Emma Johnson

Emma Johnson: The Clarinettist Who Skipped Conservatory

In 1984 an eighteen-year-old won BBC Young Musician of the Year playing a concerto by Bernhard Crusell — a Finnish-Swedish composer few listeners could have named — with the BBC Philharmonic under Bryden Thomson. What made the victory strange was not the repertoire. It was that Emma Johnson had never attended a music college and had no intention of doing so. She went to Cambridge instead, read English and Music, and built one of the most commercially successful careers in British classical music without ever passing through the conservatory system that trains almost everybody else.

Orpington, Sevenoaks, And A Deliberate Refusal

Johnson was born on 20 May 1966 in Barnet, Hertfordshire. She attended Newstead Wood School for Girls in Orpington and then Sevenoaks School, where she studied clarinet with John Brightwell. At fifteen she joined the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, the standard proving ground for serious British teenage players.

Then came the decision that defines her. Rather than proceeding to the Royal Academy or the Royal College — the expected route for a BBC Young Musician winner — she matriculated at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1985 to read English and Music, taking clarinet lessons alongside her degree from Sidney Fell and Jack Brymer. Brymer was the presiding figure of English clarinet playing, a soloist and orchestral principal of enormous authority. Johnson got the teaching without the institution.

1984 And The Crusell Gamble

Her BBC Young Musician win came with a second honour the same year: a bronze award at the European Young Musician Competition. But it is the choice of Crusell's Second Concerto that repays attention. Competition finalists typically reach for Mozart or Weber — the safe monuments that let a jury measure a player against a known standard. Johnson chose a work outside the everyday repertoire and won with it. Advocacy for neglected music, rather than perfect delivery of familiar music, would become her method.

Barbican, 10 February 1985

Her London debut came at the Barbican Hall on 10 February 1985, playing the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the English Chamber Orchestra. That same year she signed an exclusive recording contract with ASV Records. By her third year at Cambridge she had performed in the principal British concert halls and with professional orchestras — a working soloist and an undergraduate simultaneously.

In 1991 she won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, which brought a Carnegie Hall debut in New York and, with it, an American career.

The Kitchen Garden Accident

In 1987 Johnson recorded the theme and soundtrack music for the BBC series *The Victorian Kitchen Garden*. It became one of those pieces of television music that escapes its programme entirely: the theme won the Ivor Novello Award for best TV theme in 1991, and it put the sound of a solo clarinet into hundreds of thousands of British living rooms that would never have bought a concerto record.

The commercial consequences were substantial. Johnson has sold more than half a million discs worldwide, making her one of Britain's biggest-selling classical artists — a distinction almost never achieved by a wind player.

Half A Million Discs

Her discography runs from 1985 to 2022 across ASV, Universal Classics and Jazz, Naxos, Nimbus and Champs Hill, and covers Mozart, Weber, Crusell, Finzi, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Beethoven, Prokofiev and Hindemith. The landmarks include *Voyage* (2004), *The Mozart Album* (2005), the *Brahms Sonatas* (2012), *English Fantasy* (2016) and *Songs of Celebration* (2022).

The critical reception has matched the sales. *The Observer* called her Brahms and Mendelssohn sonatas disc "definitive...triumphant...a landmark disc." Her recording of the Finzi Concerto drew a Gramophone award nomination. *Pastoral* was named BBC Music Magazine's CD of the Year.

What underpins all of it is a structural fact about her instrument: the clarinet has a limited solo repertoire and almost no tradition of full-time soloists. Johnson is, in the plain description of the record, "one of the few clarinettists to have established a busy career as a solo performer" — a career that has taken her across Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Australasia.

The Composer

The second half of her working life has added authorship to performance. Johnson is a published composer, with works and arrangements issued by Chesters, Faber Music and Queen's Temple Publishing. During the pandemic lockdown she wrote *Tree of Life*, a clarinet concerto prompted by the climate crisis, premiered by the Orchestra for the Environment. *Songs of Celebration*, for clarinet and choir, has been performed in Dublin, London and Tokyo.

A soloist with a thin repertoire has two options: keep re-recording the same dozen masterpieces, or write more. Johnson took the second.

Why Emma Is Called a Genius

The case is unusual because it rests on strategy as much as on playing, and both parts deserve stating honestly. Nobody in the documented record calls Emma Johnson a genius in those words; what the record shows is a musician who correctly diagnosed a structural problem and solved it.

The problem: the clarinet has perhaps six great concertos and no tradition of full-time solo careers. The solution she executed over four decades has four parts — win on unfamiliar repertoire rather than familiar, take a Cambridge English degree instead of a conservatory place, use television and popular recording to build an audience far larger than the recital circuit provides, and then write new music when the existing repertoire runs out. Half a million discs sold and a Gramophone-nominated Finzi are the result. So is the fact that she performs on five continents at all.

The playing skill itself is physical and specific: control of breath, embouchure and reed to sustain a singing line across the clarinet's notoriously uneven registers, with the tonal evenness that made *The Observer* call her Brahms "definitive." That is craft, not intellect, and the distinction matters.

The counter-case is that her competition record is a single national television title from 1984, that her fame owes something to a piece of BBC theme music rather than to the concert hall, and that a large-selling classical catalogue is not the same as an influential one. Johnson's honours — an MBE in 1996, an honorary fellowship at Pembroke in 1999, the Cobbett Medal in 2020 — reward service and durability more than originality. The honest word is not genius but strategist of the highest order: a player who thought harder about her instrument's predicament than anyone else and outlasted every objection.

The Firsts

In 1996 Johnson was appointed MBE for services to music. In 1999 she became the first woman honorary fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; in 2016 the first female alumna to have her portrait unveiled there. In 2020 the Musicians' Company in the City of London awarded her the Cobbett Medal for services to chamber music.

Those two Pembroke firsts, fourteen and thirty-one years after she arrived as an undergraduate, say something about the institution as well as about her. The clarinettist who declined to go to music college ended up on the wall of the college she chose instead — the only place, in the end, that could claim her.