Writer and repertoire adviser Lewis Foreman remembers
his friend and mentor Patrick Piggott (1915-1990)
whose remarkable late flowering as a composer should not be forgotten.
Patrick Piggott, pianist, university lecturer, writer and the BBC
Head of Music in Birmingham, was a composer who took many years
to evolve a mature style, but in his last twenty years produced
a succession of individual works which have been forgotten since
his death in 1990. His last music, Rosanes Lieder, a gorgeous Mahlerian
song cycle, sung in 1989 by Margaret Field with the Bournemouth
Symphony Orchestra, set poems by Freud’s friend the Viennese
poetess Flora Rosanes. These songs hauntingly evoke the consequences
of war as seen by a woman, and surely demand an international audience.
Piggott, a pupil of Nadia Boulanger, destroyed many of his earliest
compositions. Among the survivors a Phantasy for clarinet and piano
and a Piano Trio, show the influence of John Ireland, though in
the trio memorable in individual ideas and textures. His style developed
and in the 1950s the University of Wales Press published Eight Preludes
for piano, which at the time were bidding fair to become repertoire
pieces, and are still available. From around 1960 dates a lovely
big-boned Nocturne for violin and orchestra and an Essay for string
quartet, the latter of such compelling appeal that after its first
broadcast a listener offered the composer financial support to further
his work.
Between 1972 and 1989 Piggott wrote the music he wanted primarily
to be judged by, developing a remarkable mature style, broadly tonal
but with a wholly personal inflection and harmonic tension and much
‘tougher’ than his earlier music. Piggott was a concert
pianist in his own right, and he wrote for particular artists, notably
the pianist Malcolm Binns. In 15 years he produced some 30 works,
crowned, during his final battle with cancer, by two amazingly youthful
extended scores: The Quest a glittering piano concerto in one long
movement after Tennyson’s poem ‘Merlin and the Gleam’
and the Rosanes Lieder already mentioned.
On the wall down the stairs of his house Piggott displayed his
collection of samplers, since dispersed, on which he based his affecting
little cantata for soprano, girls voices and harp, the harp part
characteristically written with the playing of Sioned Williams in
mind. Samplers was broadcast a couple of weeks after he died, but
along with all his small but intensely enjoyable output needs to
be sung again and would now reward a new wider audience. |
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