Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto

By Nick Smith, 14th May 2023

Autumn is a season I’ve long associated with the lingering dread of winter to come.

However with a profoundly contrasting sense of optimism I last night attended a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance at Ballarat’s Civic Hall on a wonderfully clear Autumn night.

Ballarat lies 116km to the west of Melbourne, and its’ many landmark buildings of Edwardian & Victorian design offer a window into the city’s famed Gold Rush prominence, a feeling accentuated by the performance’s itself as I felt myself drawn into a bygone era of opulence and splendour.

This concert consisted of three works from separate composers, namely Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto & Sibelius’ Symphony No.2.

Mozart’s concerto was familiar to me but the others were not, or so I thought. Before attending each concert I like to prepare by listening to each piece beforehand, and was surprised to find Mendelssohn’s Hebrides pleasantly familiar, as if to suggest I’d heard it previously without knowing its’ name.

What’s funny is how prior to each concert I always seem to put myself through a series of mental gymnastics debating how suitable each piece will be to my taste, before attending and being reminded how little the arrangement of notes matters in the grand sum of the experience. Once again that proved to be the case last night!

Each of the three pieces had their charms but the Hebrides Overture which opened the performance particularly tickled my fancy. Perhaps in part as it had been several months since I’d last heard the sound of a live orchestra so the first course on the menu was always going to be savoured, but also thanks to the unbridled majesty of the work itself.

Much as I’ve devoted a sizable chunk of my time & spare change over the course of nearly thirty years attempting to push the envelope of audio playback, something quintessentially vibrant is lost when music is reproduced that I’m always reminded of when hearing the real thing.

How I wish words existed to convey the feeling of hearing an orchestra unleash its’ full power only several meters away!

What immediately jumped out was how much body the sound of even string instruments conveyed. Indeed when every violin was playing simultaneously, the overwhelming force of sound formed a gigantic swell consisting of far deeper lower frequencies than I remembered.

Of course another advantage of a live performance is the sheer size of the soundstage -both literal and in the audiophile sense- in which picking out individual instrument positions becomes immeasurably easier than through earphones, and easier still by observing visual cues such as violin players raising & lowering their bows.

However the differences between live & recorded music extended far beyond that. What is truly lost with music playback is all the tiny emotional cues, which is not to say recordings & modern playback technology wants for resolution or detail, yet even though all the notes are there the subtle nuances of how they are played are lost to some extent, or simply rendered much more vividly in live, non-amplified performances.

Hearing notes wafting above the crowd with nothing but air between them, chesty and deeply resonant yet simultaneously conveyed with a silky delicateness, imbued each piece of music with deep emotional overtones worth the price of admission alone.

One reason music is so powerful is it functions as a means of voluntarily ceding control of our own emotional state. It often feels wonderfully liberating to do so, allowing ourselves to be swept up in the excitement of not knowing where our feelings will be led by the composer or artist. It is this joyous feeling of becoming lost in the music that occurs almost effortlessly listening to real instruments, and the pull of the vortex feels stronger.

Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto followed the Hebrides Overture and featured a wonderful performance from David Thomas on the basset clarinet. I was amazed at not only the incredible range of notes the instrument is capable of rendering, but also just how (for want of a better term) breathy it sounded, at least when Mr Thomas wanted it to. Simply observing his body language was a study in how passionately artists inflect emotion into their performances.

After an interval the performance concluded with Sibelius’ Symphony No.2, which prior to preparing for the concert I’d not heard before. Like any good symphony it was full of drama & bombastic moments, giving each section of the orchestra their chance to shine.

Music really does feel like an event heard under such conditions, an event I was proud to be part of. Surprisingly, reacquainting with my home audio system the day after hasn’t quite felt like the letdown you might imagine. Rather the memory of all the delicious nuances of last night’s performance linger, as if the magic of the evening somehow imbues today’s playback with an added lustre.

Thank you for reading, and I hope your next musical outing is equally as satisfying!