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US Premiere of David Matthews's Concerto for Piano with Orchestra of the Swan

Feb. 01, 2017

US Premiere of David Matthews's <em>Concerto for Piano</em> with Orchestra of the Swan

On February 26, the UK’s Orchestra of the Swan gives the American premiere of David Matthews’s Concerto for Piano at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Music Director David Curtis leads the orchestra, with soloist Thomas Nickell.

Matthews’s Concerto for Piano, scored for solo piano and string orchestra, was premiered in 2010 by pianist Helen Reid and the Dartington International Summer School at the medieval estate of Dartington Hall in England. Of the 21-minute, four-movement work, Matthews writes:

In my piece I have avoided the rhetoric and grand scale of the nineteenth-century concerto; my piano-writing is more Mozartian in conception. There are, moreover, no big cadenzas.

The first movement is the largest of the four: it is loosely in sonata form, with contrasting first and second subjects… The second movement is a tango…[which] seems to me an ideal substitute for the Classical minuet… The third movement, a slow blues called ‘Elegy’, was written in memory of Sue Skempton…the wife of my composer friend Howard Skempton. The finale, by contrast, is deliberately light-hearted.

The Orchestra of the Swan gave the London premiere of Matthews's Concerto for Piano in 2016, with Nickell as soloist:



For more information on David Matthews, visit fabermusic.com.

David Matthews
Concerto for Piano (2010)
for piano and strings
21’

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