SOMM Recordings is pleased to release Clarinet Concertos, four works for solo clarinet and wind orchestra, including two world-premiere recordings. The soloist is the English clarinettist, Peter Cigleris, who enjoys a wide and varied career and is in great demand as a soloist and chamber musician. His burgeoning career as a clarinet soloist has taken him to Festivals in Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the U.S.. Recently, he was invited to perform in Györ, Hungary for the European Clarinet Festival, which led to a special invitation from the Györ Symphonic Band to record four hugely enjoyable concertos for clarinet and wind orchestra. These are conducted by László Marosi, the world’s foremost authority on Hungarian wind music, and Ferenc Szabó, the founder of the Györ Symphonic Band.

This release opens with the première recording of Concerto Semplice for clarinet and wind orchestra by the prolific Hungarian composer Frigyes Hidas (1928–2007). The concerto is written in a direct, almost classical, tonal language that portrays the composer’s belief in traditional forms and syntax.

Cigleris has given première performances of a number of new works for the clarinet, and he played the first performance of Sonatina in One Movement by the award-winning British composer Simon Milton. So, when composing his Concerto for Clarinet and Band, Milton knew that he “could push what I felt was playable and turn it into a challenge, whilst also maintaining a lyrical and sweet sound to the clarinet part.” SOMM presents the première recording here.

The Concerto for Clarinet and Wind Orchestra, written in 2014 by American composer David Maslanka (1943–2017), is an imposing composition in two large movements: “Lamentation” and “Dance.” He described these as relating to “old forms such as the toccata and fugue – a free improvisatory movement followed by a rhythmically energized and formally strict second movement.”

This collection closes with a Clarinet Concerto from 2010 by one of the leading Japanese composers of music for wind instruments, Satoshi Yagisawa (b.1975). The work has achieved great popularity and is considered a major contribution to the composer’s “Concerto Series”. It is written in the traditional three-movement concerto form, played attacca with linking cadenzas for the clarinet solo.

Peter Cigleris’s previous collaborations with SOMM include Eclogue – British Chamber Music (SOMMCD 0653) and a full disc of first recordings, Dedication: The Clarinet Chamber Music of Ruth Gipps (SOMMCD 0641). This includes Gripps’s Clarinet Sonata, one of the finest such works by any British composer, for which she won the Cobbett Prize of the Society of Women Musicians. The Gramophone review praised Cigleris and accompanist Duncan Honeybourne as “ideal executants in an account I cannot see being bettered any time soon.”