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Tuesday 22 June 1pm to 2.15pm
BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert

Artist Spotlight: Mark Simpson & Richard Uttley

Claude Debussy Première rhapsodie
Edmund Finnis Four Duets
Mark Simpson Lov(escape)
Gavin Higgins Three Broken Love Songs
Carl Mario von Weber Grand Duo Concertant

Mark Simpson clarinet
Richard Uttley piano


Recorded for broadcast by BBC Radio 3

BBC Radio 3 logo

LSO St Luke's Jerwood Hall

© Matthew Weinreb

LSO St Luke's Jerwood Hall

© Matthew Weinreb

LSO St Luke's Jerwood Hall

© Matthew Weinreb

© Matthew Weinreb

Support the LSO and LSO St Luke's

The importance of music and the arts has never been more apparent than in recent months, as we’ve been inspired, comforted and entertained throughout this unprecedented period.

As we emerge from the most challenging period of a generation, please consider supporting our Always Playing Appeal to sustain the Orchestra and our venue LSO St Luke's, assist our recovery from the pandemic and allow us to continue sharing music with the broadest range of people possible.

Every donation will help to support our future.


You can also donate now via text.

Text LSOAPPEAL 5, LSOAPPEAL 10 or LSOAPPEAL 20 to 70085 to donate £5, £10 or £20.

Texts cost £5, £10 or £20 plus one standard rate message and you’ll be opting in to hear more about our work and fundraising via telephone and SMS. If you’d like to give but do not wish to receive marketing communications, text LSOAPPEALNOINFO 5, 10 or 20 to 70085. UK numbers only.

Claude Debussy

Première rhapsodie

✒️ 1909 to 1910 | ⏰ 9 minutes

In 1909, the Director of the Paris Conservatoire, Gabriel Fauré, commissioned Claude Debussy to write two pieces for the 1910 clarinet exams. Debussy produced a short sight-reading test (later renamed Petite pièce) and the ambitious Première rhapsodie. He dedicated the latter to the clarinet professor at the Conservatoire, Prosper Mimart, who gave the professional premiere of the work at a concert arranged by the Société musicale indépendente in January 1911. Later that year, Debussy produced an orchestrated version.

The Première rhapsodie displays the fluidity of Debussy’s late style: Pierre Boulez described it as ‘hovering between reverie and scherzo’. Striking features include the soaring clarinet melody that evolves from the dreamy opening music, the ensuing abrupt shifts in tempo, mood and dynamics, and the bravura ending, full of rhythmic and technical challenges.

Debussy called the work ‘one of the most pleasing pieces I have ever written’. He would have been delighted to learn that it has become a staple of the clarinet repertoire.

Note by Kate Hopkins


Claude Debussy
1862 to 1918 (France)

Composer Claude Debussy

Despite an insecure family background (his father was imprisoned as a revolutionary in 1871), Claude Debussy took piano lessons and was accepted as a pupil of the Paris Conservatoire in 1872, but failed to make the grade as a concert pianist. The gifted musician directed his talents towards composition, eventually winning the coveted Prix de Rome in 1884 and spending two years in Italy. During the 1890s he lived in poverty with his mistress Gabrielle Dupont, eventually marrying the dressmaker Rosalie (Lily) Texier in 1899.

His Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, although regarded as a revolutionary work at the time of its premiere in December 1894, soon found favour with concert-goers and the habitually conservative French press. Late in the summer of the previous year he had begun work on the only opera he completed, Pelléas et Mélisande, which was inspired by Maeterlinck's play. It was an immediate success after its first production in April 1902.

In 1904 he met Emma Bardac, the former wife of a successful financier, and moved into an apartment with her; his wife, Lily Texier, attempted suicide following their separation. Debussy and Emma had a daughter and were subsequently married in January 1908. The composer's troubled domestic life did not affect the quality of his work, with such magnificent scores as La mer for large orchestra and the first set of Images for piano produced during this period. Debussy's ballet Jeux was first performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in May 1913, a fortnight before the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Although suffering from cancer, he managed to complete the first three of a projected set of six instrumental sonatas. He died at his Paris home and was buried at Passy cemetery.

Composer profile by Andrew Stewart

Edmund Finnis

Four Duets

✒️ 2012 | ⏰10 minutes

Mark Simpson commissioned Four Duets to perform in his Martin Musical Scholarship recital at the Royal Festival Hall on 8 December 2012. Edmund Finnis stated that his aim was to establish a ‘close connection’ between the piano and the clarinet.

Duet No 1 is based around the opening melody of Josquin Des Prez’s motet 'Memor esto verbi tui’ and prolongs its rise-and-fall motion. Duet No 2 employs a ‘pared-down’ aesthetic inspired by the composer’s interest in minimalist artists such as Bridget Riley. The movement features polyrhythms, with the clarinet and the two hands of the piano playing at different speeds. Finnis has described Duet No 3 as ‘a clarinet song with the piano shadowing the lines of the clarinet’. In the lively final duet, No 4, clarinet and piano play in canon: the composer’s aim is to make them ‘seem like one instrument’.

Note by Kate Hopkins


Edmund Finnis
b 1984 (United Kingdom)

Composer Edmund Finnis

© Jana Chiellino

© Jana Chiellino

EEdmund Finnis (born 1984) is a London-based composer. He writes music for concert halls, film, dance-floors, installation and choreography. He has written music for some of the leading performers of his own generation (Benjamin Beilman, Mark Simpson, Víkingur Ólafsson, Jess Gillam, Clare Hammond, Oliver Coates, Daniel Pioro), and renowned ensembles such as Britten Sinfonia, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and London Sinfonietta. His orchestral works have been performed by orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.

From 2013 to 2016 Finnis was Composer-in-Association with the London Contemporary Orchestra. They gave numerous performances of his works and several new commissions, including Across White Air for solo cello with reverb, Between Rain for string orchestra and the electronic piece Colour Field Painting, premiered on a summer evening on the top of London’s Primrose Hill.

The London Sinfonietta were early supporters of Finnis’ work. Over the last decade they have have performed, toured and recorded six of his works, including four that they commissioned: Veneer, UnfoldsSeeing is Flux and Three Solos.

More recently Finnis has developed a close working relationship with the Manchester Collective. After touring several of Finnis’ chamber works they commissioned The Centre is Everywhere, a piece for twelve string players. It was released in 2021 as part of their debut album of the same name on the Bedroom Community label.

Finnis studied at the Guildhall School with Julian Anderson. In 2012 he received a Paul Hamlyn Award, and in 2016 his violin concerto Shades Lengthen was shortlisted for an RPS Award. Since 2015 he has been a Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

The Air, Turning – an album of Finnis’ music – was released to critical acclaim in February 2019. Several of his pieces were used on the soundtrack to the Icelandic film, Hvítur, Hvítur Dagur (A White, White Day) which premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Mark Simpson

Lov(escape)

✒️ 2006 | ⏰ 4 minutes

As well as being an acclaimed clarinettist, Mark Simpson is an admired composer. He wrote Lov(escape) to perform in the semi-finals of the 2006 BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition and subsequently entered it in the 2006 BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composers’ Competition. He went on to win both: the only musician to have done so.

Simpson has described the work’s title as referring to its two opening musical gestures, the one ‘yearning and romantic’, the other ‘more erratic and desperate to escape’. He perceives these gestures as ‘both connected and separate’. As the piece progresses, musical material based around the second gesture dominates, and the clarinettist uses extended techniques such as screaming through the instrument, glissandi and flutter-tonguing. The third, final section attempts to reconcile the two gestures. It features wild swoops in both clarinet and piano as they struggle for supremacy.

Note by Kate Hopkins


Scroll down or click 'Artist Biographies' in the menu for Mark Simpson's profile.

Gavin Higgins

Three Broken Love Songs

✒️2006 | ⏰ 15 minutes

1 …Three Bottles of Wine Later…
2 Three’s a Crowd
3 Love Hurts

Three Broken Love Songs was commissioned by Mark Simpson as part of a project to develop new repertoire for the basset clarinet – the instrument for which Mozart wrote his famous concerto. The three movements each explore an alternative aspect of love, and make use of the instrument’s rich, deep sonorities. Higgins has described the piece as ‘like a journey through a failed relationship… a love story without the fairytale ending’.

Note by Kate Hopkins


Gavin Higgins
b 1983

Composer Gavin Higgins

Described as ‘boldly imaginative’ (The Times) and ‘a talent to watch’ (New York Times), Gavin Higgins is one of the most exciting and gifted compositional talents of his generation. Born in Gloucestershire (1983) and having grown up in the Forest of Dean, he studied horn and composition at Chetham’s School of Music, Royal Northern College of Music and Royal College of Music.

Significant commissions include Der Aufstand for the 2012 BBC Proms, Rough Voices for the 2020 BBC Proms, and the ‘fast, exciting and brilliantly scored’ (The Telegraph) Velocity for the Last Night of the 2014 BBC Proms; the Ivor Novello Award winning trombone concerto, The Book of Miracles (2019) – premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloist Helen Vollam; and the premiere of his first opera The Monstrous Child (2019) at the Royal Opera House, which opened to critical acclaim.

Higgins comes from a long lineage of working-class brass band musicians dating back to 1895 and his passion for this heritage has resulted in a number of vigorous, daring works for brass such as Destroy, Trample as Swiftly as She (2011), Prophecies (2017) and So Spoke Albion (2019) commissioned for the European Brass Band Championships.

Higgins was appointed Rambert Dance Company’s inaugural Music Fellow in 2010, writing ballet scores including What Wild Ecstasy (2012) and the award winning Dark Arteries (2016). He has received BASCA nominations for A Forest Symphony (2009), What Wild Ecstasy (2012), Diversions After Benjamin Britten (2013), The Ruins of Detroit (2015) and A Dark Arteries Suite (2018). Dark Arteries was shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award (2016) and in 2019 he won an Ivor Novello Award for The Book of Miracles.

His career thus far has seen Higgins commissioned by – and work with – orchestras, ensembles and soloists including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Camerata, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble 10:10, Rambert, the Carducci Quartet, Fidelio Trio, Piatti Quartet, David Cohen and Mark Simpson.

Carl Maria von Weber

Grand Duo Concertant

✒️1815 to 1816 | ⏰ 20 minutes

1 Allegro con fuoco
2 Andante con moto
3 Rondo: Allegro

Carl Maria von Weber was very fond of the clarinet and wrote several works for it, including two concertos and a quintet for clarinet and string quartet. He composed these for his friend Heinrich Joseph Baermann. Baermann’s playing may also have inspired the Grand Duo Concertant, although it is possible that Weber composed it for Louis Spohr’s favourite virtuoso clarinettist, Johann Simon Hermstedt. Both the piano and the clarinet parts are extremely demanding – so much so that the musicologist John Warrack has described the work as a double concerto without orchestra.

The energetic Allegro con fuoco is in sonata form, and contrasts a driving, scalic opening theme with a calmer second one. The central Andante con moto makes full use of the clarinet’s range of sonorities and has a distinctly operatic quality. Its mood fluctuates between melancholy and passionate intensity. The finale is a sparkling 6/8 dance, briefly interrupted by a dramatic episode of recitative that anticipates the clarinet solo in the overture to Der Freischütz (1821). Its virtuoso coda closes the work in high spirits.

Note by Kate Hopkins


Carl Maria von Weber
1786 (Germany) to 1826 (United Kingdom)

Composer Georg Philipp Telemann

© Caroline Bardua

© Caroline Bardua

Born in Holstein, North Germany, Weber was the eldest of three children. After being discharged from the militia, his father Franz took up a number of musical directorships and founded a theatre company in Hamburg. His mother Genovefa was a Viennese singer. Weber had four musically gifted cousins, one of whom was Constanze Weber, who married Mozart in 1782, a catalyst in Franz’s ambitions of making the young Weber into a child prodigy like his cousin-in-law.

A gifted violinist, Weber’s father taught the boy music and gave him a comprehensive education. In 1798 Weber went to Salzburg to study with Michael Haydn, and that same year saw Weber’s first published work – six fughettas for piano. Aged 14, Weber and family moved to Freiburg where he wrote his first opera Das Waldmädchen (The Forest Maiden). The latter half of the first decade of the century was marred with troubles for Weber – debt, an ill-fated affair, his father misappropriating a vast amount of money – however, he remained a prolific composer.

Things brightened up from 1810; he visited several cities and spent time as Director of Opera in Prague and Dresden, and also worked in Berlin promoting and establishing German opera. The successful premiere of Der Freischütz in Berlin in 1821 led to performances all over Europe. In 1823 he was invited to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to compose and produce Oberon, which premiered in 1826.

While in London, Weber was already suffering from tuberculosis, which then took hold entirely. He died at the house of Sir George Smart during the night of 4/5 June 1826. Buried in London, his remains were transferred 18 years later to the family vault in Dresden. 

Composer profile by Andrew Stewart

Artist Biographies

Mark Simpson
clarinet/composer

Mark Simpson

© Bo Lutoslawski

© Bo Lutoslawski

Composer and clarinettist Mark Simpson (b 1988, Liverpool) became the first ever winner of both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms / Guardian Young Composer of the Year competitions in 2006. He went on to read Music at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and studied composition with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Simpson was a BBC New Generation Artist from 2012 to 2014 and received a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2014. In 2015 he was appointed Composer in Association of the BBC Philharmonic for a period of four years.

Simpson’s oratorio The Immortal was premiered by the BBC Philharmonic at the 2015 Manchester International Festival to immediate critical acclaim. Other works with orchestra include Israfel, premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, sparks commissioned for the 2012 Last Night of the Proms and A mirror-fragment… written for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. His first opera Pleasure was commissioned by Opera North, the Royal Opera and Aldeburgh Music and premiered in 2016.

Chamber works include Hommage à Kurtág for clarinet, piano and viola, commissioned by the Salzburg and Edinburgh International festivals for premiere in 2016 by Simpson alongside Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Antoine Tamestit, and a solo clarinet work Darkness Moves commissioned by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Under his Composer in Association role with the BBC Philharmonic, Simpson composed a Cello Concerto for Leonard Elschenbroich in 2018 and a Clarinet Concerto for himself as soloist in 2019. His most recent work is his Violin Concerto for Nicola Benedetti.

A collection of Simpson's chamber works, entitled Night Music, was released in 2016 by NMC and 2020 brought a recording of wind ensemble music on Orchid Classics combining Simpson's Geysir with Mozart's Gran Partita. Simpson continues to perform widely as a soloist and chamber musician, with recent highlights including Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto at the BBC Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis, and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps at the Aldeburgh Festival with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras. In 2016 he performed Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, with the Mozarteum Orchestra in Salzburg conducted by HK Gruber and at the 2018 BBC Proms. Recent highlights included a feature as composer and performer at the 2020 Trondheim Chamber Music Festival.

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

Richard Uttley
piano

Pianist Richard Uttley

© Cathy Pyle

© Cathy Pyle

British pianist Richard Uttley studied at Cambridge University, graduating from Clare College with a Double First in Music, and at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama with Martin Roscoe. Noted for the integrity of his musicianship as soloist, chamber musician and recording artist in a wide range of repertoire, Richard has been recognised for his ‘musical intelligence and pristine facility’ (International Record Review), ‘amazing decisiveness’, and ‘tumultuous performance’ (Daily Telegraph).

His playing has frequently been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and has featured on BBC Two, BBC Four, BBC World Service, Classic FM and Sky Arts. He won the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2006 and was selected for representation by Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) in 2011.

Richard has released several solo recordings to critical acclaim and appeared at venues and festivals including Auditorium du Louvre, Banff Centre, Bath Festival, Bridgewater Hall, Cadogan Hall, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Klangspuren Festival, Konzerthaus Berlin, Modulus Festival (Vancouver), Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall, and has toured in China and Colombia. Highlights this season include appearances at Kings Place and Wigmore Hall.

Richard’s long-term chamber music collaborators include Mark Simpson (composer-clarinet), Savitri Grier and Callum Smart (violin), and Ben Goldscheider (horn). He also works with artists such as Leonard Elschenbroich (cello), Simon Höfele (trumpet), Peter Moore (LSO Principal Trombone) and Olivier Stankiewicz (LSO Principal Oboe), and has participated in Open Chamber Music at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove. In 2019 Richard won the Yvar Mikhashoff pianist/composer commissioning prize with composer Kate Whitley.

Richard is a piano professor at the Royal College of Music and also teaches at City, University of London, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama.

LSO St Luke's exterior

© Neil Wilkinson

LSO St Luke's exterior

© Neil Wilkinson

© Neil Wilkinson

© Neil Wilkinson

Thank You for Joining Us

As we emerge from the most challenging period of a generation, please consider supporting our Always Playing Appeal to sustain our work at LSO St Luke's and allow us to continue sharing our music with the broadest range of people possible.

Every donation will help to support our future.


You can also donate now via text.

Text LSOAPPEAL 5, LSOAPPEAL 10 or LSOAPPEAL 20 to 70085 to donate £5, £10 or £20.

Texts cost £5, £10 or £20 plus one standard rate message and you’ll be opting in to hear more about our work and fundraising via telephone and SMS. If you’d like to give but do not wish to receive marketing communications, text LSOAPPEALNOINFO 5, 10 or 20 to 70085. UK numbers only.

Next BBC Radio 3 Concert

Wednesday 23 June 1pm, LSO St Luke's
Artist Spotlight:
Laura van der Heijden & Jâms Coleman

Laura van der Heijden and Jâms Coleman delve into rich folk melodies and fairy tales in this lunchtime concert.

Kodály Sonatina
Dvořák Songs My Mother Taught Me
Janáček Pohádka
Beethoven Cello Sonata No 1 in F major, Op 5 No 1

Laura van der Heijden cello
Jâms Coleman piano

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Programme Contributors

Kate Hopkins writes on classical music and on literature. Her work has featured in publications including The Wagner Journal, NB Magazine and programme books for The Royal Opera, ENO and WNO. 

Andrew Stewart is a freelance music journalist and writer. He is the author of The LSO at 90, and contributes to a wide variety of specialist classical music publications.