Mozart: Ecstasy & Abyss [PRAGUE, 1791]

Mozart changed Martin Fröst’s life forever. After his childhood efforts on the violin ground to a halt, Fröst turned to the piano but made slow progress. Yet something clicked when his father returned home with a recording of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. The beauty of the music and of Jack Brymer’s solo playing touched the nine-year-old Swede’s soul. He began studying the clarinet and soon set the foundations of what has developed into an illustrious career as soloist and all-round musician. Mozart, he tells Apple Music Classical, was “the god who breathed life into the clarinet.” Martin Fröst has done much to breathe fresh life into Mozart, as his recordings of the composer’s works for the instrument demonstrate. When it came to making his debut album as a conductor, with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, he turned again to Mozart, releasing two albums set around works from the last five years of the composer’s life. Featured here is Fröst’s performance of the Clarinet Concerto and, in the role of conductor, the “Prague” Symphony. Read on as Martin Fröst guides us through each work. Symphony No. 38 “Prague” “It’s understandable that people talk about the ‘Jupiter’ above all Mozart’s symphonies. You look at the coda in the finale, where he puts together five themes in a double fugue at the end, and you ask, ‘What was he on?’ But if you then look at the ‘Prague’ Symphony, you can see, right away in the first movement, that he was almost as complex in handling its themes. He uses six melodies, which he develops and integrates with each other. You really have to study it in detail because he’s turning those themes around, upside down, and using them in a totally brilliant way.” “Parto, ma tu, ben mio” from La clemenza di Tito “This aria from the opera La clemenza di Tito is scored for soprano and clarinet. In it, the character Sesto asks his beloved Vitellia, daughter of the deposed Roman emperor, to give him one tender look before he goes to avenge her by assassinating his friend and her father’s successor. “Ann Hallenberg has sung this often, of course, but to be honest, I have done it only once before in concert. One of the reasons for that is because I didn’t have the instrument for which it was written, the B-flat basset clarinet. I borrowed one from a French clarinet player who was also the person who made it, and practised like crazy on it. I was so happy because the whole album is built around this deep voice of the soul of the clarinet. The B-flat basset clarinet has this intimate sound, a little softer than the clarinet in A.” Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra “Mozart died less than two months after completing his Clarinet Concerto. He wrote it for the virtuoso player Anton Stadler and his basset clarinet, but it was only published in the early 1800s in a version adapted for the ordinary clarinet. That meant that parts of the original piece had to be transposed upwards to sit within its range. People thought there was something wrong with the score because if you look at it, you see all these octave transpositions. The original manuscript was lost, and the basset clarinet vanished too. The basset clarinet part was reconstructed following the publication of an article in the 1940s, and copies of Stadler’s instrument were made after some sketches of it, printed in a programme book for one of his concerts, were rediscovered in 1992. “This is my third recording of the Clarinet Concerto. What did I add? Well, it’s a closer sound, it’s more friend to friend. The recording is closer, has less reverb, so you hear the tonguing and the details more, I think. It’s like hearing the consonants when someone speaks—the text comes out a bit more clearly. And of course, my interpretation is 10 years older than the last, and the cadenzas are longer and more personal.”