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Knowledge Exchange Violin: A Performer’s Odyssey - Peter Sheppard Skærved, violin
This is a free event with tickets required for admission.
Peter Sheppard Skærved is Viotti Lecturer in Performance Studies, Royal Academy of Music, London (RAM); Honorary Professor, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester; Artist in Residence, Malmö Academy of Music; Visiting Research Fellow, Goldsmiths, University of London. Peter regularly appears as a soloist in over 30 countries. His discography is extensive, ranging from cycles of sonatas by Beethoven and Telemann, the complete quartets of David Matthews, Michael Tippett, and cycles of concertos from Haydn to Henze. He has won awards from the BBC Music Magazine, been nominated for a Gramophone Award, as well as a GRAMMY for a concerto recording in 2007. He records for NMC, Chandos, Naxos, Metier, and Toccata. Director of an acclaimed series of concerts at Wiltons Music Hall in London, Peter is the founder and leader of the Kreutzer Quartet and the Munich-based Ensemble Triolog. He regularly appears as director and soloist with ensembles such as the Zagreb Soloists and Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen. Peter is the only British violinist to have been invited to play on Paganini’s violin il Cannone more than once (five times) and he regularly gives recitals on the prestigious collection of historic instruments at the Library of Congress, Washington. He is also acclaimed for his collaborative work with museums, working regularly with the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum and worldwide. He plays on a 1698 Stradivari owned by Joseph Joachim, which is currently on loan to the Academy from the Fridart Foundation. Peter is the Fellow of Performance Studies at the Academy.
From 2005 through 2016, Peter served as Co-Director for the Vanderbilt-RAM Exchange Program, “Collaborative Composition in London.” During these dozen years, students from the two schools shuttled between London and Nashville to work with Peter on a radical extension of the classical music tradition into unexplored regions of creative inquiry, wherein new music comes into being through the sustained attention given by performers and composers to each other’s complex practices. At the heart of these workshops—and central to all of Peter’s work—is the crucial insight that the close connection between composing and playing has always been the indispensable essence of music-making throughout the ages.
Through Knowledge Exchange Violin (KEV)—his recent set of international collaborations with museums, libraries, and environmental organizations—Peter celebrates historic instruments and fragile landscapes through conversations, performances, commissions of new musical works, documentary films, recordings, podcasts, and social media outreach. Vanderbilt’s Michael Alec Rose has composed more than a dozen new pieces for the project. The following collaborations between violinist, composer, and various curators give a vivid picture of KEV’s scope and purposes: a performance and conversation about two great violas in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), filmed on site in the museum’s glorious Instrument Gallery; a project with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds at Farnham Heath (near London), including an outdoor filming of Peter playing a new piece by Michael reflecting the remarkable similarity between the preserved landscape of the English heath and the protected bottomland alongside Nashville’s Cumberland River; two films produced in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), viewed by thousands on the Library’s website, celebrating the dramatic differences in craftsmanship and sonority between the great Brookings Amati and Ward Stradivari in the Library’s collection; two new works dedicated to the city of Genoa, Italy, composed especially by Rose for Peter to play on Niccolò Paganini’s own violins, and filmed on site at Palazzo Rosso, where Paganini’s legacy lives on in the context of the city’s magnificent traditions of art, sculpture, architecture, and cyclical civic renewal.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2549688-0
