THERE are some strange and poignant synchronicities surrounding the performance on March 17 of Lyell Cresswell's Piano Concerto, which will receive its UK premiere with the BBC SSO, New Zealand pianist Stephen de Pledge and Dutch conductor Otto Tausk in a Hear and Now concert devoted to music from Australia and New Zealand.
Any piece written about Cresswell's large-scale, seven-movement concerto, which runs at half an hour and is scheduled to be recorded by Naxos in June, will inevitably be as much about another composer, the late Edward Harper, who died on Easter Sunday 2009, as New Zealander Cresswell.
The two composers were close friends and colleagues, and Cresswell's concerto is a memorial to Harper. But the connection between the two composers runs much deeper.
Harper had been a profound influence on Cresswell's early career. "He was very important to me when I was first here in Scotland.
"The first piece of mine to be played here in the seventies was performed by Edward's New Music Group of Scotland. That's how I got to know him. And I have no doubt that, without his support, I might have gone away; in some ways that initial support was one of the reasons I stayed on in Scotland."
Half a lifetime later, Cresswell started writing his Piano Concerto while his close friend Harper, who was already ill with the cancer that would kill him, had been beginning the composition of his own Third Symphony.
Cresswell knew this, and the two men had talked about that composition.
"I had already written the four inner movements of the concerto, movements 3 to 6, knowing Edward was ill, and in a strange way the whole concerto was written under the shadow of this.
"But what was really weird was that I found I was almost keeping an ear on what he was doing. I just had this very strange feeling that when he died it would fall to me to do something."
Which is exactly what happened. After Harper's death the suggestion was made that Cresswell should look at the surviving sketches of Harper's Third Symphony to see if any of the music had been developed sufficiently to be salvagable. Out of those sketches Cresswell, now commissioned by the SCO, reconstructed one movement, to which Harper had given the title Pastoral before he died. It's on a Burns theme, with a setting of Ye Banks and Braes, and the SCO gave it three performances.
Though Cresswell's Piano Concerto is clearly steeped in the close ties the two composers had, including Cresswell's re-creation of Harper's music, his new concerto, he stresses, is not elegiacal in concept or overall tone.
"It's not weeping and wailing. It's a reflection of a lot of things.
"It covers a lot more, including my own moods in the two years I was writing it. It's also a celebration of Edward's life as much as anything. I'm not just beating my chest."
Indeed, while there are many atmospheric and reflective passages in the music, especially in the fourth movement, which Cresswell has entitled Addolorato, there is also a massive energy in the piece, which has an explosive start, two Scherzos, then a Presto finale that goes off like a rocket and contains not one hint of a valedictory gesture or mood.
"No," laughed Cresswell; "the finale is actually a bit of a romp." Edward Harper, in his dry-ish way, would have got the joke and be wearing a wry smile on his face.
He would also have appreciated the irony of the final coincidence to observe of Saturday, March 17. Had he lived, Edward Harper would have been celebrating his 71st birthday that night.
BBC SSO plays Cresswell Piano Concerto, City Hall, Saturday 17, 7.30pm
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