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.
Roger Smalley is featured on the following titles
Dreams: Works for Small Orchestra
Australian composer David Joseph gathers choreographically inspired works for small orchestra from 1986 to 1994 in Dreams, tracing memory, dream states and perception through richly textured, psychologically charged writing.