Dave Smith is one of our favourite composers.  For instance, for years Dave has been writing groups of pieces or single pieces to form a handy concert-sized genre called, rather niftily, Piano Concerts.  This started with his 1985 First Piano Concert, twenty-four zippy pieces in popular styles in all the major and minor keys, went on with the 1984 aptly-titled Second Piano Concert, which is subtitled ‘Ireland One and Ireland Free’.  This second Concert includes spoken recitation - melodrama in the original sense of the word (music and spoken text) and the Third Piano Concert (1983-92) is a group of five studies.  The Fourth (1988-98) contains some of Dave’s delightful puns and word games, this time from the ‘easy as’ series (for instance, one is called ‘Shooting Fish in a Barrel’; another ‘spearing an eel with a spoon’), while the Tenth (2002) contains ‘Hard as’ pieces (‘Nails’).  The Fifth Piano Concert is one complete process piece.

Dave dedicates these pieces to friends, colleagues, and other folk he likes.  It’s a real honour to have a dedication.  For me, it was a bit confusing, as my piece for his recent group of one-minute pieces is called ‘Riding an Aversion’.  Turns out Dave was doing a group of pieces with anagrammatic titles (check it with my name - I didn’t see it until it was explained to me).  You can see a list of these pieces on Dave’s works list page on the EMC site, at least up to a year or two ago (I really must get this thing updated). 

Dave’s new recording on UH Recordings Ltd. hosts a gaggle of excerpts from his concerts: the longer On the virtues of flowers; Biguine, Bossa nova and After Hours from the First Concert; Nails from the Tenth; and so on.  It sounds lovely, and is, essentially, a taster of Dave’s piano music in a wide range that you couldn’t get otherwise unless you lived in London.  You can get it from the EMC, but you probably know that already.

The picture?  It’s Dave walking down the main road up through the Scottish island of Jura.

Virginia Anderson (Riding an Aversion)