Nicolas Baldeyrou
(Alpha, two CDs)
The Gran Partita is a supreme instrumental masterpiece and Baldeyrou and his ensemble do it full justice in this first disc of a Mozart series

This is the first instalment of clarinettist Nicolas Baldeyrou’s project to record all of Mozart’s chamber and concertante music for clarinet on period instruments. It pairs the two serenades for wind octet – pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoon and horns – that Mozart composed in 1781 and 1782 for the newly formed wind band court of Emperor Joseph II, with one of his supreme instrumental masterpieces, the Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments.

The first two works make a sharply contrasted pair, with K388, in C minor, a far more ambitious work (which Mozart later adapted as a string quintet) than the E flat, K375. But both are outstripped in scale and achievement by the Gran Partita, which contains an almost operatic range of expression within its seven movements. The performances of all three works by Baldeyrou’s ensemble are bright toned and crisply characterised; there’s a nice reedy edge to the oboes and bassoons, and an agility to Baldeyrou’s clarinet that makes light of the technical difficulties of playing this music on 18th-century instruments. Some performances of the Gran Partita might find more pathos in its great Adagio third movement than this one does, but there’s much not else to complain about here.