The Clarinet was invented in Mozart's time and when he first heard it, he fell in love with the instrument and wrote its first famous works. His Clarinet Quintet (string quartet plus clarinet) K.581, became the most popular of all Mozart's chamber music and some think the finest of all chamber music. Sackville-West said it had a "...flow of melody so limpid and serene." People must reach for words like limpid and pellucid to describe the sense of clear, flowing water that characterizes this marvelous piece.
There are a number of great recordings of this work because it has been recorded by all great clarinetists including de Peyer, Boskovsky, Emma Johnson and Sabine Meyer. Below I show the 1988 Leister recording but there is no harder piece to pick the "best of".
Carl Maria von Weber's Clarinet Quintet in B flat, one of his few chamber music works, was written to show off a leading clarinet virtuoso of the time. It uses the instrument almost like a singer in front of an orchestra, (Weber mostly wrote Operas). The string orchestra version of the quintet below features the clarinetist Sabine Meyer who became the first woman member of the Berlin Symphony at age 23 in a blind audition process. This seriously upset the previously male orchestra. "Meyer suffered extreme harassment, such as seating herself at rehearsals only to have the men slide their chairs away from her...." This orchestra had the right to vote out orchestra members and ejected her from the orchestra causing a major riff with the orchestra's conductor, Herbert Van Karajan, who strongly supported her. Sabine got the last word as she went on to become a famous solo performer because she flawlessly performs difficult works like this.
Emma Johnson's recording in the original quintet form is also listed below . Her recordings of Weber's clarinet works have won several Rosettes from Gramophone.
Mozart Quintet -Leister
Weber Quintet - Sabine Meyer
Mozart and Weber Quintets Emma Johnson
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