The comparative performances are those of Weber's Quintet. Antony Pay's is familiar from its issue in 1982, when it was warmly welcomed by RG. I cordially agree with his appreciation of Pay's ''bravura playing... matched by fine musicianship and sensitivity''. Pay is quite one of the best Weber clarinettists of the day, and this is not only technically brilliant (which is part of Weber's expressive point) but instinct with wit and elegance. He touches off the mock-sinister passage in the finale—a sly allusion to the world Weber was to make his own in Der Freischutz—with a wry, tongue-in-cheek twinkle that is exactly right; he phrases the slow movement with unaffected warmth and simplicity; he relishes the innovative writing for the instrument that was in Weber's day just evolving into a new expressive medium; and he fires off the concluding salvoes of virtuosity with a nice dead-pan humour. This is, one might say, the French side of a work that owes a great deal to Parisian example.
It is much more sympathetic than the performance by Kalman Berkes, which attaches itself more to German tradition and the Mozartian example. That is, of course, also present; and indeed one of the qualities of Weber's Quintet is its position between different worlds, between German and French romanticism, between eighteenth-century elegance and nineteenth-century sensibility. Berkes is a sensitive player, but a more straightforward one than Pay; and he does not seem to appreciate so acutely the various elements that went into Weber's work. Moreover, he has wished upon him a murky recording and is, in Mozart's Quintet, accompanied in a style that smacks too much of romanticism.
The second work on the CRD record is Weber's fascinating Trio, a work that does not appear very often in concerts (flute, piano and cello do not come together very readily, except in ensembles of the order of the Nash). It includes some remarkable music, and its very unevenness has a certain charm for those who enjoy the music of these early romantic years. For myself, I find it more than charming, a work of striking enterprise and originality whose reach is perhaps greater than its grasp but that at least has the courage to reach. The Teldec filler is the vapid set of variations by Kuffner which the sleeve-note ignores and which the label allows to be attributed to Weber.'