OK -- say you were paid to listen to and promote hundreds of new classical recordings every month and travel the world to broker new deals for one of the largest recorded music companies of our day.

The question is, “What would you do in your spare time?”

Well, if you’re a composer, the answer is easy: write your own music, of course.

That’s the case for Sean Hickey, whose “day job” is being the Senior Vice-President for Sales and Business Development at Naxos of America, but who also finds time to create his own chamber and orchestral works.

On today’s date in 2007, for example, his Clarinet Concerto received its premiere performance at Symphony Space in New York City, with David Gould as soloist with the Metro Chamber Orchestra. It’s gone on to be his most-performed orchestra work, and, in keeping with Hickey’s globe-trotting, has been recorded in the Russian Federation by another virtuoso clarinetist, Alexander Fiterstein with the St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony. The work also incorporates fragments of folk tunes from Scotland as part of the creative mix.

“I wanted to compose a work in traditional three-movement concerto form,” says Hickey, “where form and virtuosity synergize and complement one another.”

And why those Scottish themes? “They have a timeless quality of most great folk music, “says Hickey. “In the concerto’s cadenza, a fiddle tune leads headlong into a rapturous close.”