Programme Note
Composer Note:
The premiere of Wind Canticle is the latest and most personal collaborative effort I have shared with soloist David Shifrin since 1985, when we fIrst met and worked with one another... After working together several times during the next three years, Mr. Shifrin proposed commissioning a clarinet concerto from me. I began sketching the present composition two years later, and completed the score in five months, between February and July of 1991, in Newton and Truro, Massachusetts. The work is approximately fourteen minutes long. Its single movement adheres roughly to the design of an extended Sonata-Allegro form: Introduction, Exposition (containing two contrasting thematic sections), Development, Recapitulation (beginning with the second theme's abbreviated return followed by an extensive restatement of the first theme), Coda.
-- Stephen Albert