One of my recent pieces for piano, Progress always comes late (2017), will be premiered by pianist Ian Pace in April at City University of London. The event is free to attend, but it is recommended that you reserve a place via the online booking form.

To celebrate Ian Pace’s 50^th birthday, a group of international composers have all written short piano pieces in tribute to him. These were collected by US composer Evan Johnson, who wrote that this collection was ‘in recognition of a career built around the persistent championing of young or unduly ignored composers, and of difficult or otherwise unreasonable music: the sort often thankless effort that can indelibly shape a nascent compositional career, build decades-long collaborations, and begin to change the face of a repertoire’. Eighteen world premieres will form one half of the concert, and in the other half Ian will perform four other lesser-known early twentieth-century piano works: Arthur Lourié’s sensuous and ultra-chromatic Deux poèmes op. 8 (1912), Stefan Wolpe’s brutalist Sonata for piano, op. 1 (1925), Frederic Mompou’s aloof Charmes (1920-21), and Roger Sessions’ lyrical and brilliant Piano Sonata No. 1 (1930).

Quotation source: City of London Music Events (city.ac.uk), ‘Ian Pace at Fifty – Tributes and Early Modernism’.  A concert programme can be found here.

The concert will also include performances of music by Arthur Lourié, Stefan Wolpe, Frederic Mompou, Roger Sessions, Christopher Fox, James Dillon, Roddy Hawkins, Lauren Redhead, Mic Spencer, Michael Finnissy, Sadie Harrison, Ben Smith, Patrícia Sucena de Almeida, Walter Zimmermann, Ian Pace, Jesse Ronneau, Eleri Angharad Pound, Marc Yeats, Nigel McBride, Alistair Zaldua, Wieland Hoban, and Evan Johnson.