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Matthew Schellhorn is a prominent performer of new music, with several works written for or dedicated to him. He has given numerous world and territorial premieres.

Composers with whom he has worked include Hugh Wood, Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr, Jeremy Thurlow, Cecilia McDowall, Ian Wilson, James Francis Brown, John Hawkins, Adrian Williams, Lloyd Moore, Gabriel Jackson, Jane O'Leary, Kenneth Hesketh, Joe Duddell, David Bruce, Peter Wiegold, and Nicola LeFanu.

Matthew Schellhorn is a Park Lane Group Featured Young Artist for 2008. In January this year, he performed contemporary works with clarinettist Peter Sparks in the Park Lane Group Young Artists New Year Series at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London.

Henri Dutilleux & Matthew Schellhorn, 2007

Projects and commissions

David Bruce (b. 1970) Berimbau (2007)

WORLD PREMIERE
Hertford Music Club, 18 November 2007

Programme note

Berimbau is the first of a projected series of pieces for solo piano inspired by instruments from around the world. The aim is not necessarily to imitate the sound of the instrument, but more to use elements of the sound, or the approach to playing the instrument as a starting point and a point of focus for each piece.

The Berimbau is a percussive instrument used in the Brazilian dance/martial art Capoeira. It is made from a large wooden bow with a steel string and a resonating gourd. As played for capoeira the berimbau has essentially three sounds – two pitched sounds, one higher one lower, and a third buzzing sound. Throughout much of my piece this use of two alternating pitches together with a more percussive third sound can be found somewhere in the texture.

In listening to capoeira music on the berimbau I have often been struck by a rhythm which is half way between a three equal tripets and a quaver-semiquaver-semiquaver pattern – sort of a lazy triplet if you like. I took this rhythm as another of my starting points and notated it as a quintuplet filed with quaver-dotted semiquaver-dotted semiquaver, sometimes using it in isolation, sometimes contrasted with a simultaneous even triplet.

Finally the piece captures two different characters that I have noticed from the berimbau – in the first half of the piece the mood is misterious, tentative, almost feeling its way in the dark – rather like the capoeira dancers might size one another up in the opening stages of a dance. In the second half the mood becomes much more energetic and culminates in a frenzy of rhythm.

© David Bruce, 2007

Further information
: www.davidbruce.net :

Ian Wilson (b. 1964) Stations (2006–2007)

WORLD PREMIERES
18 May 2007 – London Festival of Contemporary Church Music (Books I & II)
24 April 2008 – Bangor, UK (Book III)
7 May 2008 – Wigmore Hall, London, UK (Book IV)

Programme note

Stations is a fourteen-movement work for solo piano (as of May 2007, half-complete), inspired by the Catholic devotion of the Stations of the Cross – a narrative in fourteen scenes that relates to the events leading from Christ’s death sentence to his entombment.

In the past, I have sought on occasion to marry aspects of the Christian faith with universal human experience. Works such as The Seven Last Words (for piano trio), Winter’s Edge (for string quartet), and Rich Harbour (a concerto for organ and orchestra) have all sought to distil the emotional content of the ideas behind them and to transpose them onto dramatic musical frameworks that carry the works forward unhindered by dogma or imagery. Stations uses the devotional sequence of the Stations of the Cross as the structural and emotional basis for a large-scale instrumental work. As well as being obviously related to that idea, Wilson also wants to expand the potential “meaning” of the work so that intimations of programme music or purely impressionistic or pictorial responses will not arise, but rather a strong, unified journey-type piece will result. The intention is to have a multi-movement, seventy-five-minute work that creates its own sense of musical drama as it proceeds.

The work is divided into four Books. While complete performances of the whole work are the aspiration, each Book is also performable as a separate entity. Matthew Schellhorn gave the world premiere of Books 1 and 2 during a recital at the 2007 London Festival of Contemporary Church Music on 18 May 2007; the cycle will continue in recitals in autumn 2007, and will be completed at the Wigmore Hall in 2008.

© Ian Wilson, 2007

Further information
: www.ianwilson.org.uk :

Jeremy Thurlow (b. 1967) The Will of the Tones (2003)

Programme note

In this piece I tried to recreate in modern terms the Romantic notion, which I’ve always found exciting, of music as some kind of living organism, animated by the inexorable drive or “will” of the sounds which make it up. The idea resonates with more recent thinking, too, about the way that genes blindly but powerfully shape the development of the bodies of which they are part. The piece begins with the whole body of the piano being stirred into resonance by a series of bright, strong, single notes, which gradually multiply and evolve into something both fluid and weighty, with a life and an energy entirely its own. This is virtuoso music, and it’s conceived on a grand scale, even though in fact it’s only about 10 minutes long.

The Will of the Tones was written for Matthew Schellhorn, who gave the première in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in November 2004.

© Jeremy Thurlow, 2006

Further information
: jeremythurlow.wordpress.com :

Tim Watts (b. 1979) Two Scherzos (2004)

Programme note

Two fiendishly virtuosic movements whose fiery energy is, nevertheless, tempered by moments of lyricism and calm.

© Tim Watts, 2004

Further information
: www.timothywatts.co.uk :