»dedicated to Alois Brandhofer«

for Clarinet in A
Duration: 7 minutes
Premiere: 2001, by Stefan Neubauer, Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

Written in 1971-72, the Burlesques for solo clarinet are among the earliest surviving works of René Staar. They survived several »disposal actions« that eliminated many early pieces (for example two piano sonatas and two string quartets), and were written well before Staar’s official op.1, the 1976 Jeux for violin and viola. The four burlesques in contrasting characters were originally written for a concert tour through France with the clarinetist Alois Brandhofer and the pianist Claus Christian Schuster. This youthful early tonal work of Staar was premiered however only in 2001, by Stefan Neubauer, in Vienna’s Arnold Schoenberg Center.