![]() Resembling an antique gardening tool, the bass clarinet is not the most grateful instrument for a solo role, limited in range and expression. Only the prominent use of the opening motif of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in the closing section seems a bit twee, distracting one from Musgrave’s own compelling musical argument. Otherwise Autumn Sonata is an effective work, evocative, concise (20 minutes), and smartly scored. Near the end a second offstage bass clarinet echoes the soloist’s line. There is a violently explosive march-like middle section (con furore), followed by a searching Lamentoso. The solo line is closely woven with the undulating mystery of the orchestral fabric. Befitting the concerto’s title, the music is autumnal, restless and dream-like, cast in a dark expressive vein with ominous militaristic shadows in the martial rhythms and percussion writing. Most attention Thursday night focused on Autumn Sonata, a bass clarinet concerto by Thea Musgrave, which was being heard in its belated American premiere.Ĭast in six unbroken sections, the 1994 work takes inspiration from the haunting poems of the Austrian writer Georg Trakl, who died in a Polish hospital during the First World War. With powerful, richly eloquent, and immaculately balanced performances, Mälkki’s sensational debut is easily the most impressive CSO podium bow of recent seasons. Mälkki, music director of Ensemble InterContemporain, managed to not only pull off each work on this demanding program with striking success but sparked the CSO to some of their finest playing of the year. premiere of a bass clarinet concerto, flanked that assignment with two challenging works by Charles Ives, and closed the evening with Richard Strauss’s epic tone poem, Also sprach Zarathustra. The Finnish conductor led the CSO Thursday night in the U.S. One certainly can’t say that Susanna Mälkki opted for the programming road most taken in her Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut. Lawrie Bloom applaud composer Thea Musgrave folllowing the performance of her "Autumn Sonata" Thursday night at Symphony Center. This mesmerising performance conjures up a whirlwind of sound, ranging from simple cuckoo noises to a collage of the French and American national anthems, without once losing its grip.Conductor Susanna Mälkki and soloist J. The orchestration has a Straussian depth and complexity, swept along by a Romantic undercurrent that is enthralling but unpredictable. ![]() With The Seasons, twenty years on, Musgrave creates an astonishing tapestry of sound – as rich and diverse as the paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that inspired it. ![]() It swoops and flutters with dramatic energy, giving the performance a raw excitement, despite the relative austerity of the musical language. The soloist in the Clarinet Concerto physically moves around the orchestra to confront and cajole various concertante groups of instruments (including an accordion). Spanning 25 years of Thea Musgrave’s career as a composer, these three pieces demonstrate a consistently vivid orchestral imagination. PERFORMER: Victoria Soames (clarinet, bass clarinet)BBC Scottish SO/Thea Musgrave WORKS: Clarinet Concerto The Seasons Autumn Sonata ![]()
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