'...one of the outstanding composers of his generation.' The Independent
   
 
 
 
Peter Fribbins Composer
 
The music of Peter Fribbins combines a gift for melody, drama and passion, with a directness and uncompromising clarity. His music is frequently performed throughout the UK, Europe and beyond and is increasingly popular with both musicians and audiences alike. He was born in London, winning a composition scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music at the age of 17 and subsequently studying at Royal Holloway and Nottingham universities. Studies with the German composer Hans Werner Henze led to the staging of his collaborative opera ‘Anna Bella’ in Italy when still only 20.

Fribbins is now especially known for chamber music, some of it literary-inspired, and much of it for strings, notable exceptions being the early Wind Quintet 'In Xanadu' (after Coleridge) which was runner-up in the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize, 'Porphyria’s Lover' for flute and piano (after Browning), and the clarinet and piano '...That Which Echoes in Eternity' (after lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy).

Of the more abstract pieces, important works are the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, the Piano Trio (commissioned by the Austrian Government and premiered in Vienna in 2004 by Haydn Trio Eisenstadt for ORF broadcast), and the Cello Sonata for Raphael Wallfisch and John York (performed by them at the Wigmore Hall in 2006 and recorded for Guild).

His dramatic and highly expressive early string quartet 'I Have the Serpent Brought' (based upon an early seventeenth-century poem by metaphysical poet John Donne) has been performed by many quartets and was recorded by the Allegri Quartet, together with the Clarinet Quintet for the recent Guild CD of Fribbins’s chamber music for strings. His String Quartet No.2, commissioned by the Chilingirian Quartet, was premiered by them in 2006 and performed to a packed house in the Wigmore Hall in 2008.

Recent work
2007 saw the premiere of the haunting ‘Bugail Yr Hafod’, based on a Welsh folk song for violist Sarah-Jane Bradley (a Presteigne Festival commission) and a second piano trio 'Softly, in the Dusk...', a commission for the Rosamunde Trio and based on a similarly haunting poem by D.H. Lawrence. This was premiered at the Wigmore Hall to great critical acclaim, and has subsequently been performed widely throughout Europe (in November 2010 it will receive it’s Czech premiere in the Dvorak Hall in Prague).

In 2008, Fribbins was invited to be one of a number of composers to contribute a piece to the Primrose Piano Quartet's project 'Variations on a Burns Air', to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns's birth. This was performed by the Quartet through England and Scotland and released on the Meridian label together with the new Piano Quartet by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. A similar project, this time in dual commemoration of Haydn's bicentenary and John McCabe's 70th birthday, led to the writing of 'A Haydn Prelude' for piano, premiered at the Presteigne Festival by Huw Watkins in 2009 and selected for publication in the International Piano Magazine in 2010.

Current projects
2010 sees the premiere of ‘Dances & Laments’, a violin and cello Duo commissioned by Philippe Graffin for the Consonances Festival in France, and work on a septet for the new 'Turner Ensemble' (formed by a number of the principals of the Royal Opera House Orchestra at Covent Garden) for premiere next May.

As well as a composer, Peter Fribbins is Director of Music at Middlesex University and Artistic Director of the celebrated and long-established series of Sunday London Chamber Music Society Concerts, which has been resident in the splendid new Kings Place concert hall since 2008.


A Janacekian instinct for unusual and ear-catching timbres’ - CD Review