Aurelian Octav Popa is a lively player, with a direct, somewhat lean tone excellently suited to Molter's concerto. Originally written for the D clarinet, the piece keeps the tessitura very high; Popa plays it on the A clarinet, and admits to transposing some of it down for the sake of contrast. It is a fresh, cheery piece, with quite a sensitive Largo. Krommer's (or rather, Kramar's) better known work is also admirably played here (though the accompaniment is a little inert), with a simplicity of phrasing and an elegance of manner matching the courtly grace of the finale. Popa produces a more substantial style for the long opening Allegro, and responds cordially to the warm-hearted Adagio. He is at his best, though, with the Rondo. He is a player of immediate reactions, quick and extrovert, he makes the lighter side of Kramar's piece the more significant, and of course he rises with high spirits to Rossini's harmless caper.
The concerto by Aurel Stroe is another matter. Stroe was born in Bucharest in 1932. Viorel Cosma lists multifarious musical activities in his dictionary Muzicieni Romani, Bucharest: 1970), and writes in Grove of his musical complexity, and of him drawing on mixed forms and on devices including probability theory for his music. The anonymous note with this record states, ''Throughout the concerto an ancestral microcosm gradually shrinks, breaks up, is then rebuilt into several superimposed folk themes, then reaches a sonorous implosion''. I cannot understand what that means. I hear a work that makes great use of percussive backgrounds to abrupt or wild clarinet statements, frequently (all too frequently, for my taste) using split notes rather than pure ones. Stroe had some instruction in Darmstadt with Kagel, Ligeti and Stockhausen; there are some general 1960s Darmstadt traits in the music, and I suspect that he is still absorbing these, perhaps rather slowly given the geographical and political position of his country. He has written much else (including several operas). It would be interesting to hear more, and indeed more from Romania altogether.'