Ewan Millar & Tomos Boyles

Performers

Notes on the performers

Ewan Millar

Ewan Millar is from Berkshire, recently having completed his final year reading music at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours. He has been playing for over a decade, beginning in the Berkshire Maestros charity music service in Reading, learning with Nicky Fairbairn. He now has lessons with Melanie Ragge, and is continuing with her at the Royal Academy of Music over the next two years for his Masters.

In 2021, he reached the grand final of the BBC Young Musician Competition, winning the woodwind final along the way, getting to perform Oscar Navarro’s “Legacy” Concerto with the BBC Philharmonic at Bridgewater Hall.

As a solo recitalist, he has performed at events around the UK like the Cheltenham Festival, Wooburn Festival, and Lake District Summer Music Festival. As well as oboe, he is a jazz pianist and singer, gigging regularly around Oxford.

Tomos Boyles

Tomos Boyles is a young Welsh musician developing a career as a pianist. He has performed in numerous venues, including St Martin in the Fields, the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, the Wales Millennium Centre, Christ Church Cathedral, and the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

He has enjoyed success in competitions, having recently been awarded the first prize at the Wales International Piano Festival in Caernarfon; this came with a scholarship to help fund future studies. Other top prizes include the Blue Ribband at the National Eisteddfod, and first place in the EPTA
competition.

Tomos graduated from Christ Church, Oxford University in 2022 with a first-class degree in music, having been the recipient of an academic scholarship during his studies. As a postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music, Tomos studies under pianist Rustem Hayroudinoff, having previously studied with Alison Bowring at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama’s junior department.

Programme

Programme notes

Alessandro Marcello

Oboe Concerto in D minor

1. Adagio

The Oboe Concerto in D minor, S D935, is an early 18th-century concerto for oboe, strings and continuo attributed to the Venetian composer Alessandro Marcello. The earliest extant manuscript containing Johann Sebastian Bach’s solo keyboard arrangement of the concerto, BWV 974, dates from around 1715. As a concerto for oboe, strings and continuo its oldest extant sources date from 1717: that year it was printed in Amsterdam, and a C minor variant of the concerto, S Z799, was written down.

Source: Wikipedia

Marina Dranishnikova

Poeme

Marina Dranishnikova (1929 – 1994) was born into a musical family. Her father was conductor and composer Vladimir Alexandrovich Dranishnikov, who was music director at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg (1925-1932), and a friend and contemporary of Prokofiev. She wrote Poème for oboe and piano in 1953, a challenging work, not least for its shifts of key and its changing figuration.

Source: Wikipedia

Clara Schumann

Three Romances for Violin and Piano

1. Andante molto
2. Allegretto
3. Leidenschaftlich schnell

The Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 of Clara Schumann, were written in 1853 and first published in 1855. Having moved to Düsseldorf in 1853, Clara Schumann, who said that “Women are not born to compose,” produced several works, including these three romances. Dedicated to the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim, Schumann and Joachim went on tour with them, even playing them before King George V of Hanover, who was “completely ecstatic” upon hearing them. A critic for the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung praised them, declaring: “All three pieces display an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate and fragrant hand.” Stephen Pettitt for The Times, wrote, “Lush and poignant, they make one regret that Clara’s career as a composer became subordinate to her husband’s.”

Source: Wikipedia

Claude Debussy

Beau Soir arr. J. Heifetz

“Beau soir” (“Beautiful Evening”) is set to a poem by Paul Bourget. The poem paints the picture of a beautiful evening where the rivers are turned rose-colored by the sunset and the wheat fields are moved by a warm breeze. Debussy uses a gently flowing triplet rhythm in the accompaniment, which contrasts the duplets that drive the light melody. The piano and voice partner to create the sensation of peace that one might feel in the evening in nature, fitting the post-Romantic stye. As any evening fades, however, so does the mood of the piece, and the song modulates from E major to F-sharp minor. The piece reaches its climax when the melody reaches a high F-sharp, paired with the word “beau”, about two-thirds through the piece, before entering its modulated conclusion.

Source: Wikipedia

Olivier Messiaen

Vocalise-Etude

Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (1908 – 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex. Harmonically and melodically, he employed a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material his early compositions and improvisations generated. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.

Source: Wikipedia

Peter Facer

Manhattanhenge

Peter Facer is considered to be one of the most talented oboists and cor anglais players of his generation. He has served as principal on both instruments in many of the leading British orchestras and for three years was principal oboe with the West Australian symphony orchestra. He grew up in Hertfordshire, and then attended Girton College Cambridge, where he read music, graduating with a double first class degree. He then studied as a postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music in London where he graduated with distinction and earned the DipRAM for an outstanding final exam.

Source: Wikipedia