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Search forSoloist's welcome return is Bliss for city
Friday, November 14, 2008, 07:30
Three years after his superb performance of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, Julian Bliss is back to play it again, this time with the Munich KlangVerwaltung Orchestra, making its first visit to Derby.
As on the previous occasion, he is playing the concerto on a basset clarinet; the lower-pitched instrument played by the clarinetist for whom Mozart wrote the work. The basset clarinet didn't catch on and, when the concerto was published, the solo had to be tweaked to make it playable.
Mozart's manu- script is lost so we don't know exactly what he wrote but attempts to recon-struct versions for basset clarinet have been successful enough for more and more soloists to play the work in this form over the last 20 years. And once you've heard those gurgling bottom notes, you won't want to hear it played any other way.
The concert opens with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, written both as a surprise birthday present for his wife, Cosima, and a lullaby for their young son, Siegfried. It is scored for an ensemble of 13 and was first played outside Cosima's bedroom for her to wake up to. The music uses themes from Wagner's opera Siegfried, which he was just finishing, and a traditional German lullaby.
The main work of the evening is Schubert's Symphony no 9. He began work on it during a holiday in the Austrian Alps. It is a big piece with an open-air feel, unlike the rather claustro- phobic, emotional world of his previous symphony, the "Unfinished". It takes in a range of moods, with passages of driving energy and moments when time seems to stand still.
There has been a change of conductor. Enoch zu Guttenburg is indisposed, so his place is being taken by the orchestra's leader, Andreas Reiner.
Munich Klang- Verwaltung Orchestra will be at the Assembly Rooms on Thursday at 7.30pm. Tickets are £17-£26 on 01332 255800.
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BIG SOUNDS: Munich KlangVerwaltung Orchestra.
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