On Saturday, 17 October, at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall, Mark Simpson gave the world premiere of Gavin Higgins’s Clarinet Concerto. Adam Hickox conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The programme opened with Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes and closed with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The Guardian published the review the next day.

Higgins had promised Simpson a concerto twenty years earlier, after a short clarinet-and-piano piece, the composer’s first paid commission, in 2006, the year Simpson won BBC Young Musician. The promise waited for an orchestra, a hall and a slot. The RLPO co-commissioned the score. Simpson closes his artist-in-residence tenure with this premiere.

The concerto runs about 33 minutes, in four movements with a cadenza. Higgins tied them to night and to queer literature: Andrew Holleran, Jeremy Atherton Lin, David Tait, Guillaume Dustan. The movement titles appear in the orchestra’s programme note. The Guardian kept them as a programme, not as an ideological verdict. The music is a premiere; the readings remain the composer’s.

Hickox, born in 1996, has been chief conductor in Trondheim since autumn 2025 and principal conductor of the Glyndebourne Sinfonia. In Liverpool he came back with Britten, ahead of the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, and with the Rite, the piece that, Higgins has said, pushed him toward composing when he saw it, still a schoolboy, in Manchester.

The RLPO listing and Simpson’s own page put the same hours: 7:30–9:30 p.m., Hope Street. BBC Radio 3 has scheduled the recording for Tuesday, 27 October, at 7:30 p.m., in “Radio 3 in Concert,” presented by Penny Gore. That is a recorded concert, not a review. Hall tickets, as Simpson announced them, ran from £16.50 to £71.50.

The Guardian heard a premiere twenty years in the making and an orchestra that held, on the same night, Britten’s folk suite and the 1913 rite. Higgins had said beforehand that the night in the concerto is not a drawing-room nocturne. The review confirms the piece took place, with Simpson as soloist. The rest is each listener’s ear, in Liverpool on Saturday or on Radio 3 on 27 October.

Image: Rodhullandemu, facade of Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; the Hope Street building, not the 17 October 2026 concert.

Sources consulted: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Hickox review - The Guardian; The Rite of Spring - Liverpool Philharmonic.