Clarinet Concerto No.2 in E flat major, Op.74

Alla polacca

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 - Weber 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.

Although Weber was modest enough to attribute the success of the two concertos to Bärmann’s extraordinary powers of persuasion - he described the first performance of the Concerto in E flat in Munich in 1811 as “divine” - he was obviously doing himself little justice. It is true that the opening theme of the Second Concerto is scarcely out of the ordinary: it is really no more than a fanfare and an arpeggio in E flat. But the point is that the solo clarinet never plays it in that form. The nearest it gets is on its first entry where it transforms the fanfare into a dramatic leap over three octaves before taking flight in a brilliant improvisation on the material presented in the orchestral exposition. Although the soloist has little to add to the second subject, which was evidently attractive enough as the violins first introduced it, the strings take it upon themselves at the beginning of the development section to challenge the clarinet with a provocative modulation to D flat - to which it responds with characteristic extrovert wit. When it comes to the recapitulation, apparently convinced by now that the soloist knows best, the orchestra abandons its pedestrian opening theme in favour of the clarinet version, the solo instrument making its last entry to reintroduce the second subject and to add a coda of runs and arpeggios.

If Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto is vaguely perceptible in the background at one or two points in the first movement it seems almost to occupy the foreground at the beginning of the Andante con moto - after the gently scored G minor introduction, that is, as the clarinet enters on a sustained line in its soprano register. In fact, the movement takes a quite different direction: it assumes the form of an operatic scena, the solo clarinet expressing itself in dramatic runs and leaps and breaking into a passionate recitative before finally recovering the melodic poise of its first entry.

The finale, headed Alla polacca , is a rondo based on a theme in Weber’s favourite Polish dance rhythm - propelled in this case by an irresistible syncopation which sustains the vitality of the whole movement. It seems to lose its way just after the delightfully scored second episode - but only, it turns out, to delay the satisfaction of returning to the key of E flat major for the last entry of the rondo theme and the joy of celebrating that event in a breathtakingly virtuoso coda.