‘You’ll be sorry you told me this!’: the 98-year-old composer who gets musicians – even bassoonists - on their feet

Scotland’s Thea Musgrave is still writing radical music with perambulatory soloists and a message of hopefulness.

Her latest work, for bassoonist Amy Harman, comes to the Proms this weekend Thea Musgrave is a phenomenon.

Born in Scotland in 1928, the composer has lived in the US since the early 70s, but has lost none of her accent, her infectious optimism, and her drive to keep writing.

As she told me from her home in California, with a joyfully rolling laugh, “I’ve got to this age, and from now on I’m going to do what the fuck I want to do”.

That includes her latest opera, on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando – Orlando: An Escapade – which will premiere at the Buxton festival next year , and a new bassoon concerto for Amy Harman, Out of the Darkness, which you can hear at the Proms this weekend, on 23 August .

The bassoon concerto develops one of the central innovations of Musgrave’s life and career, which she’s still intensifying and exploring in her 99th year: what she calls her “dramatic-abstract” approach to her orchestral compositions, in which the players aren’t a single collective told what to do by a conductor’s gestures, but instead are released as individual characters and identities.

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