Author Description

Fantasia III was commissioned by the Albany Brass Consort, with funds made available by the Scottish Arts Council, and first performed on 3 November 1977 at St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh. The piece is based on the first of William Byrd’s elegies for Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Come to me, grief, for ever’, published in the ‘Psalmes, Sonnets and Songs’ of 1588. Edward Harper (1941-2009) read music at Oxford and studied composition with Gordon Jacob at the RCM and later in Milan with Donatoni. His music combines emotional directness with a close-textured refinement and his treatment of the music of older composers -- also including Byrd, Schubert, and Elgar -- is eager and generous, sometimes humorous, but never swerving into irony. After the culmination of his early serial style in the Piano Concerto (1970), a return to tonality and an interest in the reworking of older music was marked by Bartók Games (1972). These features persisted in the one-act opera Fanny Robin (1975) which utilises a theme from Purcell's Dido & Aeneas (with which it is intended to be performed), as well as echoing the melos of English folksong. The widely-performed Intrada after Monteverdi, written for the 1982 Edinburgh Festival, develops material from the opening toccata of Orfeo. The opera Hedda Gabler, performed by Scottish Opera in 1985, on a libretto after Ibsen, is Harper's most ambitious work, and reveals an eloquent dramatic voice. Like Fanny Robin and the chamber opera The Mellstock Quire (1988), it contains passages of spoken melodrama. The quintessentially English quality in many of Harper's works is especially evident in the Homage to Thomas Hardy (1990). His music combines emotional directness with a close-textured refinement. His treatment of the music of older composers, who also include Byrd, Schubert, Elgar, and Dallapiccola, is eager and generous, sometimes humorous, but never swerving into irony.