John Tilbury plays... Howard Skempton + Michael Parsons:
14 January 2014

John Tilbury plays... John White + Alexander Scriabin:
12 February 2014

The first in a series of winter piano concerts from John Tilbury performing lesser known repertoire. The first of the series continues on from his performance earlier this year of Beckett's late masterwork Worstward Ho with a version with piano accompaniment of Beckett’s final prose piece Stirrings Still. The concert will open with Dave Smith's Al Contrario.

JOHN TILBURY / piano

British pianist John Tilbury is renowned for his remarkable touch and in constant demand as an interpreter of piano pieces by composers such as Morton Feldman and John Cage. During the 1960s, Tibury was closely associated with the composer Cornelius Cardew, whose music he has interpreted and recorded and a member of the Scratch Orchestra. He is also an incredible improvisor, most famously as a member of legendary British group AMM.

Almost all Feldman's music is slow and soft. Only at first sight is this a limitation. I see it rather as a narrow door, to whose dimensions one has to adapt oneself (as in Alice in Wonderland) before one can pass through it into the state of being that is expressed in Feldman's music. Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of light can one begin to perceive the richness and variety of colour which is the material of the music. When one has passed through the narrow door and got accustomed to the dim light, one realises the range of his imagination and the significant differences that distinguish one piece from another ...

Feldman sees the sounds as reverberating endlessly, never getting lost, changing their resonances as they die away, or rather do not die away, but recede from our ears, and soft because softness is compelling, because an insidious invasion of our senses is more effective than a frontal attack. Because our ears must strain to catch the music, they must become more sensitive before they perceive the world of sound in which Feldman's music takes place. - Cornelius Cardew

SAMUEL BECKETT

Stirrings Still is the final prose piece by Samuel Beckett. Written 1986–89 to give his American publisher, Barney Rosset, something to publish. First published in a signed limited edition, it was later republished in the posthumous edition As The Story Was Told (1990). It was to be Beckett's final piece of prose.

Samuel Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906 and died in Paris in 1989. After school in Northern Ireland he went to Trinity College in Dublin where he distinguished himself in French and Italian and was recognised as a brilliant scholar, who under an exchange arrangement taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure before becoming a writer. He left Ireland and finally settled in Paris, staying in France during the war where he was a courier in the Résistance. He won the Nobel Prize in 1969 and is now recognised as one of the major writers of the 20th century.

"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He’s not f---ing me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful." - Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett

DAVE SMITH

Dave Smith is a British composer, arranger and musical performer. Since 1971 he has been associated with the English school of experimental music. After attending Solihull School, he read music at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In the 1970s, Smith was a member of the Scratch Orchestra and a participant in several composer/performer ensembles. The first of these was a keyboard duo with John Lewis which played minimalist and systemic works by British and American composers (notably including early works by Philip Glass) as well as by themselves. Several concerts with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton featured at this time, as did a short-lived 5 piano group (with Lewis, Michael Nyman, Orlando Gough and Benedict Mason) and an involvement with the People's Liberation Music group of Laurie Scott Baker, Cornelius Cardew and others. From 1977 he played in John White's Garden Furniture Music Ensemble alongside Mason and Gavin Bryars: his close association with the music of White, Bryars and Cardew has continued ever since. In the 1980s he was a founder-member of the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria, the first British groups to specialise in, respectively, Javanese classical and Albanian folk musics.

Up to 1977 his music was largely minimalist (process music or systems music). His style quickly developed into a highly eclectic pool of ideas ranging musically from the abstract to the markedly referential and which on occasion is informed by a political consciousness and commitment reminiscent of the later Cardew. His acknowledged influences range from Alkan, Ives and Szymanowski to Albanian folk music, Duke Ellington and those with whom he has worked. The range of ideas is most clearly chronicled in a long series of recital-length solo Piano Concerts, works which encompass an entire concert with varieties of styles. Many of his piano works have been encouraged and performed by John Tilbury.

"Dave has the keenest artistic instincts, and that would probably ensure the quality of his compositions even before we throw all those other things into the mix - his experiences as a member of the Scratch Orchestra, as part of the flourishing community of English Experimental composers, his encyclopedic musical enthusiasms and his pianistic bravura. His pieces can be enjoyed on so many levels - there's enough here to keep a connoisseur-detective occupied for hours, while the huge appeal of the music could stop the most casual listener in their tracks." - Sarah Walker, pianist, on Dave Smith