A CD of chamber music for strings by Peter Fribbins has recently been released by Guild (GMCD 7343), featuring the Allegri String Quartet, the Angell Piano Trio, Raphael Wallfisch (cello), John York (piano) and James Campbell (clarinets).

(MUSICAL POINTERS: reviewing Guild CD 'I Have the Serpent Brought')

'a thoughtful composer who eschews the latest fads in favour of solid craftsmanship' Musical Pointers, 2010

‘…an immensely rewarding collection of chamber music’ - Fanfare Magazine

.........Listen to sound clips on the Guild website

Music Samples from Peter's Guild CD 'I have the Serpent Brought'

Primrose Piano Quartet CDE84586
Peter Fribbins
Variation on a Burns Air - commissioned by the Primrose Piano Quartet

amongs many other work by:
John Casken, Joe Cutler, Sally Beamish, Piers Hellawell, Jacques Cohen, Zoë Martlew, Robin Ireland, Stephen Goss By Yon Castle Wa' Francis Pott and
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies:
Piano Quartet (2007)
Dmitri Smirnov:
Quintet for Piano, Violin, Viola, Violoncello and Double-bass, Op.72 (1992)

One of my main concerns is musical drama and expressive narrative structures, although not necessarily in a programmatic sense. I have often thought that composers of my generation inherit a rich musical legacy: we are neither constrained to be modernist nor post-modernist, to consistently avoid the diatonically tonal nor exclusively embrace it, but instead a myriad of musical styles of the past are available for plunder in a vast post-modernist palette. Clearly the tonal and harmonic drama of a modulation from tonic to dominant has been largely neutralised over the last 200 years, but another sort of drama can be created by contrasting different techniques. The potential for this is something I have consistently attempted to harness in my music: for instance the wild dissonances in the opening of Porphyria’s Lover are relieved by the warmth of the tonality that immediately follows (literally from the fire in the hearth of Browning’s poem).

No doubt there are plenty of modernist features in my music: however at the same time I am drawn to the sense, logic and formal satisfaction to be gained through traditional structural gestures, shapes and forms.

The pacing of material and the location of certain musical events, sections or aesthetic areas in the musical narrative are an important consideration in my music, and I suppose is an instinctive link with the great music of the past.

Peter Fribbins: Dances & Laments for violin & cello duo (UK première). Premiered at Kings Place on 15 Januar 2012 by Philippe Graffin, violin, and Henri Demarquette, cello, in a concert for the London Chamber Music Society.