The Mozart Complete Edition from Philips continues here with a mixture of the familiar and the very unfamiliar from the composer's chamber music. The Clarinet Quintet which begins the first disc is probably Mozart's most popular chamber work, but how many of us know the Sonata (or Duo) for bassoon and cello, to say nothing of the obscure items on the third disc, of which no less than five are fragments provided with completions by Erik Smith? Some of these really are the scrapings from the bottom of the Mozart barrel, and although it is admittedly a very special one, I can't help wondering whether this is not a case of musicological zeal and piety leaving common sense behind. Though Smith provides a careful and persuasive essay on the inclusion of these pieces, what Mozart would have thought of it all is hard to imagine.
In any case, not everything one might expect to find is here; thus, while we have the Allegro in F major, K580b, I looked in vain for the Adagio in C major, K580a for cor anglais and string trio that Heinz Holliger has recorded (11/85), ending up in thinking that it may have been intended for wind instruments only. But what of K516d in E flat major, for clarinet and string quartet which does not figure here, although its companion piece, K516c in B flat major, does? (I see, though, that Smith says he has chosen only those fragments long enough to provide more pleasure than frus- tration.) Furthermore, the 'strings and wind' title of this issue does not exclude rejected movements from the String Quintet in B flat major, K174 and other pieces for strings only; indeed, only three of the 11 works on the third CD have wind parts at all.
The recordings of the more familiar items on the first and second discs go back to recording sessions held in 1969 and 1979, but they are generally satisfying though with slight background sound in quiet passages. The performance of the Clarinet Quintet is on the romantic side tempo-wise and tonally, though not excessively so. Antony Pay makes a beautiful and expressive sound, not least in the Larghetto and the slow variation in the finale; only the slightly close recording detracts from delicacy. Timothy Brown is skilful and sensitive in the Horn Quintet and if his instrument seems placed a little forwardly, perhaps one should point out that it naturally has more weight than the strings. The Oboe Quartet is less than half as long as the one for clarinet, but the music is attractive and Neil Black plays it with intelligence as well as the firm, rich tone for which he is famous: this is the best performance among these three works, with an especially eloquent Adagio. As for the agreeable but entirely unmemorable Duo Sonata written for Baron von Durnitz, this is neatly and wittily done and worth hearing once or twice—the finale sounds as if the composer were glad to be reaching the end of his task.
Mozart's well-documented disdain for the flute did not stop him from writing well for it when commissioned to do so, and with good playing on modern instruments one cannot know what he so disliked; though not everything in the four flute quartets is of compelling interest, the crisp and elegant performances here from all four artists make for exquisite listening. They are finely recorded, indeed in sound more like that of 1989 than the actual 1969 vintage—try the Gluckian Adagio of the D major for an example of this artistic and technical quality.
As far as the third CD is concerned, I see that I have appeared rather dismissive and must emphasize that the proof of these mainly rejected or incomplete pieces lies in the hearing. They certainly have some interest, but listen to the discarded finale to K174 on track 2 and it is only too easy to see why even a teenage Mozart thought it inadequate, for the thematic material is conventional and the workings-out boringly studentish. The rejected, incomplete finale to the great A major String Quartet, K464, is better, but even with Smith's incorporation of a transposed fugal exercise written at much the same time (which allows him to complete the movement from the 166 existing bars) it remains a faceless curiosity. Not all pieces end conclusively: e.g. the Allegros on tracks 8 and 9 end respectively on a dominant seventh chord and in the dominant key, while track 10 also ends in the dominant and track 11 in the relative major. Kenneth Sillito and his colleagues in the ASMF Chamber Ensemble play all this music with effortless skill, and are well recorded.'