Review of 2020
Every New Year I write a brief review of what I have been up to in the previous year: all the concerts, commissions, broadcasts etc - it is an entirely positive and rose-tinted appraisal of the previous 12 months. However, this year I’m finding that process just a little bit more difficult, and it is genuinely quite hard to paint a totally optimistic picture of 2020: as an academic and musician it has been a bleak and barren year, and one of the most challenging in my life.
It started reasonably enough with Irish and American premieres of my Fourth Service (2018), a new work (The Mystery of Light) performed in front of members of the Royal Family and a wonderful trip to Manchester to celebrate the 70th birthday of John Casken, including over twenty new pieces being performed by his former students. Then it all went wrong at the end of March and what followed was cancellation after cancellation as much of the world was thrown into a Lockdown of some form or other. What should have been a year of exciting performances, broadcasts and recordings ended on the 12 March with the second performance of The Mystery of Light. It was all very sad.
Despite this, there have been some highlights, and the good will amongst musicians has been hugely encouraging. Perhaps the most edifying was being involved in Duncan Honeybourne’s Contemporary Piano Soundbites, which saw daily premieres of new piano pieces brodcast live from Duncan’s sitting room. My short contribution was The Turtle Dove which he premiered in April, by July he was recording many of the pieces for CD release which duly happened in November. The CD has had excellent reviews in the following weeks. The book MacMillan Studies was published in July featuring a chapter written by me and I also wrote the liner notes to a new CD of MacMillan’s organ music. Two of my organ pieces were published in a new anthology by OUP in August. There were some performances despite the most challenging circumstances including a Canadian premiere of Salve Regina and the English premiere of The Mystery of Light - I am hugely indebted to anyone who performed (or tried to perform) my music against all the odds. It means so much.
So, on to 2021, there are some concerts tentatively planned for the autumn, but I’m not getting my hopes up. When live music happens again in a regular and concerted fashion it will mean so much to so many - it will happen, we just have to be patient and wait. PAC