Peter Seivewright

Peter Seivewright (born 1954 in Skipton, England) is a British pianist. After music studies at Oxford, he was a post-graduate student at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where he studied piano with Ryszard Bakst.

Work with Galuppi's sonatas
Although he has released several recordings, including discs of Carl Nielsen, Victor Bendix, and Louis Glass, he is perhaps most known for his current endeavor to record all 90 of the keyboard sonatas of Baldassarre Galuppi for The Divine Art record company. This has involved him in personally researching manuscripts of Galuppi's sonatas in Venice, and reportedly in editing and publishing them in due course as well.

Reviews of Seivewright's Galuppi have been varied. Some have been impressed by Galuppi's sonatas themselves, using Domenico Scarlatti as a benchmark with one reviewer calling them "far more appealing that Scarlatti sonatas,"; others have made the same comparison to Galuppi's detriment ("the individual pieces lack the character and sparkling invention so typical of Scarlatti").

Seivewright's playing has also been evaluated variously, with many reviewers applauding it. Reviewer Gerald Fenech terms him "an enthusiastic and technically accomplished pianist" who "plays with great conviction and flair in all the sonatas presented here." Kevin Sutton, however, complains that "The halting playing, lack of line tension and the image that I was listening to a pianist playing over, rather than through a composer continually disturbed me. (Glenn Gould would have been proud.)"

Nevertheless, it is clear that Seivewright is performing an important service in renewing interest in Galuppi's long-neglected keyboard output, and one that should help broaden our knowledge of the composer.

Work with modern composers
Seivewright has also been a champion of music by living composers, having performed Rory Boyle's piano concerto and "Moduli" (a series of piano pieces), and commissioning "A Saltire Sonata" from Robert Crawford. He also performed Martin Dalby's score for the ten-minute film for schoolchildren "Let's See: Winter."

Use of music therapy for surgical recovery
According to Britain's The Daily Telegraph, Seivewright underwent a quadruple-bypass operation in 2000, and used a work by Johann Sebastian Bach for purposes of music therapy. The Telegraph reported that Seivewright


 * "was determined that if he didn't wake up, the last music he listened to would be the 'greatest music ever written': the opening orchestral movement [sic] of Bach's St Matthew Passion."

(The opening movement "Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen," actually a chorus with orchestra, is evidently meant.) However, the operation was successful, and though Seivewright attributed this to his surgeon, the Telegraph commented that "Bach's music floating around in his subconscious was certainly a contributory factor."

Forthcoming recordings
Seivewright's reverence for Bach may also be judged by the fact that his record label has announced that in 2007, they will release a recording of four of the composer's keyboard concertos by the pianist with the Scottish Baroque Soloists, as well as another disc including works by Elliott Carter and Miklos Rozsa.