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WENDY HISCOCKS COMPOSER WENDY
HISCOCKS’s
music is imbued with her love of dance and by a natural melodic sense.
While tonally based, her music uses many different scales and modes,
savouring the colour and character of the twelve notes of the octave and
their varied combinations. Nature and the written word are the two
dominating influences on Wendy’s creativity. Such sources can be found in a wide
variety of mediums such as paintings by her favourite artists from Turner to
Lloyd Rees, photographs, poetry and letters. Her most recent compositions
for solo piano, collectively called ‘Scenes from an Australian Childhood’, recall through music,
the drama and magic of various natural phenomena and landscape unique to Australia. Wendy began
composing in her teens and went on to study composition with Peter Sculthorpe
at the University of Sydney. Her career started with a two-year
residence as composer and composition teacher at a major Perth school that
resulted in the establishment of composition as an accredited subject in the
West Australian school syllabus. Since moving to London in 1988 she has
received commissions, premières and broadcasts from distinguished soloists,
ensembles and choirs from around the world. The British pianist Roy Howat has
been a major champion of her music and has performed, broadcast and given
numerous first performances of her works on the BBC, ABC, Radio France and in
a wide range of recitals in countries as diverse as Japan, Switzerland,
America and Australia. Other pianists who have commissioned and premièred her
music include the American Scott McCarrey (Lanterns on Lake Illawarra and
Trees & Lightning on November 15, 2007 in the McKay auditorium, Brigham Young
University, Hawaii); the Russian Vladimir Stoupel (Garden Orb Web and
Wombeyan Caves on May 5, 2006 in the Kleiner Salle of the Berlin Konzerthaus,
Germany) and the young English pianist Cordelia Williams (Two Pieces for
Cordelia and Tarantella). Singers with whom she has collaborated in the
creation of new scores feature the sopranos Elizabeth Connell singing Bush
Christmas at a Wigmore Hall recital in December 1993 and Rachel Nicholls in
Mother & Child (2001); a performance of I Look Out & See by the bass Keith
Hempton in 1997 was accompanied by the composer and recorded live by the ABC.
Highlights involving Wendy’s choral music include the Sydney Chamber Choir’s
programming of Christmas Letter in their 2004 tour of NSW, the Adelaide
Philharmonia Choir’s commission and première of Love Falls (2002) with
Carolyn Lam (solo violin) and Timothy Sexton (conductor), and the
Howat-Hiscocks Duo première together with Coro Infantil de Santa Joana’s of
Four Portuguese Songs at the Teatro Estaleiro as part of the 2004 Fifth
International Piano Festival in Aviero. Graces S.A.T.B., premiéred by Jesus
College Choir, Cambridge in 1995, has also been sung by Trinity College
Choir, Melbourne to accompany Wendy’s contribution to an ABC TV documentary
I.O.U. Lloyd Rees that has now been screened nationally in Australia in 2008
and 2009. In the chamber music genre, she has composed two piano trios
(Vibrancy and Kumas Dziesma) for the Schubert Ensemble’s Chamber Music 2000
project, the Swiss clarinettist Thomas Friedli and his group Quatour Krommer
gave the première and live broadcast on Radio Suisse Romande of the final
version of Pages of Poetry for clarinet and string trio, and her String
Quartet received its first performance from Quatour Terpsycordes at the 2001
Amadeus Festival, Geneva. Wendy
Hiscocks is a composer of great finesse, well tuned to the fantasy-world of
children, and her works for young pianists ‘Two
Pieces for Cordelia’ and ‘Light’ are delightful,
exquisite miniatures worthy to stand beside the
classic children’s repertoire. She
understands and nurtures piano colour, something often neglected or even
negated by new composers…For more advanced pianists there is a
suite of four pieces ‘The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and a searching piano trio called
‘Coral Fantasy’ — I found a lot to
savour in this compelling music. Piano
Magazine Wendy
Hiscocks’s ‘Coral
Fantasy’, inspired
by visits to coral reefs in Hawaii and Australia, inhabits a very different sound
world. It’s a delight. In turn restful and turbulent, with
brief obeisances to Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and frequent changes of tempo
(and pleasingly varied tonal colourings to add interest to the listening
experience), Hiscocks’s piece has an
unpretentious charm and
immediacy. The West
Australian
Pan
magazine |
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