How critically aware are you of dissimilarities in instrumental timbre? As an exercise for specialists in differentiating and identifying clarinet styles, and for amateurs in concentrated listening, this second disc of artists of the past (the first was reviewed in 2/94) provides valuable documentation, ranging as it does over the first half of this century and over five nationalities of players, from totally shadowy figures to famous personalities. For those whose interest is less analytical, here is an extremely varied collection, from miniatures and show-pieces to movements from concertos and chamber music (albeit sometimes with cuts, made to accommodate early record sides).
The very earliest recordings here (from the beginning of the century) cannot give a true picture of the player. A certain Cicotti (clearly heard through surface noise) is agile but apparently thin-toned; a noisy transfer from a cylinder by the influential Charles Draper is no more than a curiosity. (He can however be heard in excerpts from the Brahms Quintet in 1917 – very 'straight' in tone, rhythmically free in the first movement and with an appreciation of the gipsy element in the Adagio.) The clean-cut, vibrato-less playing of his pupil Thurston is as great a delight now as it always was: at the other extreme of style is the seductively luscious tone of Kell partnering Elisabeth Schumann in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen. There is a more 'woody' tone from two clarinettists prominent in the jazz field though classically trained, Benny Goodman and the multi-talented Phil Cardew. In the playing of Pistoia (who used a Boehm with a crystal-glass mouthpiece and was a member of La Scala Orchestra under Toscanini) vibrato becomes somewhat quavery, though not so much so as with Dreisbach (in the Stuttgart Symphony Orchestra for 34 years).
The concept of a national style becomes questionable on listening to three very different French players – the fluid-toned Perier (dedicatee of the Saint-Saens E flat Sonata), the warm-sounding Cahuzac and the virtuosic light-toned Verney, a member of the Garde Republicaine, whose whole first-clarinet section is heard playing the Weber Concertino in astonishing unison and with refined dynamic control. A pity that the booklet for this interesting historical survey should contain several factual errors.'