Clarinettists have been a potent force for good over the past four centuries.

Mozart wrote his Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet for his friend Anton Stadler. Hearing Richard Mühlfeld perform brought Brahms out of retirement, and 50 years later the “King of Swing”, Benny Goodman, inspired works from Bartók and Copland.

We have Heinrich Joseph Baermann to thank for Carl Maria von Weber’s two concertos and other showpieces, including the Quintet in B-flat major, Op. 34, which Sydney Symphony’s Alexander Morris chose to feature in the latest of the orchestra’s intimate Cocktail Hours in the Opera House’s Utzon Room.

This is the second of the series to feature Morris who, as Principal Bass Clarinet, is usually seen buried in the heart of the orchestra and who joked that he felt “naked” in this informal setting. Last year he performed Mozart’s quintet, paired with a bravura new work by young Australian composer Holly Harrison.

For this concert he came up with the perfect partner for Weber’s operatic fireworks display in Bernard Herrmann’s romantic and nostalgic Souvenirs de Voyage, written in 1967, a year after the composer’s bitter bust-up with film director Alfred Hitchcock.