Saturday 21 April 2012

I was very sad to hear of the death of clarinettist and conductor Alan Hacker on Monday. Alan was one of my teachers at York in the 1980s, and it’s not to do the others down to say that he was easily the one who influenced me the most. His musicianship was breathtaking (he wasn’t principal clarinet of the LPO aged 19 for nothing), and his musical interests and enthusiasms were wide-ranging: besides having the likes of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies regularly write pieces for him, he conducted the first modern UK performance of Beethoven’s 9th on original instruments, worked often with jazzers like Tony Coe, and was a great enthusiast for the music of Delius and Vaughan Williams, which as students desperately trying to be cool, we would sneer at of course. Below the (usually) cheery surface and personal kindness, there was also an underlying anger and frustration that drove things along with unstoppable momentum.

His recording of Weber’s clarinet quintet is one of my favourite chamber music recordings ever (if not the favourite). It still makes me gasp and swear at some of the things he does, and all of it grows directly from the piece and the instrument, rather than from an imposition of his ‘interpretation’. It’s wild, exhilarating, sometimes not quite in tune, and you can almost hear the shock of Duncan Druce and the other string players, including our very own Carolyn Sparey on viola, at what is coming out of the clarinet in the middle of them all. It was 1978 (I wonder if Alan had much experience of punk at that point) and in the UK no-one else was really trying to play romantic repertoire on old instruments, as no-one had yet acquired enough technique to give it a go. He’s playing on an instrument from about a decade before the quintet was written, and it sounds like he wrestles the sounds and the myriad notes out of its not-quite-adequate mechanism by sheer force of will. His fortissimo is like being punched in the face – you don’t normally expect that from chamber music, do you?

Anyway, I have very happy memories of, amongst other things, a project on Classical Music that he taught in his house, where we rehearsed Mozart’s piano concerto K.415 on the square piano in his garage (a Broadwood copy made by Alastair Laurence), and over bottles of Sam Smiths at lunch Alan told us about the history of what we now call the historical performance movement from his unique perspective, with a social rather than an academic impetus.  Speaking of academia, his approach to essay marking was thorough and systematic: he was a university senior lecturer without even a degree, but he certainly wasn’t an intellectual lightweight.

We have his many recordings (if you can seek them out), you can hear him in conversation with Sue Lawley here, and I will always remember his enthusiasm ‘Good mew-sic, isn’t it?’, and the sight of him at a party in his house, helpless with laughter at an LP of Dame Edna Everage singing Why Do We Love Australia with Carl Davis.  In fact, I could fill many pages with happy and inspiring memories of Alan: I learnt a hell of a lot about music both from his example and from his anecdotes. I’m very glad to have spent time in his company.