This could have been easily overlooked when it was rather modestly mentioned on another thread.

St Johns Smith Square

Mozart Clarinette Concerto - soloist Jane Booth

Mozart Requiem with the Exmoor Singers of London

Orchestra - Charivari Agreable Simfonie

Tickets £8-£20. 10% discount for concessions.

Our very own Lady of the Pomegranate will be leading   I'm certainly going to try and get to this. I missed her last gig

Of course Jane will actually be playing the bassette horne...

I'm sure Mr. Sudden could tell us (a)more, but a quick glance on Grove reveals that it was a late 18th century member of the clarinet family with a globular or pear-shaped bell; usually pitched in A-flat, G or F; originally three-keyed, a lot were updated with an additional one or two keys; very few made after 1810; distinct from basset horns in being straight-bodied rather than curved.  Very little music was specified for the instrument. 

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's...

Ahem.

Stadler called the instrument he used for the Mozart concerto a bass clarinet, I think. Of course since his time that name's been taken for an instrument which does actually play in the bass register. The name basset clarinet comes from the 1950s or so, about the time people such as Jiří Kratochvíl were pointing out that the surviving solo part in the Mozart concerto looked rather like a version of something originally written for another instrument.

Basset horn is a historical name, though, for a clarinet-family instrument in low F descending to a written C.

Historically they looked like this:



I don't have a historical one but my nice new Buffet looks like this:



Mozart started writing the concerto for a basset horn in G and a sketch survives of the first 190-odd bars. The piece finally moved up another tone to A major, for what we now call a basset clarinet. For quite a while it was a matter of complete conjecture what that instrument might have looked like. The concerto was performed on instruments looking more or less like long clarinets as well as on speculative reconstructions looking more like basset horns. In the 1990s a concert programme resurfaced, from one of Stadler's concerts. In it there's a picture of Stadler's instrument showing that it looked rather like a couple of other period basset clarinets which for some reason hadn't previously been explored as potential models for the Mozart pieces. Most period instrument performers of the piece now use reconstructions of that sort.



The description 'd'amore' (or 'd'amour') usually denotes an instrument in A or thereabouts, often with a pear-shaped bell as strina notes. (That kind of bell is indeed called a Liebesfuß in German.) The oboe d'amore is the most common example but there are flutes and clarinets as well. It's not in itself inappropriate for the Stadler instrument but it wasn't a name used at the time and as far as I know none of the historical 'clarinettes d'amour' have the extension to low C.

Hm, yes, work...

...pretty painful, Id say...

Well, Mæstro Sudden, if that instrument in your hands sounds as lovely and elegant as it looks (which I have less than no reason to doubt), I look forward to hearing it very much!

I don't know, but I will endeavour to find out.

Then read the rest of the thread tinners... 

Strina, I ask partly because Jane Booth was once kind enough to write to a complete stranger in Australia to tell him that it was Agnès Guéroult in Paris who had made her a basset. Don't know if it's the same one though...