Teaching an old dog

Symphony No 35 (Haffner) - Mozart

Clarinet Concerto - Mozart

Sonata for Strings No 2 - Hans Werner Henze

Symphony No 4 (Tragic) - Schubert

It's a funny old world, and some things never seem to change. Four years ago, under the old management of the music department in RTE, Georg Tintner conducted the NSO in one of the rarest versions of any Bruckner Symphony (Carragan's of the Second) but provided notes and programme order for Nowak's version.

On Wednesday, under the new regime, Michael Collins joined the NSO for a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, and played it on a basset clarinet, without any mention of this fact being made in advance publicity or in the details in the programme book.

Even the music notes are confusing, with their author claiming that the basset clarinet went "two notes lower than the conventional instrument at that time, down to a C, two octaves below middle C". Clarinettists must all now be wondering how composers have managed to ignore the extra octave on the "conventional instrument" for over 200 years.

The basset clarinet version of the concerto is, of course, in the nature of a reconstruction, hinted at only by an early sketch and the knowledge that Anton Stadler, for whom the work was written, had a clarinet that extended the lower range by four semitones; even the name of the instrument is a modern coinage, by Alan Hacker.

Musically, the reconstruction makes sense, so much so, in fact, that even the sharpest of musical intelligences, encountering the concerto for the first time, would never spot the surgery that was involved in the basset clarinet version.

Michael Collins's performance, on a thoroughly modern, straight-line basset clarinet on a swivel-stick support to bear the extra weight of the longer instrument, was in his familiar, persuasively svelte manner. Howard Shelley provided alert support without, however, managing to get the real flavour of chamber orchestra playing from an NSO reduced for this concert to chamber orchestra size.

Mozart's Haffner Symphony was done with brio, but without the full degree of unanimity the smaller forces should have facilitated. There was greater sharpness and bite in the reading of Schubert's Tragic Symphony. But the best-judged orchestral playing came in the haunting textures of Hans-Werner Henze's oddly inconclusive Second Sonata for Strings of 1995.