Clarinet Concerto by Ebenezer Prout

World premier of the Clarinet Concerto by Ebenezer Prout (1835-1909)
Clarinet: Peter Cigleris
Conductor: David Cutts
Greenwich Chamber Orchestra
Live performance at St Alfege Church, Greenwich, London. 4th March 2023

In the late summer of 2014 whilst generally looking through the online archive catalogue of the Royal Academy of Music I stumbled across the concerto by Ebenezer Prout that you will hear this evening for the very first time. This discovery took me on a journey to find out more about Prout the composer but also why there is no record of this concerto existing.
Seeing the concerto listed and only knowing about a clarinet sonata that Prout had composed in 1882 really piqued my interest so I set about arranging a time to study the manuscript. The next step was to obtain a copy of the manuscript which I was able to do by proving that the work was a ‘orphan work’. Through this process I discovered that after Prout’s death in 1909 his entire collection of manuscripts, scores etc. were sold to Trinity College Dublin where he taught.
According to the archivist at Trinity College, Prout was quite fastidious in keeping a record of his compositions and the fact the clarinet concerto was not listed poses quite the mystery. There was precedence however as Prout, in 1884 orchestrated the slow movement of his clarinet sonata but rather frustratingly doesn’t help in dating the concerto. This was likely for Henry Lazarus who was the foremost clarinettist of the day and clarinet professor at the Royal Academy of Music were Prout taught composition. This then leads to two questions which may or may not ever be answered.
Did Prout compose the concerto for Henry Lazarus or Leonard W. Beddome (a friend of Prout’s and student of Lazarus) only for him to give the only manuscript out and to forget about it as a performance couldn’t be arranged?
Or
Did Prout consider this concerto unworthy, destroy his own manuscript and have it stricken from his own record with the surviving copy at the Royal Academy of Music being intended for the soloist? We know from an interview that Prout gave for the Musical Times, April 1st, 1899, that he did this. I quote, “All works written before 1856, as well as some rubbish perpetrated since, I have destroyed.”.
I will leave the answers to you the audience.

#backun #backunmusical #chamberorchestra #clarinet #live #worldpremier #liveperformance #english #englishmusic