Clarinet Concertino in E flat major Op.26

Adagio ma non troppo - Andante - Allegro

As Anton Stadler was to Mozart, and as Richard Mühlfeld was to be to Brahms, so was Heinrich Bärmann to Weber. Without Bärmann - who first attracted the young composer’s admiring attention when he played the clarinet obbligato in Weber’s Se il mio ben in Darmstadt in 1811 - he would not have been inspired to write his Concertino in E flat, and it was Bärmann’s performance of that work at a Court concert in Munich that moved the King of Bavaria to commission two full-length concertos from the same composer for the same clarinettist. All three works for clarinet and orchestra were completed within a few months of each other in 1811. The Clarinet Quintet, also written for Bärmann, followed four years later.

Although it is the shortest of those four works for clarinet, the Concertino is abundant in evidence of what it was that Weber liked so much in Bärmann’s playing. Bearing in mind the comparatively undeveloped state of both the instrument and the technique of the average performer, few clarinettists of the day could have been entrusted with the first entry of the soloist in the Concertino - on the quiet and long sustained high note that leads so effectively into the expressive cantilena of the Adagio introduction. The variations of the central Andante cover a wide range of colour and character, from the elegantly turned out opening theme to the two episodes of rapid runs and arpeggios and, after a quiet drumroll towards the end of the section, a beautifully scored variation for the clarinet in its lower register accompanied only by divided violas. Most challenging of all to the soloist, the closing Allegro makes a special feature of Bärmann’s debonair virtuosity, his bubbling bravura and, as a final gesture, his brilliance in the top register.

Gerald Larner ©2004