Author Archives: rjuttleycom

Night Music release

Night Music, a disc of chamber music by Mark Simpson, will be released on NMC Recordings on 20 May 2016.

Night Music (Leonard Elschenbroich, cello; Alexei Grynyuk, piano)
Ariel (Mercury Quartet)
Barkham Fantasy (Richard Uttley, piano)
Echoes and Embers (Mark Simpson, clarinet; Víkingur Ólafsson piano)
Lov(escape) (Mark Simpson, clarinet; Ian Buckle, piano)
Un Regalo (Guy Johnston, cello)
Windflower (Nicholas Daniel, oboe)
Nur Musik (Jonathan Small, oboe; Ensemble 10/10; Clark Rundell, conductor)

Tour with Callum Smart

Some photos from concerts with Callum Smart this March playing Mozart Sonata K378, James MacMillan After the Tryst, Poulenc Sonata and Richard Strauss Violin Sonata. We had several dates in the UK, culminating in Wigmore Hall, then went to Paris for the Auditorium du Louvre and to Berlin for the Konzerthaus.

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Wigmore

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Music Overheard

Richard Greenan (of Kit Records) came round to my flat and we talked about music and I played a bit. He made this sound collage for NTS Radio using that recording, recordings of other works by the composers we discussed (Matthew Kaner, Mark Simpson, Naomi Pinnock and Francisco Coll) and field recordings from his archives.

Kit Records

RPS Awards Jury

I was recently invited to be on the jury for the Large-Scale Composition section of the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Awards. The task proved to be both immense – listening to around 24 hours of music – and highly rewarding, in that it was an ideal snapshot of the music being premiered in 2015. It was also one of the most stimulating discussions about music I’ve had the pleasure to be part of. The other jury members were Hannah Bujic, Cathy Graham (Chair), Ann McKay and Stephen Newbould.

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La Voix review (Observer)

Review of La Voix by Stephen Pritchard from last Sunday’s Observer:

“If you need any convincing that the choice of title for this album is an appropriate one, just listen to the dreamy intermezzo of Poulenc’s sonata for violin and piano, FP 119: in the hands of Callum Smart and Richard Uttley its vocal quality is never in doubt. Smart won the strings category in the 2010 BBC Young Musician competition when only 13 and now at the grand old age of 19 is a rising star of the concert platform. His partnership with Uttley is best displayed here in their beautifully judged reading of Fauré’s songlike violin sonata No 1 in A and in the flashes of earthy passion they bring to Ravel’s Gypsy-inspired rhapsody Tzigane.”

La Voix released

La Voix, my new CD with violinist Callum Smart, is out now on Orchid Classics.

Here’s our introduction to the repertoire:

The starting point for the disc was French music for violin and piano, but a theme that emerged as we rehearsed and explored these works was that of the voice. As such, we decided ‘La Voix’ would make a fitting title. A vocal quality is central to all of this music, and each piece speaks or sings with its own particular type of voice. Poulenc’s Sonata has a distinctly Spanish accent, and at the same time as being a commentary on the tragedy of war, it demonstrates Poulenc’s feelings for one of Spain’s great literary talents, Federico García Lorca. The Fauré is nothing if not an extended love song, and a highly personal one at that – Fauré had hoped (in vain, alas) that it would help him woo Marianne Viardot, the sister of the work’s dedicatee. The two Ravel pieces, as with the Poulenc Sonata, are examples of a composer adopting the voice of another and in the process revealing something about themselves – the gypsy music of Tzigane and the sensual hispanic vocalise of the Pièce en forme de Habanera both a kind of tribute to the Basque-Spanish heritage of his mother, to whom Ravel felt so close.

Track listing:

Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963)
Sonata for violin and piano, Op.119
1. I Allegro con fuoco
2. II Intermezzo: Très lent et calme
3. III Presto tragico – Strictement la double plus lent

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924)
Violin Sonata No.1 in A, Op.13
4. I Allegro molto
5. II Andante
6. III Allegro vivo
7. IV Allegro quasi presto

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
8. Tzigane, rhapsodie de concert
9. Pièce en forme de Habanera

Michael Cutting commission

Michael Cutting‘s This Is Not A Faux Wood Keyboard is probably the most unusual piece I’ve had written for me so far, and it had an interesting way of coming into being too. A year or so ago I spotted a photo Michael posted on Facebook (below) of an instrument he’d bought himself, a Fender Rhodes MK1 Stage Piano. Several months later I found myself thinking again about Michael’s post, and the idea came to me to ask him to write a piece especially for the instrument. I’ve loved the Rhodes sound since a period in my teens spent immersed in Stevie Wonder albums; and I’ve been interested in Michael’s work since we met in 2013 through New Dots, where I played his trio when the world is puddle-wonderful with Joshua Batty (flute) and Anna Hashimoto (clarinet).

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When I asked Michael about the piece I had originally intended something for Fender Rhodes, but as Michael wrote it became apparent he was writing for specifically his Fender Rhodes. Its quirks – a particularly resonant tine (the metal bars its hammers strike) here or there, the odd harmonics caused by the faulty dampers on some bass notes, the growl of certain pitches – are essential elements of the work’s sound palette. There was really no other way a composer like Michael would have approached such a commission; here is an artist fascinated with the craft of making things, and ‘imperfections’ are what give these things their beauty and depth. His partner Vitalija Glovackyte is similarly creative (together they founded Another Contemporary Music Ensemble), and spending time in their flat while working on the piece was akin to visiting an exhibition of works in progress. I saw such things as homemade instruments, a suspiciously large collection of cassette players, wooden bowls carved from logs, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, prints on tissue paper, and a pet rabbit named Rabbit.

More than ever before for me in collaborating with a composer, it was through working with Michael that I really learned the piece. One of the particular challenges was finding a way to ‘make chamber music’ with the delay pedal the piece uses. The material the pedal generates is all derived from what you feed into it, but its behaviour is to an extent unpredictable – and so it took a while to get to a point where I felt I could meaningfully interact with it, and then more time again from there to feel I could mould the sound as Michael intended. Other new skills I had to rapidly acquire included using mallets to elicit beeps, rustles and clangs from the Rhodes, and finding the most expressive way to turn its volume knob… Working on the piece was to enter into a state of deep listening and quick-reactive alertness – each time leaving me with my hearing slightly altered.

This Is Not A Faux Wood Keyboard was commissioned by Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2015 and was premiered at the festival. It was recorded for broadcast on Radio 3 as part of the Hear and Now series.

Grieg Concerto

from Grieg Piano Concerto with Haffner Orchestra in Lancaster University’s Great Hall:

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Grieg / Haffner Orchestra review

Review here of my Grieg Piano Concerto with Haffner Orchestra and Justin Doyle, from Henry Prince for the Virtual Lancaster News Blog.

hcmf// recital review (Sunday Times)

Paul Driver (The Sunday Times)

“… Naomi Pinnock’s new Lines and Spaces, included in a brilliant recital at Phipps Hall by the pianist Richard Uttley, was explicitly inspired by Martin screenprints and a canvas. The alternation of “Space” sections — static, evacuated, quiet — with the plain mini toccatas of the “Line” ones was satisfying, both in itself and as an analogy. Francisco Coll’s new piece, a concentrated, brief triptych, Vestiges, was also prompted by a painter, the Spaniard Hugo Fontela, but Coll’s idiom is far from any minimalism.

At the opposite pole from that approach lies the metrical supercomplexity of Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano music, and Coll adapts that language of impossibly dynamic canons with originality and force. The virtuosity he called for, and got, from Uttley was commanding indeed, but is essentially unshowy (if passionate), and clearly at the service, not of ego, but of contemporary music seen as a broad church. He played one piece — Thomas Larcher’s Smart Dust — on a prepared piano, and another — Michael Cutting’s This Is Not a Faux Wood Keyboard — on a Fender Rhodes, striking its keys with hammers.”

Also: hcmf// recital reviews (Guardian, Telegraph, 5:4)

hcmf// 2015 photos

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above photos © Brian Slater

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hcmf// recital reviews (Guardian, Telegraph, 5:4)

Reviews from my recital in the opening weekend of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2015:

Kate Molleson (The Guardian)

“Some of the day’s most arresting moments came in a recital by Richard Uttley. I was enthralled by his composure, lyricism and ability to hold a moment without forcing it. Tristan Murail’s La Mandragore was tender and soft-hewn; the Michael Cutting’s This Is Not a Faux Wood Keyboard was a surprise five-minute Fender Rhodes marvel.”

Ivan Hewett (The Telegraph)

“It fell to the wonderful young pianist Richard Uttley to prove that new music can be aurally refined without being precious. Every piece in his hour-long recital was rewarding, but it was Naomi Pinnock’s delicately reticent Lines and Spaces, its tracery of chords and repeated notes placed in perfect balance, that stole the show.”

Simon Cummings (5:4)

“It’s perhaps a little early, following just two concerts yesterday evening, to start describing the characteristics that typify this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. But based on these, and considering the featured composer is Jürg Frey, it would seem that ‘delicacy’ is going to be one of this year’s prevailing themes. In saying it dominated the piano recital given by local hero Richard Uttley, that’s as true of the performer as it was of the music being performed. i wouldn’t use this term of many pianists but, both from a purely aural perspective as well as watching him perform, Uttley comes across like a ballet dancer. His movements are graceful, lyrical, acrobatic; keys are sprung from, landed upon, tickled, urged, encouraged, coaxed—but rarely, it seems to me, merely struck.

The acrobatics formed a key feature of Thomas Larcher‘s Smart Dust and Francisco Coll‘s Vestiges, receiving its first performance. Both drew liberally on the relentless slip-slide mayhem typical of Nancarrow, in Larcher’s case with more emphasis on playfulness. It was a level of play (practically Zappa-like) that seemed to defy Larcher’s own programme note, which speaks of giving the piano “a sound with a sense of urgency, of desperation”, with a related desire to “hammer against … conventions”. Not with music as ordered as this—but to be honest, considering how much fun it all was, who cares? Uttley’s negotiation of the material came across like a frantic game of cat-and-mouse played by independently-minded hands, both locked into the same underlying groove but falling around all over the place nonetheless. Coll’s approach was similarly ordered structurally, book-ending Vestiges with wild episodes of virtuosic canons and counterpoint with a heavily contrasting central movement, very delicate and light. Overall, it makes a somewhat curious aesthetic statement, but again, the untamed fire of the outer sections makes the question marks hanging over the piece seem less significant. Tristian Murail‘s La Mandragore, which closed the recital, proved to be my undoing; about two-thirds of the way through the piece, i realised i had been seduced by its swirling, intoxicatingly fragrant harmonies, entirely distracted from what was actually going on. But then, i wonder whether Murail might actually be quite pleased with that reaction. Less conventional were the new works from Michael Cutting and Naomi Pinnock, both also world premières. In Cutting’s This Is Not A Faux Wood Keyboard Uttley turned percussionist, using various mallets to strike the instrument (both its tone bars as well as elsewhere), the sounds being looped into interesting textures, encompassing an ambient soundscape, pitch-based interplay and a wild noise-filled finale—but in a nice touch, the work ends by allowing this immense cluster of piled-up action to resonate for a while, eventually emphasising the regularity of the loops, order thus emerging out of apparent chaos. Pinnock’s Lines and Spaces comprises six miniatures, inspired in part by the paintings of American abstract artist Agnes Martin. Each Line was impressive in the courage of its simplicity: a sonic line extended by a rapidly repeating single pitch, coloured by a simple octave doubling, adjacent pitches, or a resonant chord, with the pedal brought in occasionally to smudge things. The Spaces occupy bigger environments, inhabited by calm, measured droplets of harmonic colour like blobs of ink falling into water; the first and last were pretty, but the second was immersive, seemingly expanding to subsume the performance space, filling it with a complex constellation of drifting celestial bodies. Beautiful.”

Also: Paul Driver review in The Sunday Times

Naomi Pinnock commission

As part of the Philip Langridge Mentoring Scheme, through which I was mentored by Rolf Hind, the Royal Philharmonic Society were able to commission a new piece for me. I took the opportunity to ask Naomi Pinnock to write me something. I’d wanted to ask her for a solo piano piece since hearing her arresting, beautiful and dramatic Sting Quartet No.2 performed by the Arditti Quartet at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival back in 2012.

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Naomi’s new piece is a sequence of miniatures entitled Lines and Spaces, inspired by the work of Agnes Martin (who was the subject of a recent retrospective at Tate Modern). I will give the premiere as part of my recital at hcmf// on Saturday 21 November, and will also play it in the Bridgewater Hall on 6 January 2016.

photo © Amy Newiss

It seems Martin’s work has had a particular influence on this year’s hcmf// – Artistic Director Graham McKenzie writes that it was while attending an exhibition of her work that he decided to install Jürg Frey as Composer in Residence (his music can be heard throughout the festival, including on the Saturday evening), and Ed Finnis credits Martin as one of the influences on his piece Seeing is Flux (performed earlier on the Saturday afternoon by the London Sinfonietta).

There is a fragility to the emphatically human rendering of grids, patterns, lines, dots and simple shapes in Martin’s paintings, and human ‘imperfection’ is similarly integral to Lines and Spaces: in places Naomi introduces subtle colour changes of her own, and in others she sets a pianistic task so mechanistic in nature that ‘blemishes’ – unpredictable, un-notatable – become inevitable. The sequence demands close, focussed listening, and creates a soundworld that is spacious and suggestive in its dreaming, yet utterly precise in language.

Here’s Naomi’s note:

The miniatures are titled as follows:
Space I – Line I – Space II (On a Clear Day) – Line II – Space III (Song) – Line III.

The subtitles for Space II and Space III originate from works by Agnes Martin: On a Clear Day (1973, Portfolio of 30 screen prints) and Song (1962, Oil paint on canvas).

Whilst composing these miniatures I kept coming back to Agnes Martin’s exquisitely simple paintings. They have shown me over and over again how much is possible with lines and spaces. They are just grids and lines, and yet they evoke much more with the delicate layering of paint and beautiful imperfections.

These miniatures fluctuate between compressing or expanding, creating a bold line or subtle bands of faint colours.

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Francisco Coll – Vestiges (premiere)

photo © Maurice Foxall

I’m delighted to be giving the world premiere of Francisco Coll‘s Vestiges [2012] at hcmf// 2015. Here’s my programme note:

Vestiges was inspired by the work of Spanish painter Hugo Fontela, whose cycles of interrelated paintings find a warmth within starkness and are often concerned with nature and decay. The piece is a kind of triptych: the first and third movements are full of gnarly, volatile canons, while the second is a reflective chorale infected at its core by a germ of the outer movements’ energy. Coll works in the remnants of ideas from Bach and Nancarrow, stating that, ‘I don’t see the vestiges, the ruins, as the end of something, but as the beginning of something new, full of beauty and delicate power.’

Mark Berry St John’s review

Mark Berry’s review of my recital at St John’s Smith Square, for his Boulezian blog and Seen and Heard International.

In Tune

The Radio 3 In Tune interview and live performance is available to listen here on iPlayer for the next 30 days. I played the Mazurka from Matt Kaner’s Dance Suite, and three movements from Bach’s Partita No.4. Sean Rafferty interviewed both Matt and me.

In Tune screen shot

Planet Hugill review

Review of Ghosts & Mirrors, from Robert Hugill for Planet Hugill.

Pianist Richard Uttley sees the works on his new disc, Ghosts and Mirrors (on the Artists Recording Company label) as each being a reflection upon something. What the pieces also have in common, in addition to their 20th and 21st century origins, is a concern with the re-invention of what a virtuoso piano work is. The composers involved, Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Ades, Tristan Murail, Alban Berg/Marvin Wolfthal, Toru Takemitsu, Mark Simpson and Luciano Berio, all have works which combine a modernist sensibility with some aspect of 19th century bravura. All require truly dazzling digits from the young British pianist Richard Uttley, who delivers a series of magical performances.

Piano Jubilees by Magnus Lindberg (born 1958) is a group of six pieces all based on the same musical material. The first piece was commissioned by the Royal Festival Hall as a 75th birthday present for Pierre Boulez. This work is highly rhapsodic in style, requiring a strong technique from Uttley. All the subsequent pieces explore the musical material in the first, in a way which resembles a series of studies with each concerned with a particular aspect. The second is very free with a slow build, the third is rather perky and full of runs and trills, the fourth is gentle and rhapsodic before dramatic chords intervene, the fifth is a mischievous scherzo whilst the six is full of quiet Messiaen-like chords. Despite the music’s technical bravura, this is not frilly stuff. The pieces are edgily powerful, and they receive a consummate performance from Uttley.

Mazurkas, op. 27 by Thomas Ades (born 1971) are three works which extend the mazurka form. Like those of Chopin and Szymanowski, you cannot imagine dancing to these mazurkas. The first explores a lively and rather wry rhythmic figure, the second is fluent with flowing passage-work which explores different clashing regular and irregular metres in the two hands, whilst the final one being full of sparse wisps of sound.

Cloches d’adieu, et un sourirs (In memoriam Olivier Messiaen) is a 1992 work by Tristan Murail (born 1947) in memory of Olivier Messiaen. In writing the work, Murail has left the placement of each note or chord vague so the performer can choose how to respond to the instrument and the acoustic. The overall result is full of transparent atomospherics, with Uttley producing some stunning clarity despite Messiaen-esque clusters of notes (and the odd nod towards birdsong).

The Lulu Fantasy by Marvin Wolfthal (born 1947) is a large-scale (lasting nearly 14 minutes) concert fantasy based on Alban Berg’s Lulu. As Wolfthal explains in his note, much of the material he chose is related to Alwa and the centrepiece of the work is the Filmmusik which is framed by two large sections based on Alwa’s love music, and each interrupted by the Ragtime. This is a complex, richly textured piece in which an element of blues in the background complements the complicated harmony and expressionist lyricism. Uttley’s performance brings a real infectiousness to the work, all the notes are there in dazzling fashion but he also gives the piece shape and sense.

Rain Tree Sketch II by Toru Takemitsu (1930 – 1996) is another work in memory of Olivier Messiaen. It is a lovely delicate yet complex web of magical and ghostly textures. It was Takemitsu’s last work for piano.

Barkham Fantasy by Mark Simpson (born 1988) refers to the place where Simpson was staying whilst writing the work, which was commissioned by Richard Uttley in 2010. It begins sparsely, with a very eerie feel (deliberately so as Simpson had unsettling feelings of being watched whilst writing it), then gusts and swirls of notes blow things away and we get some brilliant drama and a high intensity ending with tremendous tremolos and then nothing.

The final work on the disc, Six Encores is a group of works written over a period (1965 to 1990) by Luciano Berio and which he later grouped together, though anything less like and encore piece I cannot imagine! The first Brin (Wisps) was written in memory of a young pianist, and has an evanescent texture full of delicate finger-work from Uttley. Leaf was written in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s musical director, Michael Vyner and is all repetitive rhythmic fragments interrupted by chords. The final four are depictions of Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Wasserklavier is quietly lyrical. Erdenklavier starts with a single, highly dramatic line which seems to develop and echo, and further complexity result. Luftklavier is all filigree notes in a busy texture, and Feuerklavier is a quiet toccata-like piece with interruptions.

This is a truly amazing disc, as Richard Uttley dazzles throughout with his dexterous finger-work but at the same time keeps the strength and rich complexity of the music. You never feel that we are listening to virtuoso elements just for their own sake. And his control of structure and colour is superb, so that the colouration of the pieces lives up to the disc’s title Ghosts and Mirrors.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know what a 21st century version of Liszt would be playing!

Sunday Times review

A little write-up of Ghosts & Mirrors from Paul Driver in the Culture section of the Sunday Times yesterday:

Sunday Times G&M

NTS Radio

First radio play for Ghosts & Mirrors this week – some of the Berio Encores as part of a set by Kit Records for NTS Live. Listen to the broadcast here.

Ghosts & Mirrors review (5:4)

Delighted to have been reviewed on 5:4, a blog I have huge respect for and have read for years. Check the article out here.

Old dogs, new tricks, new dots

On 3 November we had our biggest New Dots event so far – an evening concert at King’s Place showcasing four new pieces by composer-filmmaker pairs plus a new work by Dutch composer Jan Vriend, performed by Ensemble Matisse. We called it Interference Patterns. The idea behind the project was to have composers and filmmakers working together on equal footing from the offing, creating pieces in which neither medium was creatively dominant.

I’ve thought a lot about collaboration recently – having presented a couple of concerts with artist Nat Urazmetova in the last few months – and what fascinated me about the results of Interference Patterns was the variety of approaches the pairs took, and how each piece seemed to succeed as a collaboration on its own terms. Some were scrupulously detailed in their music/visual synchronisation (with the ensemble playing to a click-track through earpieces); others worked in broader strokes, having passages of music match visual cues (here the players coordinated by watching the film on a monitor) or keeping the two media quite independent of each other. Each team forged a unique composite language: the ephemeral, timbral music of Lisa Illean inhabited the same dark, suggestive realm as Karolina Glusiec‘s abstract visuals; Liam Taylor-West‘s tonal, minimalist leanings complemented Rebecca Marshall‘s poppy diary footage and commentary; and Ewan Campbell and Sebastian Barner-Rasmussen were totally on the same page in their exploration (pictured above) of the sinister, depressing, ugly side of the mundane. We’re used to people ‘finding the beauty of the everyday’ but it was refreshing that Ewan and Sebastian said something completely different with it.

Daniel Kidane and Giorgio Bosisio‘s work We lived like strangers had a particularly interesting back-story. Giorgio incorporated a lot of ‘found’ footage – ‘found’ in the sense that he stumbled across it on the top floor of an abandoned hotel in Switzerland. The footage turned out to be the hotel owner’s videos of his family and dog on holiday (plus a few ‘blue’ movies, snatches of which made their way into the final moments of We lived like strangers and made for an unexpectedly X-rated dimension to the evening…). Some bits of the film got burnt while Giorgio experimented projecting them – the blotchy, distorted results made it into the final piece, a celebration of the random, unpredictable and uncontrollable.

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Daniel’s music was, in a kind of analogy to the ‘found’ footage, recycled – a reworking (at times quite distant) of his piece Spear, which he wrote for Kate Romano (clarinet) and me. I enjoyed hearing it in this new quartet guise, and Giorgio’s fast cutting was an effective match for Daniel’s intricate textures and jagged pacing. Interestingly, the pair couldn’t always plan how the visuals and music would relate, and ironically the work ended up being suffused with beautiful moments of coincidental correlation. This poeticising/dramatising of chance (along with the idea of ‘found’ footage) brought to mind Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, where a photographer discovers he’s unwittingly captured the clue to a murder while developing his photos. That film poses a host of ethical and aesthetic questions about the nature of film and what it captures, much of which seems relevant here too. I wonder what the family from Switzerland would have made of the extraordinary notion of their holiday footage being found and repurposed in this way. Here’s an old dog that cropped up numerous times:

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I’ve presented the last couple of New Dots concerts, interviewing composers, filmmakers and performers onstage, and this has been an interesting departure for me. I often introduce pieces at my own concerts, but it’s a different sort of task to facilitate other people’s talking. I feel a big responsibility to allow them to say what they want, encourage them to mention points the audience needs to hear (or will find interesting) and to keep the whole thing coherent and within a time limit. It’s very rewarding to be involved in this way though, and feedback is usually that people find having a little explanation and hearing the artists speak helpful.

new dots interview

I’ve been learning other new tricks for New Dots too: I’m curating our ongoing blog series, Dots Playlists, and in the run-up to Interference Patterns I interviewed Jan Vriend and made this:

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I hadn’t originally intended to use the sound recording (hence the lo-fi quality, background noise etc), but afterwards I felt the best way I could convey Jan’s ideas was to have them in his own Dutch-flavoured, impassioned voice, and to include excerpts from his music alongside it. Listening to the premiere of his Degrees of Freedom at Interference Patterns, I had Jan’s words resonating through my head, reinforcing the ideas of the piece.

New Dots photos © Cathy Pyle

Launch footage

Clips from the Ghosts & Mirrors launch now on YouTube:

For more videos and audio click here. For further info on the disc click here.

Royal Philharmonic Society interview

Talking about being on the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Philip Langridge Mentoring Scheme with Rolf Hind, and Ghosts & Mirrors.

Ghosts & Mirrors The Cross-Eyed Pianist review

Review from Frances Wilson (aka The Cross-Eyed Pianist) of Ghosts & Mirrors on her blog.

Ghosts & Mirrors released

Delighted to announce that Ghosts & Mirrors has now been released, on the Artists Recording Company label. It’s available on Amazon.

The launch event was reviewed in the Telegraph by Ivan Hewett, and by Frances Wilson on her blog The Cross-Eyed Pianist.

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Ghosts & Mirrors launch review (Telegraph)

Wednesday’s launch was reviewed in the Telegraph by Ivan Hewett:

Richard Uttley, The Forge, review: ‘amazing decisiveness’

Video was a mixed blessing at the launch recital of Richard Uttley’s new album, Ghosts and Mirrors, says Ivan Hewett

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Sound and vision: Richard Uttley performing with video at the launch of his album Ghosts and Mirrors Photo: NAT URAZMETOVA

By Ivan Hewett

The “concept album” idea has now firmly taken root in classical music, and this concert was the launch for a fine example of the genre, from young pianist Richard Uttley. All the music on his new album Ghosts and Mirrors is a reflection or echo of something else, such as a long-vanished dance form, a much loved deceased composer, or an image in nature. This concert in the Forge, a cosy little concert hall and bar in Camden, offered an hour-long taster for it.

You might expect a concert full of ghosts and reflections to be pale and melancholic. In fact the predominant tone was sumptuous and glittery and virtuoso. Uttley seemed diffident and mild in his pre-concert chat, but once seated at the piano be became a different person, seizing the music with amazing decisiveness.

He caught the unabashed impressionist gorgeousness of the first Piano Jubilee by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, and the way the following five Jubilees retreated down to simplicity. Tristan Murail’s Cloches d’adieu et un sourire (Bells of Farewell and a Smile) was a homage to the greatest post-war French composer, Olivier Messiaen. The spirit of Messiaen seemed to hover in the music’s harmonic glitter, evoked by Uttley with musing delicacy.

Most overtly ghostly of all was Mark Simpson’s Barkham Fantasy, which conjured a whirlwind of anguished virtuosity from a few wispy memories of Haydn and Mozart.

All this offered plenty for our imaginations to feed on. So we didn’t really need the accompanying video for each piece from film-maker Nat Urazmetova. Still, they were a lot more subtle than many performance videos, with Urazmetova controlling the streams of images in tandem with Uttley’s sudden changes of tempo and mood.

As always with these things, the more prescriptive the images the less helpful they were, however beautiful in themselves. One could feel one’s imagination being boxed in. It was when uncertainty crept into the videos that they reinforced the music, rather than competing with it. The drifting black-and-white pan-shots of churchyards worked well for Simpson’s Barkham Fantasy, as did the images of a haunted-looking woman’s face and dimly lit fin-de-siècle interiors for Marvin Wolfthal’s Lulu Fantasy. This was an operatic fantasy in the grand tradition of Liszt, which brilliantly summoned up the vast decadence of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu in 15 minutes. I would never have imagined a mere piano could capture that world, but Uttley’s tumultuous performance soon persuaded me.

Ghosts and Mirrors is released on ARC

Livenotes Magazine feature

Delighted to feature in the latest edition of Livenotes Magazine, which focuses on live music in West Yorkshire, ahead of my recital in Leeds later this year. Download the full magazine by clicking here!

Ghosts & Mirrors London launch 15 October

On Wednesday 15 October I’m launching my new CD, Ghosts & Mirrors, at The Forge in London. I will be joined onstage by Nat Urazmetova, who has created the artwork for the disc and will mix live visuals on the night, following our first performance together at St John’s Smith Square in the Occupy the Pianos festival earlier this year. Click here for further details and tickets.

New videos

Filmed by SKY for a documentary on Mark’s The Immortalisation Commission.

Ben Foskett recording on NMC

Delighted to feature on this disc from NMC, Dinosaur, which showcases the music of composer Ben Foskett and will be released 23 June.

The works included are:

Five Night Pieces (Richard Uttley, piano)
Hornet II (Mark van de Wiel, clarinet; London Sinfonietta; Geoffrey Paterson, conductor)
From Trumpet (Hallé; Nicholas Collon, conductor)
On From Four (Psappha; Nicholas Kok, conductor)
Dinosaur (Eric Lamb, flute)
Cinq Chansons à Hurle-Vent (Raphaële Kennedy, soprano; Jean François Becquaert, soprano saxophone)

More info here.

Collaboration with Nat Urazmetova

From the programme notes to Occupy the Pianos festival at St John’s Smith Square:

Nat and I began working together on this project when she created the artwork for my forthcoming CD Ghosts & Mirrors. The pieces we’re presenting in this concert all appear on that disc, so this is a sort of live version of that collaboration. I wanted to work with Nat as the aesthetic of her work is the closest thing I could find to a visual representation of my feelings on the atmosphere and concerns of the works I chose to record for Ghosts & Mirrors. Themes explored by the music include hauntings, rebirth, symmetry and warping – all of which are expressed either directly or obliquely by Nat’s images. Our hope in presenting the concert in this way is that the visuals will enhance your experience of the music – highlighting certain details of pieces and setting the tone of the performance, but at the same time remaining sufficiently abstract as to allow the music space to breathe and to leave something to the listener’s imagination. Collaborations of this kind within contemporary classical music have often employed rigorous and detailed synchronisation of the visual and auditory elements, but we wanted to experiment with something more free and suggestive. As such, Nat will ‘mix’ visuals live as I play, responding to the performance as it unfolds on the night, to shifting moods and textures, and to the light as it changes over dusk here at St John’s.

We are very grateful to Help Musicians UK Emerging Excellence Awards for their support of this collaboration.

In rehearsal at St John’s

Cheltenham review

Review of my recital in Cheltenham, by Ben Easey for the Gloustershire Echo:

Meticulously positioning himself at the foot of the marvellous Steinways grand piano, youthful talent Richard Uttley began his concerto to the setting of Cheltenham’s Pittville Pump Room.

Under the enchanting light of a chandelier, Uttley poured his passion for the classical genre into renditions of works from a selection of histories most sought-after composers.

Uttley’s chosen pieces were varied, drawing compositions from composers such as Scarlatti who date back to the 1600’s contrasting with 20th century avant-garde composer Berio.

He dedicated the first half of his performance to three more fleeting arrangements ranging from Scarlatti’s Sonata in D minor K.9 to five preludes from Rachmaninov’s OP. 23.

Each piece was delivered impeccably, emphasising beauty in even the most dissonant sections.

This first segment gave an insight into Uttley’s love of the genre as a whole. Uttley cleverly provided brief yet fascinating explanations defining the reasoning behind choosing such eclectic compositions.

It was clear that the versatile musician was there to do what he loved, talking confidently and fondly about his musical predecessors.

The concertos latter half focused upon Brahms’ Piano Sonata No.3 in F Minor, Op. 5 a piece written early in Brahms’ career. It was enthralling to see Uttley so caught in this piece.

Hunched over the pianos keys he elegantly passed through the sonata’s movements with a flawless thirty-five minute performance.

After returning for an eagerly anticipated encore of Schumann Uttley gave his final bow before leaving the stage.

The booming applauds that echoed through the pump rooms following Uttleys departure from the stage were thoroughly deserved, it was a joy to see such immense talent driven by such genuine ardour.

Matthew Kaner commission

I’m delighted to announce a new commission for solo piano from Matthew Kaner. We’ve been talking about this new piece for months and have now got all the funding together, so I’m very excited that Matt can start work on it. His music is colourful, intricate and rich; as such his first big piano piece promises to be very interesting indeed. I will give the premiere at St John’s Smith Square in London on 7 May 2015.

The work has been generously funded by the Arthur Bliss Trust, the Britten-Pears Foundation and the RVW Trust.

UPDATE: Full details and programme note here, and I subsequently recorded the work for BBC Radio 3 – excerpt here:

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Mark Simpson Sky Arts feature

Sky Arts have broadcast this feature on Mark’s project The Immortalisation Commission, which he’s working on through his Sky Arts Academy Scholarship. I’m on piano for Mark’s Echoes & Embers (clarinet & piano) and Barkham Fantasy (solo piano). We filmed in the beautiful Caroline Gardens Chapel (home of Asylum) in Peckham – a really atmospheric space perfect for Mark’s music. Watch here.

Sky Arts filming

Piano duo with Huw Watkins broadcast

The piano duo pieces (birthday pieces for Hans Werner Henze and Oliver Knussen) Huw Watkins and I played in a BBC concert at Maida Vale were broadcast yesterday on Radio 3 as part of the Hear and Now programme. Presented by Tom Service in conversation with Oliver Knussen. Listen here!

Ed Nesbit Interview

I interviewed Ed for the New Dots blog. You can read the full post here. It proved to be a very satisfying thing to do, and I was able to ask many of the questions I had about what it’s like being a composer today and about Ed’s music. I’m grateful for Ed’s full and honest answers, and would like to think we’ve ended up with a genuinely interesting article.

Glasgow Short Film Festival

Had a nice time recently at the Glasgow Short Film Festival giving the premiere of Dobrinka Tabakova and Ruth Paxton’s new collaboration PULSE, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society for the PRS New Music Biennial. The work is for gamelan, percussion and piano duet, with Ruth’s film projected live. The concert also featured various chamber pieces by Dobrinka, of which I played Halo. Photos of the event here. Further performances are scheduled throughout 2014 at the Southbank Centre, the Commonwealth Games, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Nottingham Royal Concert Hall.

Galway Midwinter Festival

Just back from a great time at this festival, which is part of Music for Galway. As well as the Vaughan-Williams Piano Quintet (an early work of his I did not know, but which turns out to be full of great tunes and passion), I played Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in the piano 4-hands version with Rolf Hind. Apparently Stravinsky authorised and even encouraged pianists to play it at two pianos, and it is often done this way, but we did it the hard way – fighting for space at the one instrument! (See below.) There’s a lot to be said for this, and perhaps it adds to the power of the music in some way. I’m delighted we’re scheduled to play the piece again, at a festival of which Rolf is artistic director, at St John’s Smith Square in London. Even though there will be two pianos available we’re planning to do it at one again.

I also made my harmonium debut (!) in the festival, with the chamber version of Debussy’s Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune, made by one of Schoenberg’s students. This was the one work on the programme that involved almost all the musicians playing in the festival. There was a great atmosphere between everyone, and I was glad to be able to watch when I wasn’t playing. The highlight of what I saw had to be Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with Lore Lixenberg, who was astonishing in her characterisation and vocal theatricality. The ensemble (with Rolf on piano) were amazing too, so much so I came away desperate to have the opportunity to play this work myself one day. I thought it a major credit to the festival that they supported their new director Finghin Collins in programming all these fascinating and challenging works, and it says a lot that they reported their best audience figures yet.

Rehearsing The Rite with Rolf – note the distribution of hands

Recording with Mark for BBC New Generation Artist scheme

Mark and I have just been in the studio to record an array of repertoire for broadcast on Radio 3. Works by Bernstein, Finzi, Simon Holt, Ireland and Simpson will be broadcast over Christmas and in 2014…

with Simon Holt after recording his Escaramuza

Milton Court Recording

I recorded my new disc with Artists Recording Company last month. We were incredibly fortunate to be using the fabulous new Milton Court Concert Hall, and it lived up to expectations in every way. The sound of the piano and hall are gorgeous and it was a pleasure to record in such conditions. I’ve been producing the disc myself so have heard the results already and am delighted with how it’s turned out. I tend to try take risks in recording sessions – for example playing extremely quietly, on the edge of what’s controllable on the piano, or playing faster than usual – as I feel a recording needs this extra energy and that this is the best way to capitalise on being in the studio. There’s a fine line between daring and recklessness though, so it was with great relief that I got to the end of producing the disc without feeling I needed to go back to the studio and do it all again..

There’s now just the liner notes, design, packaging etc. to be finalised and the release date looks set for May 2014.

Recording in Milton Court

American piano music radio broadcasts

The BBC broadcast some of my recordings as part of their Transatlantic Travel: Americana series on Afternoon on 3 earlier this week:

On Tuesday, Edward MacDowell’s Fireside Tales : listen here (47 minutes in)
On Wednesday, Amy Beach’s Gavotte fantastique : listen here (39 minutes in)
On Friday, Henry Cowell’s Exultation : listen here (2 hours 7 minutes in)

Britten Holiday Diary BBC broadcast

My recording of Britten’s Holiday Diary (from a concert at Maida Vale Studios in February 2013) was broadcast this weekend, during the interval of the Live in Concert broadcast of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Barbican. You can hear it on iPlayer here (about 1 hour in) for the next week or so and I will post a clip once that has expired.

UPDATE: clip below (excerpt from 2. Sailing and 3. Funfair)

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Recording project

One of the main things I’m working on at the moment is a disc for Artists Recording Company. They gave me carte blanche on what repertoire I would record, so I had a lot of fun putting the programme together. My starting point was two previously unrecorded works, the first of which was Mark Simpson’s Barkham Fantasy. He wrote the piece for me in 2010 and I premiered it in the Royal Festival Hall that same year. I’ve played it lots since and it always gets a terrific response, and of course Mark’s composing career has gone from strength to strength recently. The other work was Marvin Wolfthal’s Lulu Fantasy, which I’d been itching to get my teeth into for a while (more details about that piece here). In terms of the rest of the repertoire, I wanted the disc to feel coherent without being too narrow; but at the same time, I wanted it to make sense as a programme heard from start to end, and for each individual piece to have some reason why it seemed right for me to record it.

After lots of thought and playing around with various ideas, a sense of balance emerged almost by chance – inspired by the palindromic Filmmusik of Berg’s Lulu, which is at the centre of Wolfthal’s Lulu Fantasy. Trying to expand upon the idea of symmetry in that work helped me decide which others of the many I was considering to record, and how to structure the programme:

Magnus Lindberg : Piano Jubilees [2000] Thomas Adès : Mazurkas, op.27 [2009] Tristan Murail : Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire (In memoriam Olivier Messiaen) [1992] Alban Berg / Marvin Wolfthal : Lulu Fantasy [2008] Toru Takemitsu : Rain Tree Sketch II (In memoriam Olivier Messiaen) [1992] Mark Simpson : Barkham Fantasy [2010] Luciano Berio : 6 Encores [1965, 1990]

I’ve been playing Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Jubilees on and off for quite a while, and more recently came to Berio’s 6 Encores. Both are groups of six shortish pieces; the Jubilees have a recurring fanfare motif, so seemed apt to begin a recital, and obviously Encores make sense at the end – so I put these two groups on the edges. To balance Mark’s evocative, dramatic Barkham Fantasy, I thought something else British but this time more poised and witty, and chose Thomas Adès’s Mazurkas. The key-stone to this arch was to be the Lulu Fantasy, and I decided to flank it with two slender pieces that would set this big, intense work in some relief: Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II, and Tristan Murail’s Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire – both of which were written as memorial tributes after Messiaen’s death in 1992.

All of these pieces relate in some way to the idea of life cycles. Lindberg’s Piano Jubilees began as a single ‘Jubilee’ written for Pierre Boulez’s 75th birthday celebrations, with the subsequent Jubilees being elaborations (offspring, I suppose) on material from that initial one. Mark wrote Barkham during a stay in the Devonshire moors during which he was convinced he saw ghosts, and this experience bore itself out in the paranoid-hysterical character of the music. The two Messiaen tributes relate to the commemoration of a great composer’s life. Lulu is nothing if not the story of a cycle – there is an inevitability about Lulu’s ascent and descent, culminating in her death – and Lulu Fantasy is a kind of reincarnation of the original opera. Similarly, Adès’s Mazurkas are like Chopin Mazurkas reborn. Two of Berio’s Encores were written in memory of pianists he knew, and the other four relate respectively to the elements (Earth, Water, Wind, Fire).

The recording sessions are in September and October, in Guildhall School’s brand new Milton Court Concert Hall, with a planned release date for the disc of January 2014.

Lulu Fantasy by Marvin Wolfthal (UK première)

Lulu Fantasy cover I recently gave the UK premiere of a piano paraphrase on Berg’s opera Lulu, by Marvin Wolfthal. I found the score by chance whilst browsing in Barbican Chimes music shop and had it on my shelf for a few years before deciding to take the plunge and learn this immensely difficult piece. It was written in 2008 but had only been performed once before, and I’m delighted to be making the first recording of it in September this year. I’ll be playing it often after that, and am looking forward to championing what I feel is an outstanding and important new work. It won International Piano Magazine’s award for best new work in 2009 and is published by Universal Edition Vienna, but I don’t think it’s got the recognition it deserves yet, simply because pianists haven’t been playing it.

One of the great things about a piano paraphrase (essentially, sections of the opera strung together and arranged for solo piano) is that the player and listener experience the music in a more intimate setting than they might otherwise. For me, learning Lulu Fantasy was a great way to get to know the opera better – and it’s much more satisfying to do that by playing Wolfthal’s paraphrase than trying to wade through the full score. In the 19th Century (i.e. before recorded music), the piano paraphrase was one of the main ways people became familiar with operas – piano recitals or amateur play-throughs generally being much more accessible than full-scale operatic performances. Continuing this tradition, hopefully Wolfthal’s Lulu Fantasy will help Berg’s Lulu reach fresh ears.

I’ve played the Sonata, op.1 – Berg’s only work for solo piano – a lot and had always wished there were more piano pieces by Berg. Lulu was the last thing he wrote and as such, this and the Sonata effectively bookend his oeuvre. Berg’s late music is extraordinary in its structural integrity – almost every note can be accounted for within some kind of compositional system – but something that’s always fascinated me is that despite the polar-opposite ways in which they were created, the sound of the late works has much in common with that of Berg’s early ones. In the tonally free-wheeling Sonata we sense – amidst the intense, passionate, high-Romantic music – Berg searching for order: in the supremely organised music of Lulu (where the organisation effectively programmes dissonance into the DNA) we hear this same lyricism and passion, and Berg finding ways to hark back to tonal security. He delights in engineering ways to escape his systems; but though he may be able to find consonance temporarily, the music is quickly forced off in some other direction. Some people find this incongruous, but personally I love the way you end up with these mirage moments of fleeting relief.

Lulu is a fascinating character and whether or not we sympathise with her despite her wicked and manipulative ways is questionable. Within the opera she’s all things to all men – each male character calls her by a different name – and before we even meet her she’s described as a snake. In fact none of the characters in this opera are particularly likeable, and you could see that as being because Lulu brings out the worst in them or think of her as simply the most developed of this unsavoury bunch. Her story has a neat and unfortunate symmetry: in the first half of the opera she climbs the social ladder and in the second she descends it, culminating in her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Berg reflects this symmetry in various ways, including having singers whose characters Lulu kills off come back in other roles, taking revenge by proxy. Musical symmetry is at its most intense in the central Filmmusik section – a film is shown in the middle of the opera, depicting Lulu’s arrest, trial, imprisonment, scheming and escape – which is palindromic, i.e. the second half is the same as the first in reverse.

This symmetry is incorporated into Wolfthal’s paraphrase. The Filmmusik sits in the middle, flanked on either side by Alwa (the male lead)’s love music, which in both instances is interrupted by the Ragtime music. The paraphrase begins with a variation on the music heard when Lulu first appears and ends with a section from the Lied der Lulu that sets the line, “I have never tried to appear anything other than that what I am taken for, and no one has ever taken me for anything other than what I am.” An extraordinary text, given the way Lulu’s manipulation of others is the very thing that creates the conditions for her abuse by them.

Wolfthal decided which bits of the opera to transcribe by trying them out at the piano and seeing what would work – and it was by this process that he ended up with lots of Alwa’s music. So Lulu Fantasy became partly a portrait of Alwa, which is uncannily fitting since Alwa is a composer (he is also viewed by many as Berg’s means of inserting his own point of view into the opera). The Ragtime music is written by Alwa for Lulu, and the way Wolfthal features it in this paraphrase gives it much more weight than when we hear it – briefly and in the background – in the opera. Wolfthal is American and when I talked the piece through with him he told me that among Berg’s possessions was a book on how to write Ragtime music – so Wolfthal’s foregrounding of the ‘Rag’ (“the real American folksong,” as Ira Gershwin had it) makes Lulu Fantasy in some ways a particularly American paraphrase. Another way in which this is so is that in moving from one section to another Wolfthal often uses metric modulation (where one rhythm and meter slips seamlessly into another), recalling the great American composer Elliott Carter, to whom Lulu Fantasy is dedicated.

I was very grateful to the City of London Festival who allowed me to programme this work. It seemed a particularly apt if slightly sinister place to play it, only a mile or so from Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper’s murders – including his fictional one of Lulu, presumably – occurred.

Victorian-era Whitechapel

Joining the (New) Dots

I’m very pleased to have become the latest addition to the team who run New Dots. The founders approached me about joining them after the concert in May and I was delighted to accept, so I’m going to be helping out with it for the next couple of years at least. New Dots is a charity that primarily supports emerging composers, by providing a platform for them to have their works performed, connecting them to musicians that love playing contemporary music and helping these performers and composers build an audience. Through this work we also aim to widen appreciation and interest in new music.

At the moment we have two concerts per year, at The Forge in Camden, and present six pieces by different composers at each. The instrumental / vocal forces are fixed in advance, then a call is put out for composers to apply to write either a brand new piece or offer something they’ve already written for a combination of the instruments/voices available. The featured composers are chosen by a selection panel which changes for each concert. Once they have been selected, the composers write their pieces, working with the musicians in rehearsal and prior to that too if they want. The concerts themselves have an informal atmosphere (The Forge works well for us as the room the concert is held in connects directly to the bar), do not last too long, and involve the performers and composers talking about the music in terms of why they wrote it or what it’s like to play. Often there’s a story behind a piece or it demands some unusual playing technique that’s interesting to hear about.

The niche I feel that New Dots fills is emerging composers getting chamber works played and heard by people who are interested in them. Ordinarily it can be difficult for performers to programme new pieces as promoters often fear the unknown, worrying about risking it on their audience. As a result there is little out there for audiences to go to where they can hear work by emerging composers – not just the ’emerged’ ones with big publishers backing them – in an engaging, entertaining format. There are lots of schemes for emerging performers, and quite a few for composers, but the latter usually seem to focus on big orchestral pieces. I think it’s important to have something more for chamber music, as smaller-scale pieces have a greater chance of getting repeat performances and as such being heard more often.

We have exciting plans for the years ahead, including a big concert (these might become a regular fixture every couple of years) based on some of the highlights from what we’ve presented so far; using unusual instrumental/vocal combinations; arranging repeat performances; and facilitating cross-arts collaborations.

Find out more about New Dots here.

New Dots review

Paul Kilbey wrote the following for Bachtrack after the New Dots concert in May:

New Dots is a new initiative devoted to supporting emerging composers and performers in contemporary music, and this was its second-ever concert, at The Forge in Camden. Four world premières and one UK première – all New Dots commissions – plus a bonus performance of a recent piece by Mark Simpson were performed by members of the Atéa Wind Quintet and pianist Richard Uttley, in various instrumental combinations. They formed a pleasingly varied programme, all taking inspiration from a non-musical source, and yet each using this inspiration in profoundly different ways.

Piers Tattersall’s At a Distance of Less than a Yard… was a strong opening which stood out for the sharpness with which it characterised its three instrumental parts. Based around the plot of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy, this trio tells the story of a man (piano) whose wife (clarinet) is having an affair (with a French horn). Perhaps understandably, the piano spends most of the piece going slightly nuts, and prompts a shrill response from the clarinet. The horn begins as an apparently rather confused bystander, but gradually unites with his lover, perhaps in opposition to the barrage of unreasonable outbursts coming from the piano. A slower coda sees the piano, feeling sorry for itself, slip into a rather self-indulgent light jazz style and reluctantly take on the role of accompanist to the two soloists. It’s easy for compositions like this to slip into unintelligibility, but Tattersall’s was full of wit and enjoyable to try and interpret.

…

When the world is puddle-wonderful for clarinet, flute and piano by Michael Cutting had a rather vaguer relationship to its inspirational source, E.E. Cummings’ poem in Just (from which the title is taken). There’s an air of quiet joy to the poem, which vividly depicts a spring day, and something of this carries through into Cutting’s contemplative, smiling, whispered composition. This provocative piece stood out for its softness, answering few questions but asking quite a lot.

…

An interlude to all the commissions came in the form of Mark Simpson’s slightly older piano work Barkham Fantasy, performed with breathtaking sensitivity by Richard Uttley. It’s a remarkable miniature, full of sinister textures, extremes of pitch and capricious changes of mood, reminiscent of Thomas Adès’ solo piano works but never distractingly so. This concert wasn’t meant to be about Mark Simpson, but this did come fairly close to stealing the show.

With Uttley, the Atéa Wind Quintet – Joshua Batty (flute), Philip Haworth (oboe), Anna Hashimoto (clarinet), Christopher Beagles (horn) and Ashley Myall (bassoon) – performed excellently in whatever combination was required, eloquently proving the benefits of close relationships between composers and performers. It’s wonderful that contemporary music has another champion in London – especially one so committed to commissioning – and New Dots has found an effective formula for presenting its new works. I look forward to seeing how it develops, and keeping up with the many new dots (and sounds) ahead.

View the full article here.

BBC Maida Vale Studios review

Review from Colin Anderson, for ClassicalSource.com:

…Richard Uttley delighted the ear with solo piano music. Benjamin Britten’s Holiday Diary (1934) is of precocious prestidigitation, and Uttley caught unerringly the music’s rippling evocation, its rhythmic flair and its hustle-bustle. If not always obviously by Britten there was no doubting a young man’s talent and confidence, mirrored by Uttley, and culminating in ‘Night’, shaped with sensitivity. Uttley then offered something from the salon with Amy Beach’s Gavotte fantastique (1903), charming in its capricious formality, and played with affection.

Read the full article here.

Biopic

YCAT biopic of me talking about learning Brian Ferneyhough’s extraordinary Lemma-Icon-Epigram and a few other things.

Produced by Unveil Arts, funded by The Foyle Foundation.

You can hear an excerpt from the recording I’m talking about here.

Mozart Concerto review

Review from Brian Hick for Lark Reviews, on my performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.23 with Brighton Symphony Orchestra:

After the stridency of the Verdi, Mozart could have seemed rather too relaxed but Richard Uttley brought a crispness and classical finesse to his playing of the Piano Concerto No23 which was completely convincing. What a pleasure to find a performer who simply plays the music exquisitely without histrionics or showmanship. It was a model of what professional music-making should be. Clarity, precision and rationalism where finely blended to give a reading which held our attention throughout. The second movement was particularly effective in its hints of an inner life and soul which can so easily be missed in a more superficial reading.

Bridgewater Hall review

Review from the Canal St blog of my recital in Bridgewater Hall:

We had been told that Richard Uttley had given a compelling audition to the friends committee towards the end of last year and so there was no surprise that this young man opened his recital with a flawless performance of Bach’s Partita No 1. Perhaps all lunch time concerts should begin with Bach!!

The recital was built around dance and from Bach we moved seamlessly to 5 Chopin Mazurkas op7.

Each full of melody and charm, Richard displayed great skill in his interpretation without any flamboyance or histrionics!

3 of Debussy’s Image from book one followed and for me these were the highlight of the recital. Beautifully played rich in colour and touch. I hope we will get to hear him play more Debussy if he returns to the Bridgewater Hall as I’m sure he must.

Very cleverly Richard followed the Debussy with 3 Mazurkas by Thomas Ades. I hadn’t heard these previously but found them to be quite delightful. They were quirky, full of humour and scatty imaginings.

The recital was brought to an end with Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat, op.53 “Heroic”. A truly virtuosic piece which was played with apparent consummate ease!!!

Leicester review

Review from recital in Leicester Mercury:

Graduating from Clare College, Cambridge in 2008, Richard Uttley is a rising star as a recital pianist.

In 2010, he won first prize in the Haverhill Sinfonia Soloist Competition.

Richard began a short recital with three waltzes by Chopin. Each was played clarity and feeling bringing out the simplicity of the pieces.

In contrast, Maurice Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales were of a more complex texture.

The opening Modéré was a torrid display of fingerwork, transforming to sentiment, simplicity, humour and passion as the waltzes delighted the audience.

Richard presented the many moods with ease and an evident passion.

Richard Uttley has a huge empathy with the music he plays, his musical standards are of the highest order and his understanding of a piece brings it off the page with great maturity.

Suite No. 5 in E was a delightful display of Handel’s harmonious and melodic composition. Beautifully phrased with subtle ornamentation, I cannot imagine a finer performance.

The frenetic Air and Variations, more commonly known as The Harmonious Blacksmith were played with energy and poise including perfectly executed fast arpeggios.

Richard concluded his recital with Beethoven’s restless Sonata in A, demonstrating a tour de force of emotion, exquisite quiet passages, in parts passionate and exuberant, but above all truly musical!

A concert which displayed many facets of this young man’s extraordinary talent.