“Giles
Swayne, pianist, composer and wit, is a national treasure and should
be paid more attention.”
The
Strad
“And
more money.” The
Swayne
Giles
Swayne
was
born in June 1946, and
(after an early childhood in Singapore and Australia) grew up in
Liverpool and Yorkshire. He began composing at an early age,
encouraged by his cousin Elizabeth Maconchy. In his teens he studied
piano with Gordon Green; later teachers were Phyllis Hepburn-Lee,
James Gibb and Vlado Perlemuter. On leaving Cambridge in 1968 he won
a composition scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, where he
studied with Harrison Birtwistle, Alan Bush and Nicholas Maw. From
1971 he worked as accompanist and repetiteur, and was on the
Glyndebourne music staff 1973-4. In 1976-77 he visited the Paris
Conservatoire to study with Olivier Messiaen. In
1980, CRY for 28 amplified voices was premièred by the BBC Singers under
John Poole. Hailed as a landmark, it has been performed twice at the
Proms and many times worldwide. The recording, made in 1985 by the
BBC Singers under John Poole, is still in demand after more than 20
years. In 1981 Swayne visited Senegal to record the music of the Jola
people of Casamance. These recordings are now in the British Library.
His interest in African music has had a great influence upon the
subsequent direction of his work – though not in the simplistic
sense which some critics have supposed. From 1990 to 1996 he lived in the Akuapem Hills in eastern Ghana.
The
Silent Land
for cello and 40-part choir, premièred at the 1998
Spitalfields Festival by Raphael Wallfisch with English Voices under
Tim Brown, was described by The
Times
as "a masterpiece" and Swayne "the most accomplished
choral composer in Britain". After a more recent (November 2006)
performance in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge by the
BBC Singers under Stephen Cleobury, Richard Morrison described it in
The
Times
as “oneof the most powerful
memorial pieces written in recent years . . . I found it
overwhelmingly moving.”
In
1998 the BBC, to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the BBC Singers, commissioned Swayne to write HAVOC,
a concert-length companion-piece to CRY
(written
for the BBC Singers twenty years earlier).
After
its première at the Proms in September 1999 (by the BBC
Singers and Endymion under Stephen Cleobury) The
Independent
wrote "Swayne is a master".
The Telegraph
hailed HAVOC
as “a potently imagined sequel to CRY
. . . a tour de force . . . music of a fleeting, hallucinatory
vividness which is, in the best sense, mesmerising.” The
Guardian called it
“music of beatific plangency”.
Swayne’s
Sonata for cello and
piano was premièred
at the 2006 Cheltenham Festival by Robert Irvine and Fali Pavri.
“Swayne’s
cello sonata . . . was the pick of the premieres I heard . . . [and]
deserves to be heard again and often.” (Paul Conway, Tempo,
January 2007). More
recent works include Sinfonietta
Concertante for Beethoven-period orchestra with natural horns and trumpets, which was commissioned by the Jeune
Orchestre Atlantique and toured by them
under Sigiswald Kuijkens in Belgium and France in November 2006, and
Suite no. 1
for solo cello, commissioned by Gerry Mattock and Beryl Calver-Jones
for Robert Irvine and written in May 2007 on the Greek island of
Paxos. Convocation,
a CD of Swayne’s work for voices and organ released by Delphian
Records in 2006, was described by International Record Review as “a
virtually perfect release”.
The Times
commented: “Swayne pushes at the boundaries of choral singing
to create works of excitement and beauty . . . [he] is undoubtedly
the finest choral composer writing today.”
Swayne’s latest major
work, Symphony
no. 1: a small world,
was commissioned by BBC Radio 3, and will be premièred by the
BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jac van Steen on 17th
November 2007. Delphian Records will release a new CD of Swayne’s
music for cello (unaccompanied and with piano) at the end of 2007.
Giles Swayne lives in London,
teaches composition at Cambridge University, and is Composer in
Residence of Clare College.
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