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for solo clarinet and chamber orchestra
The Clarinet Concerto was commissioned by Emma Johnson and takes the form of one continuous movement. It is the second of two purely instrumental works that I have written over the last two years while preparing for the composition of an opera for 1993 based on Kipling's autobiographical short story Baa Baa Black Sheep describing the traumatic experience of being brought to England by his parents and left with a fiercely Evangelical woman called Auntie Rosa who took violently against the young child and made his life a misery. This painful period as an outcast provided Kipling with the inspiration for The Jungle Book, where a child finds acceptance in the animal kingdom.
The opera combines these two worlds - the austere childhood experience and its magical and imagined counterpart. In very different ways this scenario has influenced both the concerto and Entertaining Master Punch which was written for Lontano. Where in that piece I was experimenting primarily with different colours and textures, including aspects of Gamelan, in the Clarinet Concerto I have been more concerned with single musical argument; there is no percussion, but the role of the timpani is crucial. Although Kipling's childhood predicament is the starting point for the relationship between the clarinet and orchestra, the music develops from there into an abstract essay. The clarinet frequently merges with the woodwind section while at other times stands out against it. I decided to keep two clarinets in the orchestra so that the solo clarinet can be triple-voiced at one point, the orchestral clarinets ape the solo line like rooks mobbing an outsider. Indeed in the first part of the work the clarinet is frequently subsumed by the lines of the orchestra: rather like a beleaguered swimmer in heavy waves it dips, disappears and then bobs above the surface, making large leaps, taking great gulps of air. Gradually, orchestra and clarinet become more distinctly separate, and the wide intervals heard first at the opening grow closer together and become more obviously lyrical. The music closes, as it began, with the muttering timpani and a ticking clarinet, but now the quality of that ticking has changed irreparably.
9780193620223
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