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Clarinet Concerto (1996) |
solo clarinet, orchestra - 20'
Although originally a string player myself (viola), it is the woodwind instruments that perhaps fascinate me most of all, whether singly, in chamber combinations, or in the orchestra. This is mainly on account of the strong, colourful and totally individual personality of each instrument, but also partly because of the ‘creature-ness’ of them. Like living birds they sing, and they must breathe, and take rests in their songs. Like the human voice too, the wind instrument is so much an extension of the personality of its player, more so perhaps than with any other kind of instrument.
One of the composers who seemed to share my love of woodwind, and whom I treasure almost more than any other composer, is Carl Nielsen. It was on hearing his first symphony when I was 16, with the clear, bright, ‘washed clean’ colours of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons predominating, that made me want to compose music too. There is none of Nielsen’s very personal idiom in my music, but like him (although sadly he didn’t accomplish it), I intend to write concertos for all 5 instruments of the wind quintet. The Clarinet Concerto is the first of these pieces.
Cast in one movement, it is very much a work in which the soloist has a dialogue with the orchestra, often taking the part of leader for the other players who then follow and join in, rather than acting out a combative role, at odds with the orchestra - the individual against the world.
The clarinet is in the music right from the beginning, playing wide-reaching melodies over bare textures in the orchestra. The timpanist also has a very important part, often shadowing fragments of the clarinet melody with unison figures. Throughout all the different sounds in this first part - the rather ‘spiky’ downward moving string and wind passage, or the heavily accented unison sequences from the orchestra - the timpani occupy a very important position. Only in the brass fanfares does the player change from drums to sanctus bells - those little bells sometimes used during the Prayer of Consecration in the Christian Mass.
The middle section begins with the solo clarinet enlisting the help of the two orchestral clarinets in a rather plaintive, wistful melody. The passage which follows has a solo for every single member of the orchestra, all to be played at the same time! Suddenly they are no longer part of an ensemble, but individuals, each pursuing their own train of thought in their own little world. Three times, the soloist tries to summon them together, by blowing an unearthly-sounding multiphonic. Eventually the music moves into a contrapuntal section, and the musical journey continues.
The final section asks for the timpanist to change to the harder, clearer sound of the rototoms, and the clarinet soloist leads the orchestra in a rough and rather primitive-sounding ‘dance’. The players are often in unison at this point - violas high up with the violins, giving a plangent quality to the strings, high bassoons in octaves with oboes, single notes by all the woodwinds like penetrating calls from a colony of seabirds. At times, the music revisits landmarks heard earlier, a ‘clipped’ clarinet melody, this time heard in the cellos and basses as well, a sudden burst of the individual solos passage, as if a window into another world opens and closes again briefly, and finally the brass and sanctus bells fanfares from the first part.
The thoughtful, rather ‘lost’-sounding clarinet melody heard afterwards, serves as a gentle respite before the final passage - fast scales from the bottom register of the clarinet to its extreme high sounds, and stern, repeated notes from the orchestra which finish the work.
The Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by the Northern Sinfonia and Hexham Abbey Festival for Robert Plane and first performed on 14 September 1996 at Hexham Abbey.
© Diana Burrell