Pianist Peter Seivewright is celebrating his 70th Birthday with a celebratory series of recitals at St. Mark’s Unitarian Church in Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
2rd August 2024 – 6:30 PM: Peter Seivewright performs a jazz pianoforte recital including music by George Gershwin and Friedrich Gulda
15th August 2024 – 8:00 PM: Peter Seiverwight performs Khachaturian’s legendary Piano Sonata and music by J.S. Bach.
24th August 2024 6:30 PM: On the 170th anniversary of Moszkowski’s birth, Peter Seivewright performs piano music by J.S. Bach and Moszkowski
British pianist Peter Seivewright is this month (October 2021) recording a significant new album for Divine Art, the label to which he has been signed since the mid-1990s.
The album is focused on the premiere recording of the 1976 Vietnam Sonata by Cornelius Cardew, and also includes recent compositions by two of Cardew’s comrades in music: Michael Chant and Hugh Shrapnel.
The recording represents a tribute to Cardew following the 85th anniversary (in 2021) of his birth and the 40th of his untimely death at the age of 45. Cardew, Chant and Shrapnel occupy a unique niche in British music. All three progressed from the British experimental music scene to being part of the movements of the working class and peoples for their rights, nationally and internationally, and writing music accordingly.
This recording was originally scheduled to be recorded last summer for release in December 2021, to coincide with those anniversaries, but had to be postponed due to a tragic bereavement; Stephen Sutton, CEO at Divine Art, is hoping now for a release to be achieved in February or March 2022.
Cardew’s Vietnam Sonata celebrates the victory of the Vietnamese people in liberating their country in 1975 from US occupation and aggression. It also refers to the support provided by the people world-wide in organising against the Vietnam War.
Chant’s Piano Sonata: Transformations is an extended work based on the conception that to be human is to make claims on society, and is inspired by the line, “transform the world with a million songs”. It was composed specially for pianist Peter Seivewright.
Shrapnel’s Climbing to Heights Hitherto Unknown is a piano version of his original solo violin work, suggesting the call to move on which inspires people to scale the heights with all the twists and turns that entails. Kevin Barry is a version for piano of the song paying tribute to the young Irish patriot hanged by the British in 1920.
Cornelius Cardew was well-known as being at the forefront of expanding the boundaries of music-making in Britain and internationally, and then taking this quality into music which was inspired by the modern enlightenment movement. Michael Chant, born 1945, has been associated with Cardew since 1968, when he took the organ part in the first performance of paragraph one of Cardew’s The Great Learning at the Cheltenham Festival. He is the secretary of the Cornelius Cardew Concerts Trust, which encourages composers to follow Cardew’s path.
Hugh Shrapnel, born 1947, studied with Cardew at the Royal Academy of Music, was active in the Progressive Cultural Association, of which Cardew was Secretary, and has retained fidelity in his life and work to the path to society’s progress. Cardew, Chant and Shrapnel have all acknowledged the leading role of Marxist-Leninist Hardial Bains in pointing cultural workers in a positive direction, towards the world of the New.
Peter Seivewright is known for his wide-ranging repertoire, and has enthusiastically dedicated himself to promoting the work of these three composers, which transcends their political associations not necessarily shared by artist or label. He has performed extensively around the world, from the USA to central Aisa, and until retirement from Academic life held senior positions at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, the University of Trinidad and Tobago, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul and at leading music schools in Cambodia and Thailand. His recorded output is extensive including the complete piano music of Carl Nielsen (Naxos), works by Victor Bendix (Rondo), and for Divine Art music by Louis Glass, J.S. Bach, four volumes so far of keyboard sonatas by Baldasarre Galuppi, and the first of a series of recordings of modern American piano sonatas. 2022 will see the release of Seivewrght’s recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and music by Max Reger.
With a million songs (DDA 25224)
Recording date: October 2021 at The Byre Studio, Inverness, Scotland
Pianist: Peter Seivewright
Works
Vietnam Sonata (Cornelius Cardew)
Piano Sonata: Transformations (Michael Chant)
Climbing to Heights Hitherto Unknown (Hugh Shrapnel)
Originally scheduled as part of the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, on 16 August 2020, Peter Seivewright will now be performing his Piano Music from the United States of America programme as an independent recital at St. Mark’s Unitarian Church, Edinburgh. The programme will include Edward MacDowell’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (‘Eroica’) which will be recorded on a future installment of his American Piano Sonatas recordings on Divine Art! On 3 August, Peter will also be live streaming a DVD recording he made of Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata from The Byre Recording Studio in Inverness, Scotland.
Pianist Peter Seivewright announces an 27th April 2019 recital at St. John’s Cathedral in Oban, Scotland at 7:30pm featuring J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2. Following this performance, on May 21, 2019, Seivewright begins his appointment as the Pianist-in-Residence at the brand-new Phuket School of Music in Phuket, Thailand. He will present his Inaugural Recital at 6:30pm on Saturday, 15th June 2019 which will feature the following program:
J.S.Bach (1685-1750): Prelude and Fugue in A flat major BWV 862
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Piano Sonata Number 2, in B flat minor
Peter Dickinson (born 1934): Lullaby
Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) transcribed Rachmaninoff : Liebesfreud
Peter Seivewright (b.1954) has held a number of positions at new music schools around the world from Trinidad to Cambodia, and has performed in Kazakhstan, Donetsk Republic and around the UK and USA. He records exclusively for Divine Art and is currently preparing recordings of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 1 and Goldberg Variations, and the fifth volume of his series of Galuppi Piano Sonatas.
Each year a prestigious Pianoforte Festival is held in a different city in Poland. Many of the world’s most celebrated pianists regularly perform at this Festival. In February 2019 this Festival will be held in Sanok, in South-East Poland. Sanok is the birthplace of Ryszard Bakst and, twenty years after Bakst’s death, the complete Festival is to be dedicated to Bakst’s memory. The central recital, entitled ‘In Memoriam Ryszard Bakst’, is to be given by Peter Seivewright, one of Bakst’s former students. Seivewright was chosen by the group of distinguished piano Professors in Warsaw and Moscow who run this Festival, in consultation with Ryszard Bakst’s widow, Barbara. The entire committee of Polish and Russian Pianoforte Professors who run this Festival will be present, and indeed three Pianoforte Professors from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow are travelling especially from Moscow to Sanok in order to hear this recital. Peter Seivewright regards this as the greatest honour ever bestowed on him in his long international performing career.
Peter will also perform a preview recital on Saturday 26th January, in the Swinburne Hall, Colchester, England at 2pm.
“Among the many contests of The American Prize, the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for Performance of American Music is unique. It recognizes and rewards the best performances of American music by ensembles and individual artists worldwide.”
Peter is beginning preparations to record the second of four volumes in his American Piano Sonatas series.
Congratulations to pianist Peter Seivewright! His ‘American Piano Sonatas’ recording is a finalist in the Ernst Bacon Award for the Performance of American Music, professional division.
The award is among many contests of The American Prize and “recognizes and rewards the best performances of American music by ensembles and individual artists worldwide, based on submitted recordings.” The album includes works by Edward MacDowell, Elliott Carer and Miklós Rózsa.
To learn more about the prestigious national competition visit their website.