Article published by Manchester Evening News 17th February 2017

EMMA Johnson has been described as ‘Britain’s favourite clarinettist’. She won the BBC Young Musician competition in 1984, as a teenager, and she’s never looked back.

She’s one of the UK’s biggest-selling classical artists, and concerts take her all over the world. On February 24 she’s appearing at the Bridgewater Hall, as soloist with the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra and conductor Yutaka Sado, in the ever-popular clarinet concerto by Mozart.

Emma is a north-westerner by birth: her dad worked for the BBC in Manchester, and until the age of four she lived in Cheadle Hulme. “I learned to speak with a Mancunian accent,” she says, “and subconsciously I always find it warming to hear.

“Manchester played a big part in my life, too, as that Young Musician final was held in the Free Trade Hall, with the BBC Philharmonic.”

The family moved south, and from that time a love of music ruled her life.

“I was given a recorder at the age of four and a keyboard when I was six, and my parents didn’t need to make me practise. In fact they worried about me becoming a musician because it wasn’t a ‘safe’ career.

“At junior school we had free instruments and lessons, and I took up the clarinet with a good local teacher.

“Benny Goodman was a hero for me. His recordings inspired me – and the fact that he straddled the genres of classical and jazz.” (She does the same herself – with jazz encores at concerts, and recently brought out a jazz album with her own trio).

“Also Jack Brymer was on the jury at that Young Musician competition, and I had lessons with him after it. I think I learnt most from just listening to him: he had a way of making the clarinet sound like a singing voice … I’ve always tried to make it an extension of me, not just an instrument.”

She never went to music college, but studied English at Cambridge, except that “… I was getting so many professional engagements I had to change to reading music. That taught me how to analyse pieces, write orchestrations, and so on, and now I do a lot of my own arrangements.”

Emma finds she plays the Mozart concerto four or even more times every year. “It seems like an old friend. There’s something magical there – and I find something new every time.”