Gwyn Pritchard: Nocturne
for solo clarinet 

Nocturne (1982) is a modified extract from my piece Moondance, which is a kind of chamber concerto for solo clarinet with string trio and percussion. In the first movement of Moondance the soloist is unaccompanied, and after hearing it a number of times I decided that the movement could, with some changes, stand alone as a piece in its own right. Some aspects of the music, which in the original were appropriate to the opening of a large scale piece required changing so as to suit the shorter time scale of the new piece, and an entirely new ending was needed, not only because the original led directly to the second movement but to give a new formal meaning to the piece as a whole. The title refers back to the night-time imagery of the original.

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