Peter Seivewright

Wednesday 31st August 1pm

Free Lunchtime Concert

Room: Pianodrome Ampitheatre

J.S.Bach (1685-1750) transcribed Ferenc Liszt (1811-1886)

Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 543

Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925)

La Jongleuse

Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000)

Variations on 'Light my Fire'

PETER SEIVEWRIGHT has received a Special Judges’ Citation in The American Prize Ernst Bacon Award for the Performance of American Music competition, in the professional solo artist division. Peter Seivewright, honored for “Championing American Piano Music,” was selected from applications reviewed recently from all across the United States and the United Kingdom, and the citation awarded for his Divine Art album ‘American Piano Sonatas‘.

Peter Seivewright was born in Skipton, England, in 1954. He studied music at Oxford and spent three years as a post-graduate student at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, studying piano with Ryszard Bakst. As a student he was a frequent soloist with RNCM orchestras, receiving particular Press attention for his performance of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Piano Concerto.

Peter Seivewright has performed extensively as a recitalist and as Piano Concerto soloist with leading professional Orchestras throughout Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Austria, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Denmark (eight recital tours), Latvia, Estonia, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Australia (four recital tours), China, India, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States of America, Russia, and the Donetsk  People’s Republic. Notable successes in Europe include his recital on the opening night of the Heilbronn International Piano Forum, a recital which was enthusiastically reviewed in papers and journals in Germany and Italy, and his 1994 recital in the International Masters of the Keyboard series in Bruges, Belgium. One of the few British pianists ever to be invited to perform in this major European piano recital series, his performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Sonata were rapturously received with a prolonged standing ovation. Peter Seivewright has given recitals and concerto performances in the best-known Concert Halls of all the countries he has visited, including the International House of Music, Moscow, Russia; the Wagner Hall, Riga, Latvia; the National Concert Hall, Hanoi, Vietnam; the Melba Hall, Melbourne, Australia; the Aarhus Festival, Denmark; the Concert Hall of the Forbidden City, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; the Philharmonic Hall, Arkhangelsk, Russia; the Bosendorfer-Saal in Vienna, Austria; and numerous others.

Orchestras he has appeared as Piano Concerto soloist with in Great Britain include the Hallé Orchestra, the Milton Keynes City Orchestra, the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the Scottish Sinfonietta, the Strathclyde Sinfonia, Camerata Scotland, the Scottish Baroque Soloists, and the Paragon Ensemble, with whom he has appeared as a soloist on a number of occasions. In 1998 he gave the world première of the Piano Concerto by the Scottish composer Rory Boyle, with the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra in Liepaja, Latvia, and in 2001 gave the première in the countries of the former Soviet Union of the Piano Concerto (1930) by the English Romantic composer John Ireland (1879-1962) with the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Kazakhstan and their Russian conductor Tolepbergen Abdrashev, in the Philharmonic Hall, Almaty. In February 2003 he made his Russian debut with the Archangelsk Philharmonic Society in North West Russia, and performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in Beijing, China on New Year’s Day 2006 with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. In October 2006, Peter Seivewright performed in India for the first time, playing J.S. Bach’s Piano Concerto in D minor with the Calcutta Chamber Orchestra in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta, during the 2006 ‘Baroque in Bengal’ Festival. He is a frequent Piano Concerto soloist with the S.S.Prokofiev State Academic Symphony Orchestra in Donetsk, in the People’s Republic of Donetsk, and in March 2017 the S.S.Prokofiev State Academic Symphony Orchestra honoured him with the Distinguished Artist Citation, the highest honour the Orchestra can bestow.

Peter Seivewright’s CD discography is extensive and includes: The Complete Piano Music of Carl Nielsen (2CDs – Naxos), Contemporary Scottish Piano Music, (Merlin), the major piano works by the Danish Romantic composer Victor Bendix (1851-1926) (Rondo Records, Copenhagen), and several CDs issued by The Divine Art Recordings Group, for whom he now records exclusively. Peter is working through a series of CDs for Divine Art featuring the complete Piano Sonatas of Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785), the last great composer of the independent Venetian Republic. In 2007 Divine Art released a double CD comprising the major piano works of the Danish composer Louis Glass (1864-1936).Other Divine Art recordings include a disc of J.S.Bach Piano Concertos and a CD featuring American Piano Sonatas, which was exceptionally critically well-received, and which is currently a finalist for the Ernst Bacon Award in THE AMERICAN PRIZE 2018. Future recording plans include several more sets of American Piano Sonatas, more J.S.Bach and music by Reger, Cyril Scott, and Olivier Messiaen.

From 2008 to 2011 Peter Seivewright was the inaugural Professor of Music (Full Professor) at the Academy for the Performing Arts at the University of Trinidad and Tobago. In the Spring and Summer of 2012 he spent three months as Professor-in-Residence at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, in Kabul, Afghanistan, and from 2017 to 2018 he was Professor of Pianoforte Performance at the Phnom Penh International Institute of the Arts, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. His latest post is as Pianist-in-Residence at the brand new Phuket School of Music in Phuketm Thailand (from May 2019).
His home is near Glasgow, Scotland.