Reviews
"This is an impressive, challenging debut from British composer-pianist
Philip Howard, winner of the 2003 Gaudeamus Interpreters' Competition:
big pieces by Xenakis, Finnissy and Feldman rub shoulders with shorter
works by his contemporaries Paul Newland, Max Wilson and Paul Whitty.
Howard's fingerprints as a performer are clearly evident throughout: a
ferocious technical ability filtered through a bold and thoughtful
interpretative intellect. Most refreshingly, he seems (perhaps by
dint of being a composer himself) prepared to adapt his whole approach
to the demands of some very different aesthetics, lapsing neither into
received ideals of pianistic beauty nor into crudely iconoclastic
dogmatism...Last and best is Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari. This is
an object lesson in close-up listening and feeling, capturing
marvellously the music's elegiac purity: the final ten minutes,
as the harmony seems gradually to be refined and resolved into
utter clarity, is a deeply moving piece of playing, a fitting
conclusion to this brave and impressive display of musical
intelligence and integrity". [Decoding Skin, Divine Art CD 25021]
James Weeks, Tempo, July 2004
"A FINE DÉBUT, WITH THE MANY REPERTOIRE CHALLENGES WITHIN ELOQUENTLY AND SKILFULLY MET...
One of numerous younger British pianist[s] focusing on 20th-century and contemporary repertoire,
Philip Howard won first prize in the 2003 International Gaudeamus Interpreters' Competition
and plays to his strengths on this auspicious recorded début...Xenakis is represented by Evryali,
whose extremes of motion and dynamism are realized with a palpable sense of the underlying drama...
Howard contributes the informative booklet notes. Taken as a whole, this striking...programme augurs well for Philip Howard's future
as a proponent of uncompromising piano music. [Decoding Skin, Divine Art CD 25021]
Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone, March 2004
This may, at first sight and hearing, be a specialist issue, of interest
only to those interested in the latest music, but I urge those listeners
with rather broader tastes to seek this album out and to listen to it
without preconceptions, for I believe it can bring surprising rewards...Every piece is superbly played with total belief by this most gifted pianist
and I trust this CD will get the attention it clearly merits. [Decoding Skin, Divine Art CD 25021]
Robert Matthew-Walker, Musical Opinion, January 2004
Overall his interpretation of Evryali by Iannis Xenakis made a big impression. This work - not for nothing did the composer himself call it 'a sort of athletics for hands, body and soul' - is devilishly difficultly written. For Howard, no hurdle was too high. He has the pure, supple power that the Greek composer had in mind and changed Xenakis's relentless form into a seductive rhythmic spectacle. As a counterpart he chose Zeitlin (on) by Max Wilson, in which he put to good use his strong feeling for lazy, jazzy timing.
De Telegraaf, 4th March 2003
In contrast, the Englishman Philip Howard revealed the structure of Evryali by Xenakis much better. He clearly profits from the advantage that he also composes, and his technique is really flawless.
NRC-Handelsblad, 3rd March 2003
Philip Howard's playing projects the text (as though he were caught in the act of writing it), projects a wondrous multiplicity of piano sonorities (as though discovering them entirely anew), and does not project his own ego as though it were the main focus of interest.
Composers' playing is different, Nadia Boulanger could always spot it in master classes, it simply but powerfully gets more involved with the notes and what lies beyond them, it doesn't stop short at acrobatic stunts for the fingers, or at detective-work, or interrogation of the text, it welcomes the text as embraceable equal.
Philip Howard 's playing doesn't need to make points, it can lose itself in the crowd of the music, observing it the more accurately for not being obviously present itself - it is quietly, sincerely and masterfully there, as he is in person.
Philip Howard encourages you to listen to whoever he's playing, as if he were them (as I remember Richter being Beethoven when playing), if it weren't so understatedly confident it would be disconcerting.
Michael Finnissy, August 2003