To call a four-part composition The Seasons is not to set much store by originality, but Thea Musgrave’s orchestral autumn-to-summer cycle, written in 1988, is bursting with freshly imagined pictorial details. The longstanding credentials of this Scottish-born, American-resident Boulanger pupil (who will be 70 next year) are confirmed in music that makes a virtue of its French and American sympathies even before these become explicit in the quotation of national anthems in the final movement.
The Seasons is all the better for not aspiring to the kind of earnestly symphonic dialogues and arguments that dominate the two concertos. Though separated by a quarter of a century, the Clarinet Concerto (1968-9) and Autumn Sonata for bass clarinet and orchestra (1993-4) are both weighed down by sprawling forms and rather mechanical methods for extending and developing ideas. The earlier work (once available on LP: Argo, 8/75 – nla) is most effective in two central episodes (a scherzo and a slow section) which are sufficiently sustained to generate a strong sense of atmosphere, thanks in large part to Musgrave’s special way with instrumental colour. Autumn Sonata is at once too episodic and too undifferentiated in its routines. Moreover, despite the effectiveness with which the solo instrument is able to make its presence felt, the textures are often opaque, if not positively congested.
I have no quarrel with the recording, or with performances radiating energy and commitment: and with The Seasons, at least, we have well-crafted music of distinctive character.'