Tate wrote Sonata for Clarinet and Cello upon discovering that (at that time) only one work had been written for this duo of instruments. It was first performed in 1947 by Frederick Thurston and William Pleeth, to whom she dedicated the piece.  

The Sonata for Clarinet and Cello is one of Phyllis’s most performed works.  

Phyllis discovered that only one work had been written for these instruments, a duet of 1894 by a clarinettist named Johann Sobeck. She set to work on the Sonata, which was critically acclaimed as a ‘minor masterpiece’ and ‘a tour de force of the first order, revealing a wonderful sense of colour’ (Music and Letters 1950). 

The first movement is fairly slow and mostly cantabile. A feature is the persistent interruption of the flow by a curious sotto voce semitonal passage between the two instruments, as if played in brackets. The second and third movements are fairly straightforward from the audience’s point of view. The fourth movement is the most elaborate and takes the form of free variations on thematic material heard in the first movement, but now much transformed. 

Following the first performance at the Wigmore Hall, Martin Cooper wrote in The Spectator:  ‘At this concert the work of a young English composer, Phyllis Tate, quite overshadowed the small works by great names which composed the rest of the programme. The imaginative power, the real mercurial emotion and the wit and skill with which the two instruments are blended and contrasted makes this essay entirely successful.’ 

The Sonata was one of the works chosen to represent our country at the International Society of Contemporary Music Festival in Salzburg in 1952. Since then it has been performed many times, recently by The Varenne Ensemble (Elaine Cocks, clarinet and Robin Michael, cello) at a NASDA concert in 2014.