Dalwyn Henshall - Composer

Dalwyn Henshall's first major concerted work is the Oboe Concerto written while a postgraduate student at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where he studied under Einojuhani Rautavaara: this was followed a year later by the Harp Concerto and concerted works for several instruments including a Concerto for Euphonium and Brass Band. (The latter was composed alongside a number of pieces for brass band including Variations & Fugue (pub. Boosey & Hawkes), which was used as a test piece in the National Brass Band Championships.

More conventional works of this type include a Violin Concerto and Cello Concerto.  The Concerto for Percussion and Strings, however, marked a new direction, both stylistically and structurally.  It was comissioned by the Swansea Feastival with funds provided by the Welsh Arts Council and first perfomed by Evelyn Glennie, Richard Hickox and the BBCNOW.

A more recent work is the Clarinet Concerto.  As ever, the music stems from an encounter with real musicianship.  Discussion with the extraordinarily gifted clarinettist, Malcolm Macmillan one sunny afternoon in Boulogne after a perfect lunch resulted in the Concerto.  On being asked what he thought some attractive effects might be for this instrument, the reply came "quickly repeated notes, staccato, subtle dynamic control - crescendos from nothing - and offbeat or syncopated tunes" hence all feature throughout: repeated notes largely in the Finale as well as characteristic skips of a 12th.  Early - and exceptionally fond - remembrance and familiarity of Finzi's music inspired the comment "Finzi-like".  Finzi enthusiasts will know from where, and why it comes: there is an autobiographical reference here too!

Part of the composer's lifelong fascination with concerted forms, the concerto proper, concerto grosso and concertante effects probably stem from the sheer impossibilty, in the composer's view, of reconciling extreme modernism using for instrumental forces a soloist pitted against a larger ensemble given that two of the defining characteristics of modernism are extreme complexity/difficulty and extreme originalty.  Whereas the former is the defining characteristic of "soloist" (it would be oxymoronic and stupid in the extreme to maintain otherwise), solo parts in the mainstream tradition have drawn from the tradition of improvisation on the one hand and on coherence in context of the (sometimes) subordinate part on the other.  Whithout a meaningful context/texture the one cannot be differentiated from the other.  Think of a figurative picture of a cow standing in a field: if the cow looks exactly like the field, how can one tell the difference between what is a cow and what is a field?

Assuming, of course, that the intention is to portray a cow standing in a field!  That will also tell you the composer's opinion of abstract painting vs. figurative painting.

The first movement is now available on sibeliusmusic.com

This conundrum is encapsulated in what might be termed the "piano concerto problem" that faces any composer contemplating wrtiting such a piece.  Possibly, even more than symphonic writing which is, itself, hard to pin down though one instinctively recognizes something as being symphonic as easily as it possible to dismiss an idea as being "un-symphonic", concerto-type textures are, by definition, complex/difficult writing for soloist(s) set against a (typically) subordinate accompaniment as described above and it is just as possible to determine that someithing sound just like concerto texture or not, as the case may be.  Just as there is an enormous heritage of symphonic writing, there is as substantial (if not as numerically large) a corpus of concertos for piano.  Before composing a concerto for piano, then, the composer is compelled to ask hiself or herself how the proposed composition would compare with,say, any one from the list of  - Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Gershwin, Shostakovitch, Uncle Tom Cobbley, et al.  The list is awesome.

It can be daunting.

The answer is not to care a hoot about originality.  This is probably the reason that the score of this Concerto was rejected by the BBC Reading Panel, though one (anonymnous) reviewer left an imprint on the score that "this would be fun to do".  The composer doubts very much that this comment should have been left there for him to read.  Time will tell if rejection by the BBC Reading Panel was/is on a par with Groucho Marx's observations regarding membership of clubs.

The opening bars of the soloist's exposition in the first movement give the game away.  No prizes are given for spotting the antecedents.  Regarding rejection, though, the composer will donate his personal share of all royalties from sales/broadcast to any charity of choice to the first recording company that makes a CD of the work! 

Other orchestral works include the short tone poems The Penydarren Locomotive (first performed and broadcast by the BBC NOW), Daniel Owen (commisssioned by the National Eisteddfod of Wales with funds provided by the Welsh Arts Council).