Anthony Gilbert

[Photo: Morris Adam]
Photo: Morris Adam

"Tough yet often humorous, Gilbert's music reflects the uncompromising spirit of its creator. His dogged individualism is clear not only from his determination, relatively late in life, to become a composer, but also from his subsequent pursuit of artistic goals that answered personal challenges rather than topical concerns of the avant-garde. Although he has written in most of the major genres, his output resists conventional classifications of either sensibility or technique. The common factor in his works is his fertile imagination, which is charged both by his musical ideas and his thoughts on the nature of performance." Nicholas Williams (New Grove Dictionary of Music, 2000)

Born in London in 1934, Anthony Gilbert took up composition seriously in the early 1960s after five years of study with Alexander Goehr. For ten years he was closely involved in the promotion and publication of new music in London and then moved to the North West of England, first as Granada Arts Fellow at the University of Lancaster and then to establish a new composition department at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was Director of Composition Studies until his retirement in 1999. He has a close association with the musical life of Australia. Much of his later music owes its origin to the birdsong of this land and much, too, has its technical roots in the classical music of the Indian subcontinent, in which he has been interested for three decades.

His compositions cover a wide range of forces and forms. He has written for most of the major ensembles and soloists, including the Arditti Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Camerata, Hallé Orchestra and Lindsay Quartet, and received major commissions from the BBC and from the Cheltenham Festival and Staatstheater Kassel, to mention just a few. Recordings of his work appear on NMC, ABC Classics and other labels.

"In Anthony Gilbert's new Rose luisante he appears to penetrate straight to the heart of the music's soul." Keith Potter (Independent)

"The inspiration here [for Rose luisante] is purely and seductively visual: Gilbert's responses to the light diffusion and the intricate form of the western Rose Window of Bayeux Cathedral have nurtured a ten-minute piece of beguiling beauty, its slowly refracting harmonies sensuous, its variations on a curling chant haunted by Eastern modes and spectral, toccata-like dances." Hilary Finch (The Times)

"And this event [Gilbert's 70th birthday event] comes at an apparently propitious time for Gilbert, too. On the evidence of Rose luisante, heard in a recital earlier this year, Gilbert might be hitting a new, Indian-summer stride. Tinos, the new piece in the present concert, and the only one written since 1992, continued that impression, though this setting of Spanish symbolist poetry for soprano, clarinet and vibraphone, exquisitely scored as it was, proved too brief to make more than a fleeting impact. I look forward to hearing the promised cycle of which it is part." Keith Potter (Independent Digital)

"Sophisticated and understated, Encantos was a vivid, poetical response to a series of haunting texts. Gilbert handled his reduced forces with immense creativity, expertly tempering unflagging invention and a winning sense of fantasy with a sharp ear for telling sonority." Paul Conway (Tempo)

"On Beholding a Rainbow is a piece of great lyrical beauty and one of the great violin concertos of the late 20th century. It also illustrates the point that for all its technical complexity, Gilbert's music is first and foremost of great expressive strength. Indeed, when listening to a piece of his, one always forgets all the workings behind the music and one begins to 'appreciate the energy, the poetry, the intelligence, integrity and originality' of it. These words from Douglas Jarman's article Notes on the Music of Anthony Gilbert aptly put his music into perspective." Hubert Culot (MusicWeb-International)

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