Five days before the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra was due to start its latest tour Paul Dyer got the phone call every artistic director dreads. It was Craig Hill, his featured soloist, ringing to say his basset clarinet was unplayable after it met with an accident and was split in five places.

This unique forebear of the more familiar modern instrument, reconstructed in Vienna in the 1990s from a sole surviving engraving of the original played by Mozart’s dedicatee Anton Stadler, had to be packed off to Austria for repairs, so Dyer asked his concertmaster Shaun Lee-Chen if he happened to have a Mozart violin concerto “up his sleeve” to replace the clarinet concerto advertised in the printed concert brochure.

Shaun Lee-Chen was the stand-in soloist in the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra's Mozart's Clarinet concert at City Recital Hall, Sydney, 28 April, 2022.

Shaun Lee-Chen was the stand-in soloist in the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s Mozart’s Clarinet concert at City Recital Hall, Sydney, 28 April, 2022. Photo © Keith Saunders.

Happily, Lee-Chen could oblige, and as a result his superb performance of the charming youthful Third Violin Concerto, K216, left no one at Angel Place...