Philip Sawyers

The works of the stylistically independent composer Philip Sawyers have been increasingly often recorded in his later life. He has made a living primarily as an orchestral violinist, teacher, and examiner. Sawyers was born in London on June 20, 1951. He took up the violin at age 13 and started composing soon after that, and he calls himself a proudly self-taught composer. Sawyers attended the Dartington College of the Arts in Devon, England, where he did have some composition lessons with Helen Glatz (who had studied with Bartók and Vaughan Williams) and also studied the violin with Colin Sauer. Sawyers went on to the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he studied violin with Joan Spencer and Max Rostal. There, his composing was encouraged by Edmund Rubbra, Buxton Orr, and Patric Standford. In the late '60s, he issued several chamber works, beginning with the String Quartet No. 1 in 1968, and chamber music has always made up a substantial strand of his output. His first major orchestral work was the Divertimento for string orchestra of 1970. In 1973, Sawyers joined the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden, in London as a violinist. He also appeared as a freelance violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra, the English National Opera Orchestra, and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, as well as playing in musical theater orchestras in London's West End and recording as part of film and popular music groups as a session musician. He also taught and served as a violin coach for the Kent County Youth Orchestra. As a result, Sawyers wrote comparatively little music from the mid-'70s through the mid-'90s. That changed after 1997 when Sawyers left the Covent Garden Orchestra. He gave himself a yearlong refresher course at Goldsmith's College at the University of London, continuing to work as a freelance violinist, teacher, and examiner for the Royal Schools of Music. As Sawyers' compositional output increased, his works began to be programmed more often, both in Britain and beyond. They have been performed in the U.S., Austria, the Czech Republic, and France, among other countries. Between 2004 and 2022, he composed six symphonies and a variety of other orchestral works; these include the symphonic poem Hommage to Kandinsky, commissioned by the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Symphony Orchestra. Sawyers' works are for conventional instruments, generally in classical forms, but his style draws on many sources ranging from traditional tonality to serialism, remaining accessible and lyrical no matter what the idiom. In 2015, he was named John McCabe Composer-in-Association by the English Symphony Orchestra; his term ran until 2018, whereupon he became composer laureate, and the orchestra has continued to record many of his works. The orchestra released the album Philip Sawyers: Double Concerto for Violin and Cello; Viola Concerto; Remembrance for strings; Octet in 2023, by which time some 20 of the composer's works had been recorded.
© James Manheim /TiVo