Piano Concerto: Cofio / Remembering

Davies, Maxwell

Abstract

I had the honour of being selected for the 2017-2018 Adopt A Composer scheme, run by Making Music in association with Sound and Music, the PRS Foundation and BBC Radio 3. I was paired with Cor Crymych a’r Cylch from Pembrokeshire, Wales, and the collaboration yielded two electronic soundscapes made from recordings of primary school workshops associated with our collaboration, and three reasonably substantial choral works: Y Gors Fawr, Arwyr, and Cofio / Remembering. These five works all form part of a suite that was in some way written in response to the political climate of the then current times (2016-2019), and explored broad themes such as ‘identity’, ‘community’, ‘place’, ‘looking outward’ etc., and were settings of poems by poets associated in some way with Cor Crymych.

The choir is wonderful. They produce a beautiful sound and are led brilliantly by their very gifted conductor Angharad Mair Jones. One side effect of this brilliance is that the choir is extremely busy, often competing in local and national competitions and touring to different parts of the world – often with different repertoire. As a result of this, Y Gors Fawr was performed many times during the collaboration, and even competed with in the National Eisteddfod in 2018, but the completed suite is yet to be performed in its entirety.

My belief is that amateur/leisure-time musicians are incredibly important for composers – I’d go as far as to say they are a national treasure – as they are the musicians communicating with the communities in which they serve, so what better people to perform the works of composers within those communities?

There is also a very important factor to be considered as well, and that is ‘access’ – access for different kinds of musicians to be able to access contemporary repertoire that is idiomatically appropriate and rewarding to perform.

All of these considerations were, in fact, motivations behind this Piano Concerto. To start with, I had the opportunity to compose another piece for the St Edward’s Orchestra, for whom I wrote my Tiny Symphony in 2016, and have had a relationship with as a guest conductor for many years. I had promised to write Alison Dite, their conductor and director, a ‘Tiny Piano Concerto’, so writing this went in some way to fulfilling that promise, although it didn’t quite happen the way I initially thought it might!

Next, it struck me how versatile the material for the choral work Cofio / Remembering was, and I could hear the music I had written in the context of a dialogue between piano and orchestra in the same way as the chorus and semi-chorus are in dialogue in the choral version.

Next, I wanted to write a concerto that pianists at different stages of learning or of wildly varying technical abilities could play – to access the experience of performing a concerto, at least from the perspective of the piano writing – and showcases musicality and ability to communicate through playing simple material.
In addition, I wanted, somehow, in this version of the music for Cofio / Remembering, to engage with the word ‘remembering’ in the instrumental writing. Much of the music for the solo piano is quite tentative or sparse – almost as if the pianist is ‘remembering’ bits and pieces, and the orchestra (and conductor, if one is used) is almost, in a theatrical way, completely in the imaginings of that person sat at the piano: the orchestral textures build in a responsive way to what comes out of the piano, and then much of the piece is a dialogue between the piano and these orchestral ‘imaginings’. There is one section – only nine bars in length – around two thirds of the way through the piece, that nods in the direction of the romantic virtuoso concerto; another play on the idea of something being momentarily remembered – a glimpse at bygone times, which is very much in keeping with the imagery in the poem. There are some eight different possible versions for the solo pianist of this passage, to account for different levels of technical ability, but all have a flavour – at least in comparison to the rest of the piano writing in the work – of something of the ‘bravura’.

• Other Type: Composition
• Publication Date: Jul 15, 2019
• Deposit Date: Nov 4, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 7, 2022
• Keywords: Music Performance, Music Composition, Piano Concerto, BBC Radio 3
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10118556
• Related Public URLs: https://soundandmusic.org/compose/adopt-a-composer/; ; https://soundandmusic.org/compose/adopt-a-music-creator/