Paul Pellay-Book 1

Riding the Comet’s Tail Rag-Caprice Triple-A (Anti-Ashcroft Aspersions) Past Silence’s Dusk-Death Valley 1979   Running on Eggshells The Warmonger’s Hoe-Down (Diatribe against W)

Endless Darwins

Artist and composer of the day. Dorothy Schwartz and Elliott Schwartz We may infer from all this that a nearly similar taste for beautiful colours and for musical sounds runs through a large part of the animal kingdom….How the sense of beauty in its simplest form-that is, the reception of a peculiar kind of pleasure [...]

10-12-2010

lafont

Recording Finnissy and Matthews

Recording, Finnissy and Matthews. New Arrival from LeFanu   November 29th was a day of new music and snow. I spent the day with my friends in the Kreutzer Quartet, engineer Jonathan Haskell, and Michael Finnissy, recording in John the Baptist Church, Aldbury. At the beginning of the morning, the church boiler died, so we worked in [...]

Tartini 26

Unknown Tartini

On November 24th, I played my reconstruction of Tartini’s unpublished 28th Piccola Sonata, as part of my last concert exploring all 30 sonatas. Here it is. 03 Track 3Tartin-Piccola Sonata No. 27 Giuseppe Tartini-A minor Sonata No28 PSS-Violin (Stradivari ‘Joachim’ 1698) Recording courtesy of Colin Still (optic nerve)

Michael Haydn

  Johann Michael Haydn I have long been fascinated with the music of Johann Michael Haydn, a great innovator and influence on the teenage Mozart. Here are some extracts from a CD that I made of his work some years ago. (Meridian CDE84243) PSS – Violin / Director Parnassus Ensemble of London Michael Haydn 1st [...]

Tartini, Dallapiccola, Rochberg

Composer of the Day  As my fascination with this set of pieces grew, with a concomitant question of how best to present the sequence, there were moments of doubt. The great Tartini scholar, Paul Brainard, last published material on these pieces in 1961. He responded with barely concealed scorn to Giovanni Guglielmo’s Edition 1970 edition for [...]

Poul Ruders extends the violin!

Poul Ruders Summers Prelude and Winters Fugue (British Premiere) (plus works by Tartini and Judith Bingham) St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield 27th October 730pm (Tickets £12 -Concessions £6) Over the past few years, I have enjoyed working with the Danish composer Poul Ruders enormously. This work has largely been private-discussing matters of writing contrapuntal [...]