German clarinetist Dieter Klöcker recorded in 1997 a concerto by Joseph Haydn once thought lost. Indeed, Fetis in his monumental Biographie universelle des musiciens  published in 1834-1835 mentions "concerto pour clarinette chez le prince Estherazy, en manuscrit " While listening to this recording,  we are struck by the beauty and elegance of this concerto and this confirms that this is the work of a great master of the classical period.

 

Impossible to see the name of a composer on the full orchestral score. It is lost. But the University library in Münster has a manuscript of 78 pages including all the individual parts. After a thourough analysis of the paper and calligraphy, the Haydn Austrian Society certifies that the music has been written in the late eighteenth century, probably soon after the Mozart concerto and that the individual parts are by different hands and were copied at different times: the older pages have been written around 1790, the last ones after 1810. This also indicates that there have been more than one orchestration for this concerto, which would prove that the work was performed with a sustained success at the turn of the eighteenth century.

 

Exceptional musician, Dieter Klöcker is the founder and music director of  the Consortium Classicum . He has to his credit over a hundred recordings focusing on the music of the classical and romantic periods, several of them featuring unpublished works found in private libraries or only published at the time of their composition and often unknown to modern musicians and audiences.