It’s often argued that music is best heard on the instruments for which it was written. 

This absorbing concert takes the audience back to the last decade and a half of the 18th century, the height of the Classical period, offering an instructive and delightful sample of works that demonstrate the kinds of sounds produced by the instruments of the day and heard in aristocratic palaces or in the public music venues that were then emerging.

It is a rare treat to be able to hear internationally renowned Australian born, Paris-based clarinettist Nicola Boud, and she performs on replicas of wind instruments favoured in the late eighteenth century – the clarinet and the basset horn. 

Nicola Boud, Erin Helyard and Simon Cobcroft: Mozart’s Clarinet. Photo © Alex Jamieson

Boud’s five-key, boxwood clarinet was made by French instrument maker Agnès Guéroult in the style of Theodor Lotz of Vienna in 1770, and the basset horn was also made by Guéroult in the Lotz style of 1790. 

Simon Cobcroft’s gut-stringed cello is a little more modern, made by Thomas Kennedy in London in 1840.

Erin Helyard plays a superb fortepiano made by South...