The two sublime works presented here were composed by Mozart for Anton Stadler, the Viennese clarinettist whose instrumental facility became something of a legend across eighteenth-century Europe. Stadler’s ability to produce a tone ‘so soft and so lovely that nobody can resist it who has a heart’ owed much to his development of an instrument with an extended range, now called the basset clarinet. For this album—and for the first time ever—Dame Thea King recorded both of these works on the instrument which for so long was disregarded as impractical, and the results are as revelatory now as they were when this album was first issued in the 1980s: ‘It is hard to imagine more affecting, stylish readings’ (International Record Review).