There are already numerous excellent recordings of this work, and here's another, which for sheer technical accomplishment is at least as good as the best of them. Sabine Meyer's ensemble (she of course plays first clarinet) is marvellously warm and euphonious, and if there's a single note in the whole work that is even marginally off pitch, then I missed it. What perhaps I also missed is any strong feeling about the music. In this very beautiful and very exact performance—the accents, for example, are done with absolute precision, the timing and the weight unfalteringly the same every time—there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for individual expression. Even the wonderful nocturnal Adagio is just a shade bland and impersonal, and comes over just a little flatly. The second minuet is taken rather quickly, much faster than the first, and I wonder if that is right; Mozart marked it Allegretto, which could well be taken to imply slower, rather than faster, than the norm. I like the slow tempo here for the Romanze, but have heard performances that distil even more beauty from it. The bassoon playing in the middle section is impeccable, shapely as well as virtuoso. There is much fine playing in the variations too—each has a separate track, incidentally—though Sabine Meyer's usually perfect clarinet fails to speak promptly at one point in Variation No. 3 (a retake would have been justified). In this movement the use of a double bassoon instead of the double bass Mozart specified is particularly noticeable; this does seem to me an error of judgment, for it affects the sound throughout.
In sum, however, a very fine if slightly impersonal performance, but not, I think, one to alter my preference for the Marriner/Philips version among existing ones on modern instruments, though I have to say there are two or three others of very high quality and that choosing between them is so difficult as to be almost arbitrary.'