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Biographical note |
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photo: Jeremy Pembrey
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His Quintet and Angels’ Song are on the 2003–6 shortlist of the SPNM. They join his Five Mediæval Lyrics which were premiered by the BBC Singers when on the 2001–4 shortlist.
Most of his compositions are of chamber music. Recent small scale works include a variety of pieces for solo instruments, a meditative setting of the Anima Christi (2000) for tenor and cello, and the Song of the Wayfarer (2000) for solo tenor recorder. Larger scale works include a setting of the Magnificat (1999), written for the Loki ensemble to perform in the closing concert of the 1999 Kingston Early Music Festival, and his Song of the Beloved, setting part of the Song of Songs for tenor, two baroque flutes, harpsichord and cello, received its premiere in 2002.
More recent works include Angels’ Song (2002) which weaves together the mediæval plainchant sedit angelus and part of the resurrection narrative in John’s gospel, and a Quintet for three recorders, harpsichord & gamba, which is an experiment in whole-tone composition, an Osterley Suite III for clavichord, and the string quartet movement Fløyen in the rain. Things in his sketch pad include material to expand Fløen in the rain into a string quartet, music for muselar virginals and for recorder, and fragments of an exploration of the seasons for three sopranos.
As a performer he is usually to be found playing a five string baroque cello. Often this means historically informed performances of baroque music, but he also uses the same instrument for appropriate modern music, and for jazz. He is the cellist of the ensemble Catch! which mixes baroque and modern music, played on baroque instruments. Bringing together the worlds of jazz and baroque music, he has recently performed five of the Mystery Sonatas of the seventeenth-century German composer Heinrich Biber, playing the violin part an octave lower than written on the top four strings of a five-string cello, with jazz bass “continuo”.
His transcriptions are usually of eighteenth century music, following the baroque practice of adapting works from one instrumentation to another. His cello transcription of J. S. Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor was featured in the autumn 2000 issue of Musical Times. Susan Sheppard gave the première and second performance in February 2002. His trio sonata transcription of the sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord in D major by J. S. Bach received its first three performances by Catch! in their 1999/2000 season.
His main musicological interest is in the musical life of eighteenth-century London, and his edition of the Recollections of the musician R. J. S. Stevens were published by Macmillan in 1992. He edited Early Music News (2001–2003) and writes for Early Music Today and Goldberg magazines.