Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.
This week’s pick from the Ondine catalogue (ODE1056-2) features music by the little-known late-Baroque German composer Johann Melchior Molter. Of his complete output (which included some 170 symphonies and over 90 concertos), it’s only his six clarinet concertos, the earliest in the genre, that are known today. Discovered after the Second World War, they demonstrate the composer’s fascination with the penetrating coloratura tone of the early clarinets. We’ve selected the opening movement of his Clarinet Concerto No. 1 In A major.