Classical Hour
Osmo Vänskä
Martin Fröst Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) moved from his hometown of Salzburg to Vienna in 1781, where he would spend the rest of his life. He flourished as a concert pianist and became acquainted with some of the city’s finest musicians – among them the clarinetist Anton Stadler, three years his senior. Mozart loved the sound of the clarinet, and he and Stadler became close friends, despite the clarinetist’s somewhat dubious reputation.

The clarinet was still a relatively new and evolving instrument in Mozart’s time. Stadler often played the basset clarinet, an extended version with a deeper range, and it was for this instrument that Mozart composed his Clarinet Concerto in A major in the autumn of 1791. The concerto would become the last work he completed, and after his death, it was revised and published for the standard clarinet.