About
DAVID PENRI-EVANS
Penri-Evans has many commissions to his name and his music has been performed across Europe and North America.
He has appeared as guest composer at the Louisiana Festival of Contemporary Music and at the Conservatoire National de Region de Rouen. He has been a judge for the Ivor Novello Awards and the British Composer Awards for many years.
He was born in Wrexham, Wales and his Welsh heritage is an important element in his music. Both his Brass Quintet-Ynys Môn and String Quartet-Dinas Brân have Welsh locations as their points of origin (Anglesey and Llangollen respectively) and in each there is a sense of rugged bleakness. Even later works such as Six Pieces for Offa have a mystic atmosphere (Offa's Dyke runs near his childhood home). American composer Ned Rorem said of David's Poem of Youth that his music sounds like New Orleans Jazz heard through a celtic mist.
Jazz has not directly influenced Penri-Evans' music, yet often in his harmonic language you get the feeling that you are only a step away from the Blues. Indeed, the mood of the Blues and a sense of isolation pervades much of his music.
David studied composition in Louisiana at Centenary College and Louisiana State University, under Dinos Constantinides and was awarded a doctorate in Music in 1986. Constantinides' rigorous approach to composition and the professional life of a composer struck a sympathetic chord. Penri-Evans' music is always clearly structured and listening to it, one feels that the composer knows exactly what he is doing. America proved a fertile soil for his composing. There he produced a large number of works including a symphony and a one-act opera, Study in Grey.
Teaching has always been an integral part of Dr Penri-Evans' musical life and his teaching career has been extensive in Britain and the US, and culminated as a Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Contemporary Music, Guildford, England. Many of his students have gone on to be professional musicians; composers, performers and even Rock stars such as You Me at Six.