Malcolm Arnold Clarinet Sonatina Pdf Now
(to hear Frederick Thurston’s interpretation)
This Sonatina is a rite of passage. Owning a clean, legal PDF ensures you have the correct accidentals and bowings (articulations) that the composer intended. Do not let a blurry, pirated scan ruin your chance to play one of the greatest works in the clarinet repertoire. malcolm arnold clarinet sonatina pdf
Yet the sonatina is not merely a technical exercise. Its true demand is interpretative: capturing the mercurial shifts in mood from brash to tender, from witty to wistful. A performance that is only loud and fast misses the work’s haunted undercurrent. Yet the sonatina is not merely a technical exercise
The finale is a rondo in all but name, driven by a 6/8 tarantella-like rhythm. Arnold unleashes the clarinet’s full virtuosity: rapid-fire tonguing, wide leaps from low E to high C, and playful cross-rhythms. The movement is a showcase of controlled chaos. A recurring “stamping” piano chord interrupts the flow, to which the clarinet responds with increasingly outrageous runs. There is a clear debt to the folk-inflected finales of Bartók and the neo-baroque gigues of Stravinsky. The coda accelerates to a Presto and ends with a brusque, almost rude, downward flourish—a final wink from the composer. The overall effect is exhilarating, leaving the audience breathless. The finale is a rondo in all but
The movement opens with a percussive, four-note piano motif (G–A–B♭–E), an acrid cell that will permeate the entire sonatina. The clarinet enters immediately with a leaping, syncopated theme full of angular intervals. Arnold treats the clarinet not as a lyrical instrument but as a rhythmic spearhead. The development section is a whirlwind of staccato articulation, hemiolas, and sudden dynamic contrasts ( subito piano after a sforzando). The movement’s “con brio” (with brilliance) is relentless; there is no true second subject, only a more cantabile but still restless idea in the relative major. The recapitulation compresses the material, ending with a snarling cadence that segues directly into the second movement.
