St Mary’s Church, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5EB. Doors open at 6.30pm. Bar.
A programme of solo piano works including a world premiere with the composer, Howard Skempton, present.
Tickets: tba
Programme
Leos Janacek: Sonata
Robert Schumann: Nine pieces from Bunte Blatter Op.99
Maurice Ravel: Sonatine
Howard Skempton: new work (world premiere)
Frederik Chopin: Mazurka in A minor Op. 17 No. 4
Frederik Chopin: Ballade No. 4 in F minor
WILLIAM HOWARD is one of Britain’s leading pianists, enjoying a career that has taken him to over 40 different countries. His performing life consists of solo recitals, concerto performances, guest appearances with chamber ensembles and instrumentalists. In 1983 he founded the Schubert Ensemble, with which he performed for the full 35 years of the Ensemble’s existence (it gave its final concert in June 2018). Winner of the 1998 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Best Chamber Ensemble, the Schubert Ensemble earned a worldwide reputation as one of the finest piano and string ensembles, as well as setting up several ground-breaking educational projects and commissioning 50 concert works. His solo career has taken him to many of Britain’s most important festivals, including Bath, Brighton and Cheltenham, and he has been artist in residence at several others. He has performed many times in the Wigmore Hall and the South Bank in London and has broadcast regularly for BBC Radio 3. For many years he coached chamber music at Birmingham Conservatoire and performed and taught at the Dartington International Summer School.
William is passionate about 19th century piano repertoire, especially Schubert, Chopin, Schumann and Fauré. He also has a strong interest in Czech piano music and has been particularly acclaimed for his performance of Janáček, for which he received a medal from the Czech Minister of Culture in 1986. Throughout his professional life he has been active in commissioning new works and has taken part in over 100 premieres. He has enjoyed collaborations over several decades with many composers, including David Matthews, Pavel Zemek Novák, Howard Skempton and Judith Weir, who composed his first solo commission, The Art of Touching the Keyboard, in 1983. In 2016 he launched a project to commission love songs for solo piano from leading composers in the UK and abroad. He also set up an international composing competition for writing piano love songs that attracted over 500 entries from 61 countries.