Roger Smalley
Roger Smalley AM (1943–2015) was an English-born composer and pianist who made Australia his home from the mid 1970s. Composition and a distinguished life at the keyboard ran together throughout his career.
His compositions, commissioned by organisations from the BBC and the London Sinfonietta to the ABC and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, have been performed and broadcast worldwide. Recordings of his music and of his playing appear on numerous CDs. He won awards as both composer and pianist: his own performance of his Piano Concerto was the recommended work at the UNESCO Composers’ Rostrum in 1987.
His academic life ran in parallel with composition and performance. A short composer residency at the University of Western Australia drew him from the UK. He stayed for a long career there before moving to Sydney in 2007. He died in Sydney on 18 August 2015.
Press quotes
Roger Smalley is a composer who plays the piano… this is first-rate playing
the piece [David Lumsdaine’s Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh'] is a meditation on the final chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and Smalley’s performance of it is little short of magisterial: virtuosic when required to be, Smalley lingers over the opening chords of the Bach which also open Lumsdaine’s work, reappearing as a tugging ritornello throughout the elaborate 19-minute movement. In Smalley’s performance, it’s as though the spirit of Bach were hovering over the piece.
Smalley’s 10-minute-long Variations on a Theme of Chopin is beautiful too – in ways that could hardly be more different. This is a wildly extrovert and sophisticated creation that subjects Chopin’s Mazurka in B-flat minor to a gauntlet of virtuoso dislocation and prismatic refractions through which the tune manages to retain its identity and indeed over which it at last triumphs, Liszt would be proud.
When one recalls the Smalley of Intermodulation, erstwhile white hope of the British avant-garde in the early 1970s, it seems scarcely credible that by the late 80s he was composing a Variations on a Theme of Chopin, and Alkanesque-cum-Godowskian fantasy on a Chopin Mazurka in a vein one would imagine more congenial to, well, Ronald Stevenson, say. Perhaps pianist-composers are ever drawn back to repolish the cornerstones of their literature. At all events it’s an impressive feat of bravura composition, with a suddenly-stilled poetic epilogue of uneasy pathos.
Composer and pianist Roger Smalley penned Suite for 2 Violins, a compelling and skillful five-movement suite based on various canons.
Smalley’s Suite for 2 violins is a probingly thoughtful work of much sophistication
Many regard the late British-born composer-pianist-conductor-scholar Roger Smalley (1943-2015) as perhaps the leading all-round composer in late 20th century Australian music.
…the whole recital is characterised by leanness and quietness, suited to Smalley’s pensive pianism.
Roger Smalley is featured on the following titles
Transformation: Music for Percussion, Piano and Electronics
Roger Smalley was one of Australia’s most respected composers. He eschewed popular styles and left an oeuvre that is both thrilling and challenging, always at the highest musical level.
Voices
Composer–pianist Roger Smalley presents a personal recital of lean, often quiet Australian piano works from the 1960s and 1970s, many appearing on CD here for the first time.
Composer
Schumann: Lieder
Gerald English, then in his seventies, was still singing magnificently. Here he joins Perth-based pianist and composer Roger Smalley, whose work as an accompanist is little known. This is the first of several Tall Poppies projects featuring English.
Compositions by Roger Smalley also appear on
In Memoriam
Roger Smalley AM (1943–2015) shaped contemporary composition in Australia. This project grew from his dual gift as a virtuoso pianist and as a composer of visceral solo piano music.
The Metallic Violins
This CD is crammed with world premiere performances and scintillating playing. These two violinists inspired wonderful new works by Australian composers, yielding the first recording of Australian music for two violins, from Hindson’s raunchy title piece to Finsterer’s dreamy Spherica I.
Credit: Liner Notes
Electric Cello
David Pereira plays solo Australian cello works, each scored for cello with pre-recorded tape or delay. The Wesley-Smith and Ford pieces are world premiere recordings.
An Australian Collection
Nineteen tracks drawn from the Tall Poppies catalogue, chosen to show the range and depth of Australian composition and performance across the label’s first decade.
Spinning: New Australian Flute Music
Geoffrey Collins has single-handedly shaped the Australian flute repertoire, and this is his third solo recording. Five of these works were written for him, and they show how freely composers respond to his playing.
A Patchwork of Shadows
In 1994 Ian Munro was one of only two or three major pianists based in Australia. Passionate about the music of his composer peers, he shaped one of the most carefully chosen programmes then available on disc.
The Hands the Dream
Sydney pianist Daniel Herscovitch specialises in contemporary repertoire. This debut disc presents solo piano works he has chosen by six Australian composer colleagues.
Roger Smalley also appears on
Ecstatic Dances: Chamber Music, Vol. 1
One of Tall Poppies' most successful releases, this collection of Ross Edwards's chamber music sets his meditative sacred style beside the buoyant energy of his Maninya pieces.