Fantasy Sonata in E flat (1943)

Andante moderato – più lento – giusto

Frederick Thurston, the clarinettist for whom Ireland wrote his Fantasy-Sonata, must have been delighted by what he saw when the the composer sent the score to him. It most resourcefully exploits not only the whole of the clarinet range but also much of an expressive potential far greater than that of any other woodwind instrument. At the same time it is a masterly, if curiously late, example of the “fantasy” sonata form so emergetically promoted among English composers by W.W.Cobbett before and after the First World War – which is to say that it contains all the elements of the conventional three-or-four movement sonata within one continuous structure. Thematically, it is based on the melody introduced in the top register of the clarint in the opening bars, which supplies much of the material for the rhapsodically expansive opening section, for a lyical slow movement and for a fiercely percussive, stridently brilliant finale.