PROGRAM NOTES: Gerald Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto

Posted on April 10, 2018

PYP will perform Clarinet Concerto with Musical Director David Hattner as soloist on Sunday, May 6, 2018 in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Program notes written by Huw Edwards, Guest Conductor and PYP Music Director from 1995 to 2002.

The music of English composer Gerald Finzi music embraces a rich variety of moods, from elegiac lyricism, spiritual reflection, a neo-Baroque purity, to radiant joy.  Although his output is comparatively small it includes many gems, from ravishing string works and choral miniatures, to some of the finest and most sensitive settings of British poetry—especially his four song-cycles utilizing poems by Thomas Hardy.  Finzi’s music also encompasses folk songs (the finale of this beautiful Clarinet Concerto is a prime example), strident dissonance redolent of Walton and Britten, the pastoral yearning of Vaughan Williams, as well as a contrapuntal simplicity that harks back to Purcell.

Following his study in London and Yorkshire, Finzi worked in humble solitude in Gloucester before gravitating back to the crowded environs of London to teach at the Royal Academy of Music.  He got married in 1933 and really put his compositional career on hold as he settled with his wife Joy, a celebrated artist, in the countryside near Newbury.  In these verdant surroundings, Finzi seemed more occupied with growing rare apple and pear trees than writing music!  As Krasi Nikolov observes so pertinently: “Finzi’s affinity to the countryside, to literature and theater, as well as his early encounter with loss (his father died when he was eight, and his teacher was killed in World War I), marked not only his character but also brought about the deep nuances and richness of his musical style.” Finzi resumed writing music as a spiritual response to the Second World War—the Clarinet Concerto being penned in 1949.  Sadly, the composer was rarely in good health for the final dozen years of his life and he died of leukemia in 1956, his fifty-fifth year.

The Concerto for Clarinet and Strings was written upon commission for the lauded Three Choirs Festival in 1949, which illustrates Finzi’s particular empathy for this solo instrument. Here the clarinet’s equal facility for sustained legato melody and rapid virtuosic figuration is supported by—and interacts with—his ever-imaginative writing for the strings.  This marvelous Concerto breathes an air of fresh spontaneity and the composer is not afraid to shift much of the fiendishly difficult writing one associates with a concerto to the orchestral accompaniment.  The first movement opens with searing intensity from the strings before the soloist enters with a calmer, more wistful melody. The music passes through many key centers and meters and, as Diana McVeagh comments, “the fast outer movements sound as fluent as the Adagio is beautiful.  For all Finzi’s retiring nature, he had his fierce, obdurate side, and this can be sensed in the opening movement of the Concerto.”

Following the pithy first movement Finzi places a divine Adagio second, which is the heart-and-soul of the Concerto.  The longest of the work’s three movements, this central meditation possesses a slumberous growth and alternates mini-cadenzas and recitatives with a melody transferred from his choral work Lo, the full, final sacrifice (1947). This intriguing music oscillates between passion and withdrawal—hallmarks of Finzi’s life—and comes to rest in a state of heavenly repose, when time itself seems to stand still.  This music is about endless longing with no solution.

A Rondo completes the Clarinet Concerto whose main theme is a lithe and catchy folk song. The second theme is in a flowing triple time though the main Rondo theme is never far from earshot. Aching echoes of the first movement are recalled towards the end of the finale, and Finzi concludes this loveable Concerto with a display of corporate virtuosity.