Name: Peter Robertson - Mozart's Andante for Flute In C by Peter Robertson - Flute in classical
Duration: 6 min 18 s
Description: Peter Robertson (flute) and Margaret Huntington (organ). Recored at the wedding of Emma Bradshaw and Garan Riley, february 28, 2015 at Matfen. Includes a couple of tiny french horn related musical jokes in the Cadenza, as the bride is a Horn Player.

classical

I began this work in 2008 but set it aside owing to the administrative pressures of my day job, meaning to return to it within a few months. In the event, it was only with lockdown in 2020 that I had the time available to continue and complete the job. The concerto was finished in manuscript short score on 22 June 2021 and orchestration of its three movements took until 07 September. Typesetting came to a merciful end on 21 December.

Covid has meant that the programming of many orchestras, promoters and societies is years behind what had been planned; and this concerto wasn’t a commission: I wrote it because I wanted to, and it’s dedicated to my wife (not for her to play, as she isn’t a violinist). It therefore seems highly unlikely that a live performance will become possible any time soon. With that in mind, I thought I would make publicly accessible a synthetic mock-up of the score (generated by Sibelius software and its associated ‘Note Performer’ sound package), since this is a good deal better than nothing and at least good enough to afford the listener some idea of the music. 

In very broad generic terms the Concerto probably counts as an extension of the English 20th-century pastoral tradition, but it arguably steps outside that categorization in two respects: first, it is far more extensively driven by motivic counterpoint than the ‘English pastoral’ label might lead one to expect, and its themes are variants of one another, deployed in a cyclical fashion across all three movements with the intention of unifying the work as a whole. Secondly, there’s been a bit of Carl Nielsen in my bloodstream ever since I encountered his symphonies in 1973 at the age of 16, and that influence is perhaps detectable, not least in the slow introduction to the expansive first movement (a feature also of Nielsen’s own Violin Concerto) but also in odd corners of the harmonic and tonal language. So this is an English concerto with occasional Nordic undertones.

The slow movement is subtitled ‘Oltrarno’. In 1976 I spent some months living a charmed life in the city of Florence. Oltrarno is the remoter, quieter, outlying district of the city across the river from where the tourists go (Oltrarno means literally ‘beyond the Arno’). In my imagination, in Oltrarno it is always a late afternoon in autumn: odd, since I was never there at that time of year. I wanted to capture the wistfulness of the visitor looking in on the scene from without. In contrast, a moment near the middle of the movement was suggested partly by climbing the steps from the cloister in the Fra Angelico museum at San Marco, nearer the centre of the city, and by being stopped in my tracks at the top of the staircase by Angelico’s 'Annunciation'. For a time I considered naming this work ‘Florentine Concerto’, but for the time being, at least, it goes without subtitle.

The expansive first movement [Andante poco lento ma non troppo - Allegro moderato] lasts some 19 minutes. The slow movement [Andante poco lento] plays for about 11 minutes and the finale [Allegro] for nearly 12.

Violin Concerto (2020 - 21)

Performed by: Peter Robertson (flute)& Martin Jones (piano)


Irishman Sir Hamilton Harty was a fine pianist, composer and one of the most distinguished conductors of the first half of the 20th century.

The brief rhapsodic fantasy In Ireland was written in 1918. At the head of the
score Harty inscribed the words "In a Dublin street, at dusk, two wandering street
musicians are playing". No doubt he had in mind a flautist and a Gaelic harpist.

The piece is a joyful medley of Irish folk-style tunes.

In Ireland for Flute & Piano composed by Hamilton Harty

A cello quartet arrangement of the second movement of Vivaldi's Cello Sonata no. 3 in A minor RV43

Vivaldi - Cello Sonata III in a minor - Allegro

Rivka Golani, viola
Beverley Johnston, percussion
Symphony Nova Scotia / Bernhard Gueller
CBC recording, Jeff Reilly, producer
for more info: https://www.christoshatzis.com/music/89

Pyrrichean Dances 4. "Worlds in Collision"

Peter Robertson (flute) and Margaret Huntington (organ). Recored at the wedding of Emma Bradshaw and Garan Riley, february 28, 2015 at Matfen. Includes a couple of tiny french horn related musical jokes in the Cadenza, as the bride is a Horn Player.

Peter Robertson - Mozart's Andante for Flute In C

Hannah Darroch (flute), Hsiao-Ling Lin (piano)

Carl Vine Flute Sonata - Movement II

Oxford Sinfonia April 2017
Cayenna Ponchione conductor

Copland - Appalachian Spring

Nielsen Symphony 6 Movt 3

For a cappella women's choir with amplified soloist.  Not performed (or notated!) yet, so right now it's all just my own voice.

The text and music were written during a dark time in my life (the painting represented here was painted during the same season... you can see the full image here: http://www.rebekahcummingsartist.com/art/acrylics).  As is often the case, it was the act of creating music and art that helped me grapple with everything and find hope. 

This piece is about the way our pain and trials, if we surrender to them rather than denying or resisting them, can often produce a beautiful vulnerability and honesty in us.  Our brokenness is transformed into openness, and we become an "open door" to unprecedented relational intimacy and to the Divine.

CLOSER (SSAA and Soloist)

SAPPHERIC UPLOAD FOR SAPPHERIC'S ZONE (ROOM)

Baby Einstein - Classical - Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat major, Op. 73, Emperor - Pachelbel - Bach-Beethoven-Schubert-Mozart-Dvorak - Classics For L

This track is placed on Soundcloud by kind permission of Gary Cole, CEO of Regent Records (03 June 2019). The score is published by Edition Peters: 
https://www.editionpeters.com/product/good-day-sir-christemas%21/ep72883

Saint Louis Firsts

Good Day, Sir Christëmas! (Pott)

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3.Vivace non troppo

Maria Angelica Carlsen, violin, 
FFWW, cello, 

Ole Kristian Ruud, conductor, Norwegian Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra. 
30 january 2010

Brahms: Concerto For Violin, Cello & Orchestra In A Minor, Op. 102

In 2012 the Cheltenham Festival ran a competition soliciting short preludes based on the arioso theme ,Bist du bei mir’. The fact that this makes an appearance in J. S. Bach’s Clavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach [BWV 508; 1725] has led to widespread assumption that Bach was its fons et origo; yet the melody comes actually from an aria in the opera Diomedes [1718] by Gottfried Stölzel (1690-1749), a composer much respected by Bach. Misconception attends also the phrase bist du bei mir – roughly, ‘with you by my side’, but with the untranslatable bei open to more spiritual interpretation. Some have assumed Bach was thinking of Anna Magdalena; others that he was addressing God. Fewer have considered the unhappy irony that Diomedes, mythical Greek hero of the Trojan War, fell foul of Aphrodite before returning home to find that, in a vindictive piece of divine retribution, his wife had been unfaithful. 
Never mind! My grandmother had loved BWV508 and had been of the ‘God / Anna Magdalena’ persuasion. My mother inherited that love, although following her own mother’s death it was impossible to play or sing Bist du bei mir without reducing her to tears. For me it holds bitter-sweet memories, and there were private family reasons to find myself attracted by the Cheltenham brief. A set of preludes on Bist du bei mir by various composers had already been published as a present to Judith Serota, erstwhile Director of the Spitalfields Festivals in London, on the initiative of her successor, the composer Diana Burrell, who had conceived the idea of assembling a set of pieces of intermediate difficulty for her to play [Variations for Judith]. My own subsequent offering was singled out by the Cheltenham competition and duly performed by Melvyn Tan in the 2012 Festival. Once that had happened, the Prelude had little obvious home or context on its own; and so, several years later and with Judith Serota’s blessing, I added the Ricercar. The terms Ricercar and Fugue are flexible and to some extent interchangeable, but I liked the etymology of ricercar, with its connotations of teasing something out, often before putting it to some further use. Here, the teasing-out resides in initially turning elements in the melodic contour of Bist du bei mir upside down. Only latterly does its salient falling 5th resume its original shape, whereupon the tune gradually emerges again in more detail before a hushed, tender peroration.
I don't make much of my living as a pianist, since composing and the University of West London claim most of my time; I just pianistically 'come back from the dead' every so often when there's a good reason: usually something of my own that nobody else will play. So this performance is only 99% note-perfect and I can't claim to have done much practice before switching on a recording machine. I had to record on a high-end digital piano, and there are some slight noises off, such as the distant murmur of a passing lorry outside, an audible page-turn and a creaky piano stool, as well as the action of the keyboard. But all this is apt, because in the first place I thought of the music very much as something private, intimate and domestic, never destined for a recital hall of any sort. I've tried to play it in a way that emphasizes its inward feeling, like hearing somebody playing quietly in the next room. Onto the end I stuck an impromptu rendition of the relevant part of the theme on which it's all based. Since I don't possess a copy of this and was doing that by ear, it was a bit risky and probably a poor idea. But it feels right to hear the original at the end, so I've left it there anyhow.

The Prelude and Ricercar are published as no. 6 in a miscellany of a dozen very mixed pieces collectively entitled Gallimaufry. The following link takes you to this:
https://composersedition.com/piano/francis-pott-gallimaufry/

Prelude and Ricercar on 'Bist du bei mir'

Snow Museum

The final in the trilogy of Scottish arrangements by Gareth Wilson. Enjoy! From my album 'Ae Fond Kiss' available to purchase via:
www.jennybacon.co.uk

My love is like a red, red rose

Flute player based in London, UK. Contact me if you need a flutist for performance or collaboration.


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Peter Robertson - Mozart's Andante for Flute In C

Peter Robertson - Flute

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