Hayes, Morgan: Dark Room. Rental
Duration: 12 minutes
For solo clarinet, flute/piccolo, oboe, bassoon/contrabassoon, horn in F, trumpet in C, trombone, harp, vibraphone/tenor drum/hi-hat, cymbals/tambourine, piano, two violins, viola, cello and double bass
Commissioned by Jouko Heikura for Mark van de Wiel
1st perf: Mark van de Wiel (clarinet), London Sinfonietta, Martyn Brabbins (cond), Assembly Rooms (Bath International Music Festival), Bath, 30 May 2003
Full score and instrumental material
A recent holiday in Morocco, and in particular Tangier with its crumbling remnants of grandiose mansions, distilled some of the essential inspirations behind so many of my compositions.
Decay is therefore a major feature of this mini clarinet concerto – the clearly etched textures of the opening becoming more opaque in later transformations and the clarinet soloist moving away from a limited collection of pitches to much darker (chromatic) areas.
Another essential preoccupation of the piece (the reverse of the above) is the idea of the darkroom in photography where an image comes into focus. The two opposing types of material heard at the start abruptly alternate and never quite resolve, but on each appearance become fuller and more extended.
© 2003 Morgan Hayes
The sensuality … was supplied by music by other composers, most notably Morgan Hayes’s Dark Room – a sexy, very operatic clarinet concerto.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 16 February 2004
… Morgan Hayes’s teeming but also convincingly evolving Dark Room for clarinet and ensemble.
Keith Potter, The Independent, 20 February 2004
Morgan Hayes’s Dark Room, formally a short clarinet concerto, was a luscious wash of decaying and emerging patterns, inspired by the crumbling mansions of Tangier and the hardening images of developing photographs.
H. E. Elsom, ConcertoNet.com, February 2004