Leopold Kozeluch – Mozart's Antipode?

Many of
the composers whose lives bestrode the end of the Rococo period and the beginning of the age of Viennese Classicism and who were distinguished by their wide stylistic range are nowadays judged by their words and deeds rather than by their works. As a result, composers with their finger on the pulse of the times are all too often lumped together with others of a more reactionary bent. Leopold Kozeluch, for example, was a highly adaptable composer but one who, like his hide-bound contemporary and colleague Antonio Salieri, now enjoys the dubious reputation of being regarded as a second-rate composer who schemed against Mozart’s transcendent genius. And yet he was often able to reconcile virtuosity and melodic inventiveness in a playful manner reminiscent of Mozart himself.

Dieter Klöcker brings virtuosity and a playful wit of his own to a recording that shows how the clarinet concerto may serve as a barometer of the great compositional range that could be achieved by masters of their profession who, like Kozeluch, are all too often misjudged. Klöcker joins forces with the Prague Chamber Orchestra in three works by Kozeluch. Influenced by Bohemian models from Kozeluch’s youth, the First Clarinet Concerto in particular invites comparisons with works typical not only of the Mannheim School but also of Joseph Haydn, while the third movement of the Second Clarinet Concert, in which a simple hunting motif is wittily developed into a positively theatrical scene, suggests nothing so much as a hunting party outside the palace gates at Eszterháza. These two concertos frame a Sonate concertante (an unusual genre in Kozeluch’s day) that not only strikes an early Romantic note but introduces into its final movement an altogether delightful and memorable melody.