Bernhard Crusell's three clarinet concertos make infrequent appearances on the concert platform, at any rate in this country, but they are agreeable works and they fit neatly on to a single CD. Eric Hoeprich brings a new perspective to bear on them as he is a historian and craftsman as well as a performer. He has written widely about the instrument, and possesses not only a collection of more than 100 antique clarinets but a workshop in which he restores them. He built the instrument he uses here modelled on one made for Crusell by the famous Heinrich Grenser, who worked in Dresden at the beginning of the 19th century.

With only a few keys - 10 was quite a generous number - these early clarinets present formidable technical problems, as is evident in some of trickier passagework in the F minor Second Concerto. But the sound is fresh, characteristically French rather than German, and with a light, pleasant tone and clean attack in all registers. The Adagio of the E flat First Concerto (1811), in which Mozart is the obvious model, sounds elegant and fluent; by the time Crusell came to write the Alla polacca finale of the B flat Third Concerto (1822) the popularity of Weber's concertos had taken hold, as Hoeprich acknowledges with his fresh and witty playing. The orchestra backs him up with the lucid sound of their own period instruments and are responsive to Michael Alexander Willens's sympathetic direction.