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Concerto for Clarinet
Conductor's score and parts on hire
978-0-19-362022-3
01 November 1991
Price: Available on request
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for solo clarinet and chamber orchestra Forces or CategorySolo clarinet & chamber orchestraDuration20 minutesDifficultyModerately difficult to DifficultOrchestrationcl solo, 2 fl (II+picc), 2 ob (II+ca), 2 cl (II+bcl), 2 bn (II+cbn), 2 hn, 2 tpt, timp, strProgramme Notes"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.
© Michael Berkeley
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
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Michael Berkeley (b.1948) Michael Berkeley was born in 1948. He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Michael's music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world's finest musicians. Most of Michael's significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas are available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. For ten years from 1995
Michael was artistic director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. He currently presents Radio 3's Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild's Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and is Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet.Michael Berkeley at the BBC
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"Nothing I had previously heard from Michael Berkeley prepared me for the searing intensity and fierce concentration of his Clarinet Concerto...The single movement is clear, the writing concise and assured, the overall effect impressively cogent." - Andrew Achenbach, Hi-fi News and Record Review "Perhaps what is most remarkable about the work is how it can sear and scald without being savage...this forthcoming opera to which the concerto is related, becomes a still more tantalising, if also alarming prospect." - Paul Griffiths, The Times
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