New York 2-piano premiere
In the 1990s Francis Pott gave a number of 2-piano recitals with his long-time friend and collaborator, Jeremy Filsell. He promised to write them a piece back in 1994; but non-commissioned works intervened repeatedly and this particular piece took a mere quarter-century to come to fruition, emerging finally during lockdown in 2020. Tandem is its inevitable name, being both (in English) a ‘cycle made for two’ and (in Latin) the word for ‘at last’.
Tandem has three movements: an expansive sonata-form Allegro modelled very loosely on Knight Errant, a single-movement work for the same forces written by Nikolai Medtner during the later years of the Second World War; an elegiac Adagietto; and an energetic tarantella-style finale (Vivo). The second and third movements together roughly equal and marginally exceed the length of the first. The slow movement is inscribed to the memory of Timothy Pride – gifted musician, polymath, fellow member of the Choir of Winchester Cathedral during Francis’s own years as a lay clerk (1991-2001) and much-loved pillar of the community. In April 2020, at the age of 55, Tim became one of the early victims of Covid in the UK, leaving a void in the lives of his countless friends.
Francis Pott and Jeremy Filsell will finally give the first performance of Tandem in New York on Thursday 27th October 2022, the latter having meanwhile relocated to the US and become Director of Music at St Thomas’s Church, Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. The work shares certain thematic ideas with the roughly contemporaneous Violin Concerto also written by Francis during lockdown.
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