein with which that duet begins.

The only real negative about the disc (which is, by the way, very well engineered) is the omission of the repeat in the Larghetto of the Mozart quintet; there would have been ample room for its inclusion. As distinct from a negative here, there are also some strong positives elsewhere. On a Hyperion disc that I reviewed enthusiastically in 25:5, the Gaudier Ensemble couples a superb performance of the Mozart quintet with three of the composer’s other chamber works, including the Oboe Quartet; and the classic Kentner-Kell-Riddle performance of the Clarinet Trio probably remains the touchstone for that elusive but wonderful composition. Nevertheless, cpo’s offering may be confidently recommended to anyone seeking accomplished performances of just the three works it contains.