Peter’s compositions are always a satisfying mix of both head and heart. Bold and dramatic, intense and expressive, his music is highly communicative and persuasive. His Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra, which I premiered, is a wonderful work, brimming with exciting virtuosity and rhythmic vitality as well as emotionally compelling lyricism.
- Margaret Fingerhut 19th September 2023
Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra was commissioned by The Musicians of All Saints with funding from Arts Council England. The first performance was given by Margaret Fingerhut with The Musicians of All Saints, conducted by Andrew Sherwood at St Luke's Church, Brighton on the 8th November 2014. The starting point for my concerto was a short piano solo called
Scherzino, which I composed in 1995 for a commissioner who wanted exactly one minute of music. The piece was later recorded by Stephanie Cant and is
included on a CD ‘Music from a Sussex Shore’, issued by New Music Brighton. I always felt that both the basic idea and the specific musical language devised for this piece had potential for further development but it was many years before I had an opportunity to follow this up. I had long been an admirer of Margaret Fingerhut’s playing and the idea of writing a concerto especially for her first started to take shape in my mind when Margaret appeared as a soloist with The Musicians of All Saints at All Saints Church, Hove in January 2010. However, other composing commitments took over and it wasn’t until receiving this commission – and a deadline - that my ideas started to take a definite form.
The original piano solo mostly survives in the first movement, chopped up and otherwise modified but the same basic material is expanded and developed in all three movements. All the movements are in various kinds of ‘arch’ form. The first is in five main sections, with the first and last parts based on the original idea. The second and fourth parts are transitional in nature, framing the central slower interlude. The second movement was partly conceived as a belated tribute to Benjamin Britten for his centenary year, as it is a Chacony. Both the actual form and the English version of its description (Chacony, rather than Chaconne) were frequently employed by Britten. The successive variations on the opening idea also form a kind of arch, although perfect symmetry is deliberately subverted by an extended and freer piano cadenza based on the same idea that leads without a break to the final movement. This is a fugue and again, the basic form is an ‘arch’ in three main sections. After the ‘exposition’, the middle section is mostly based on the ‘counter subject’ and is followed by a kind of reprise, except that the subject (the initial idea) is mostly inverted. Again, exact symmetry is subverted by the final section ‘Scherzo’, which also acts as a coda to the whole work.
