Having Lost Control of ¡Tunes!

I'm listening this morning, will-nilly, to whatever it wants to send me.  So far it hasn't been too bad.  First it was Mendelssohn's 'Italian" Symphony; then it was one Kraft's cello concerto; now it's one Franz Anton Hoffmeister's double clarinet concerto.  Vulgar, of course (not the Mendelssohn--though Bob Farrar hated it.  Despised it, I should probably say, for its feckless, inconsequential doubling of parts--but Hoffmeister quickly becomes saccharine/insufferable),--so (quickly!) back to the all-baroque station, and the first Bach orchestral suite, whilst I reflect on what it is that unser lieber Hoffmeister (May 12, 1755--Februrary 9, 1812) can't, and won't even try to, do.  

   First of all, as I once heard Princess Michael say of herself, "I didn't ekssaktly come from no-vere!"  Ahl-zó!  F. A. Hoffmeister was a music publisher and a very popular composer.   In his former capacity he was the personal friend as well as the publisher ("second only to Artaria") of (count 'em): Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi, Albrechtsberger, Dittersdorf, and Vanhal. This is important, because Constanze and her new husband Nissen probably gave Hoffmeister access to the considerable corpus of incomplete and fragmentary clarinet/basset horn music that Wölferl would likely have turned into at least one double concerto--had he, of course, lived--in the manner of the single clarinet quintet and concerto, K's. 581 and 622.  There is, à ce propos, a delicious fragment for clarinet, basset horn and string quartet, which shows how this might have been realized.  At any rate, putative privileged access to Mozart's working-sketches and fragments is, in my opinion, the likely germ of this annoyingly Mozart-like, and yet unlike, double-clarinet concerto.  What it lacks is proportion (our concertante group never shuts up--in the way so characteristic of, and fatal to, Romantic music) and charm (not a single tune of interest or distinction); otherwise it burbles and gurgles along quite fetchingly.