This record is really a homage to Heinrich Baermann, the great clarinettist who did more than any of his colleagues to set the instrument at the heart of the Romantic consciousness. Weber and Mendelssohn were but the most prominent composers to be inspired by what was by every account playing of extraordinary grace, fluency, depth of feeling and height of virtuosity. An excellent essay by Elmar Weingarten on the folder of the record provides the background, to the man and the instrument, as well as to the works.
Weber's Clarinet Quintet is here played with a small orchestra. I doubt if he would have minded: it does not alter the essential relationship of the strings to the clarinet, since it is a work in the so-called brillant or concertant tradition, popular in Paris, in which the principal instrument is very much in the lead. Sabine Meyer plays it beautifully, with elegance and with the numblest of techniques for the finger-burning close to the last movement. She needs only a dash of recklessness, of gay abandon, to make this an all-conquering performance. As it is, the playing is a delight to hear. Baermann himself has a hand in the other two works. He is now known to have been the composer of the mild but quite agreeable movement for clarinet and strings that was long rather wildly attributed to Wagner; and he seems to have contributed a theme to one of the pieces by Mendelssohn, while his son Carl orchestrated the second of them. These little morceaux are knocked off deftly by the Meyers, but they do not really amount to very much. Nevertheless, this makes a very pleasant record, with excellent playing (including from the chamber orchestra), and a delightfully clear, fresh recording.'