Prom 50: BBCSO/Vänskä – review

Royal Albert Hall, LondonThe Mozart Clarinet Concerto we know and love is not quite the one he wrote: it's a tweaking of a work for the now-extinct basset clarinet, which has a handful of low notes that the modern clarinet cannot plumb. A picture of the actual instrument Mozart wrote for shows an elongated version of something Sherlock Holmes might have puffed on under his deerstalker.The basset clarinet played by Michael Collins in his performance of the original version was a sleeker-looking b...

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