Newspaper Article

DAME THEA KING ; Influential clarinettist and teacher

Anderson, Martin

2007

Overview

She went on to make 17 more recordings for Hyperion, her catholic choice of composers running from 18th-century figures such as the Finn Bernhard Crusell and Mozart's student Franz Sossmayr via the standard clarinet classics, Mozart and Brahms, to her contemporaries Malcolm Arnold, Howard Blake, Benjamin Britten (for whom she had played at Aldeburgh in the 1950s and 1960s), Arnold Cooke, Benjamin Frankel, Gordon Jacob, Elizabeth Maconchy, Alan Rawsthorne and Robert Simpson, earning their considerable gratitude - indeed, Blake's Concerto, Frankel's Quintet, Jacob's Mini Concerto and Maconchy's Fantasia are dedicated to her. King's interest in the early-music movement didn't extend as far as performance (she lacked the time to spe-cialise, she explained) but she readily learned from it, and was one of the first to play the Mozart Concerto and Quintet on a basset horn: \"Playing the basset horn in Mozart's divertimenti convinced me that the concerto was written for a clarinet with an extended lower compass.\" The discovery of Mozart's \"Winterthur manuscript\" in the early 1960s was soon to prove her right. With the ceaseless energy that fuelled her life, she refused to be diverted by age. She continued to play the piano, taking especial pleasure in chamber music. At a centenary concert for her husband in 2001 she played the piano part in John Ireland's Fantasy Sonata - written for him 58 years earlier - and for the BBC she recorded all three parts (clarinet, basset horn and piano) of Mendelssohn's Konzertstock, Op. 114, for broadcast in the Radio 3 series Double Exposure, the title in this instance understating what was on offer. She enjoyed the theatre and confessed a fondness for Sondheim. She edited a number of clarinet works for publication and listed her other enthusiasms as \"cows, pillow lace, painting\".

• Publisher: Independent Digital News & Media
• Subject: Draper, Charles / Thurston, Frederick