A pair of quintets composed for inspirational players, both of whom were pioneers of the nascent clarinet and its technique. Anton Stadler specialised in low-register playing and helped devise the basset clarinet to extend the instrument’s range downwards. It was for this instrument that Mozart composed the now lost original versions of the Clarinet Quintet and Concerto. Heinrich Baermann played a 10 key instrument that facilitated chromatic playing; he was said to display ‘uniform quality of tone … between the high and low notes’.

Julian Bliss, too, has pioneered advances in clarinet construction, as he explained in the October issue of Gramophone. His Leblanc Legacy instrument enables him to play evenly over the whole range – and you can hear this in the Weber Quintet, with its scalic passages across the entire compass, most notably in the Fantasia second movement and the exuberantly acrobatic finale. This is a work that especially exploits the brightness of the clarinet in its highest register: here music, instrument and soloist combine just about ideally.

Bliss switches to a basset clarinet for the Mozart Quintet and plays a reconstructed version that reinstates passages where the published score was clearly altered to enable its performance on the standard clarinet in A. (Stadler was not the most savoury of characters and is thought to have pawned the autographs of the Quintet and Concerto, so what Mozart actually wrote is lost to posterity.) You hear it from the clarinet’s first entry, a whole third lower than in the ‘traditional’ version, exploiting the wonderful, woody timbre of the instrument in its lower reaches.

Bliss offers an unfussy reading in which his personality is reflected through his moment-to-moment inflections and sensitivity to dynamics rather than through ornamentation and display. The Carducci Quartet offer solid backing, lacking only the last degree of refinement, although a moment such as the dolce recapitulation in the slow movement of the Mozart is breathtaking in its tenderness. And the virtuosity of the Weber’s finale is irresistible.