Gavin Higgins: It’s a clarinet concerto. It’s just a very big clarinet concerto.
When I worked in radio, I’d sometimes find myself in a studio with an author promoting a new book. What struck me was how much energy they brought to it — so much that it barely mattered what the book was about. I wanted to read it anyway. When you’ve poured that much of yourself into something, it leaks into every conversation about it.
I thought of those authors while talking to Gavin Higgins about his new Clarinet Concerto, written for his friend of twenty years, the clarinettist and composer Mark Simpson, who premieres it with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Adam Hickox on 17 October. I spoke to each of them separately; what follows splices the two conversations together.
What comes through is less the excitement of a premiere than a sense of committment to the craft and to the work — to Mark, whose playing Gavin knows well enough that he didn’t need to send him drafts, and to the queer writers whose accounts of the night shaped the piece that inspired the composer too. Yet at the same Higgins is quick to insist that it’s “just a very big clarinet concerto”.
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