Colin Bradbury has been the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Principal Clarinet for some years now. He possesses a very clean, clear tone-quality, a superlative technique which fully justifies the disc's ''Virtuoso'' title, and his musicianship is of a high order. Every performance seems first class to me, and throughout the disc there is a confident, direct, unfussy quality in the playing. These performances were recorded at several different sessions some years ago, a fact which is revealed in the disc's printed material only by the ADD tag. Several hands were involved in the production and engineering, but the sound has been well equalized and is clear and vivid.
The music itself is pretty well all third rate, even the Weber set of variations, written so the notes tell us, in a great hurry. The solo Donizetti piece is attractive, however, and Solo de concours by Andre Messager (composer of Veronique and the first conductor of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande) is a delightful morsel which was written as a test piece but manages to pose challenges of technique in the most elegant fashion. Elsewhere the virtuoso writing is often crude and ugly: there is more of Liverani than Rossini in the Stabat mater arrangement, and too often the solo instrument is forced up into a register which can only produce a forced, shrill squeaking sound, even in Bradbury's hands.
I feel that this disc is mainly for clarinet specialists and those collectors who are particularly interested in the more obscure byways of nineteenth-century instrumental music.'