Thea Musgrave has written a new bassoon concerto for Amy Harman, and classical music listeners will hear Out of the Darkness at the Proms on 23 August. Harman will move around the orchestra while playing, a setup Musgrave says fits the work she wants to write at 99.
Musgrave said, “I’ve got to this age, and from now on I’m going to do what the fuck I want to do.” That blunt line matches the way she is working now: still composing in her 99th year, still building pieces around players who are not fixed in one spot.
Amy Harman and the bassoon
Musgrave said Nicholas Daniel introduced her to Harman last year when Mary, Queen of Scots was staged at English National Opera. She said he told her, “He said, this is Amy Harman, and you have to write a concerto for her.”
When Harman said she could walk around while playing, Musgrave replied, “What, with that big heavy bulky instrument?” Harman then took the bassoon out and demonstrated it, prompting Musgrave to say, “You’ll be sorry you told me this!”
That exchange fed directly into Out of the Darkness. Musgrave said Harman will move around the orchestra throughout the piece, making the solo part part of the music’s physical design rather than an added effect.
Musgrave’s dramatic-abstract approach
Musgrave has described her orchestral writing as “dramatic-abstract.” She said, “One night I dreamt that I was conducting a big orchestra, and all of a sudden one of the players, the clarinettist, stood up and wouldn’t sit down, so I signalled to the brass players to stand up and play, and shut the clarinet up.”
She used that idea in Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1967, and later in the Clarinet Concerto, where the clarinettist walks around the orchestra and plays with smaller groups. In the Horn Concerto, the soloist is amplified by the orchestral horns, who eventually surround the stage and the audience.
The new bassoon concerto carries the same pattern into a different setting. Musgrave said, “But there has to be a reason she’s doing this: and here’s my reason, which is to do with Covid,” and added, “The whole work starts in great sadness.”
Proms on 23 August
Musgrave was born in Scotland in 1928 and has lived in the US since the early 70s. She is still writing music in her 99th year, and the Proms performance gives listeners a new chance to hear how that long span of work now reaches into movement, space and solo display.
For anyone following the piece, the main point is simple: Out of the Darkness is not just another late work. It is a new concerto built for Harman’s mobility, shaped by Musgrave’s older theatrical instincts, and set to arrive at the Proms on 23 August.
