Twenty years ago, two teenagers made an informal deal at the edge of their careers: Mark Simpson won both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year, commissioned a short piece from Gavin Higgins, and Higgins promised a full clarinet concerto in return. That debt, accrued across two award-studded careers, was finally paid in Liverpool's Philharmonic Hall. The concerto arrives not as an obligation honoured but as a collaboration between musicians who have spent two decades learning what each other is capable of. That matters enormously to how the piece sits on the soloist. Simpson didn't perform a concerto written for a generic virtuoso — he inhabited a score written for the specific weight, colour, and physicality of his playing, and the difference is audible. Highins writes in slow-burn waves and paroxysms of frenetic activity, and his orchestral palette is thick with incident: muted brass haloing the clarinet line, a low hum of gong and double bass providing ground beneath soaring passages, climaxes that build with the patience of someone who knows the soloist can sustain them. The clarinet writing moves between keening vocalise and wild assemblages of rapid blips and riffs, covering enormous expressive range without ever feeling like a display exercise. Two shadows fall across the score — John Adams at his most maximalist and Aaron Copland's celebrated clarinet concerto — but they are ghosts in the texture, not templates. Simpson's sheer focus of tone let him punch through the full orchestral surge when required, and in at least one passage his clarinet became, in the Guardian's own phrase, 'a fine, luminous gauze.' The physicality of the performance was unmistakable as soloist and orchestra drove ecstatically to the close. Conductor Adam Hickox shaped the rest of the programme with the same directness. Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes opened with vicious timpani strokes and sustained its dark undertone throughout — string articulation precise, woodwind solos served with acid bite. After the interval, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was thrillingly direct in the hall's bright acoustic. The woodwind solos of the opening were solid rather than atmospheric, but Hickox's tightly controlled pacing cast its own spell: he struck jagged poses like a cubist figure, alive to the Rite's play of slackness and momentum. The orchestra was on fine form. Hickox's reputation as a major rising star was confirmed here rather than merely maintained. His Britten had genuine interpretive character — not just clean execution but a point of view about the suite's melancholy — and his Stravinsky demonstrated the rhythmic control the Rite demands without sacrificing the sense that something dangerous is happening. The combination of a major premiere and two canonical warhorses made for a programme with real structural logic: all three pieces are concerned, in different ways, with the tension between wildness and control. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 27 October, which means the premiere recording is accessible. For listeners who care about new British concert music, or about what a genuinely bespoke concerto sounds like when it lands correctly, this is worth the ninety minutes.
