Peter Lawson(b.1951)

Peter Lawson was educated at Cheltenham Grammar School and at the Guildhall School of Music, where he won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Composers' Prize twice and graduated with a First Class degree and the Dove Memorial Prize for the best student. He later taught piano and composition and lectured on the structure of music there for eleven years. As a pianist and a composer he has had frequent broadcasts around the world and has made 10 CDs and 2 vinyls. He has recorded the entire works of Lord Berners as a soloist, as a piano duettist with Alan MacLean and as an accompanist in his songs to Dame Felicity Lott and Roderick Kennedy.

As a composer, he was first published by Peters Edition at the age of 19 and has currently had more than 100 compositions, orchestrations and arrangements published, particularly with Goodmusic, but also with Universal Edition and Stainer & Bell and has had performances all round the world, from Europe, Russia and Kazakhstan to the Philippines, Japan and Australia as well as in the United Kingdom, notably in London in the Royal Festival Hall, Royal Albert Hall, St John’s, Smith Square, Wigmore Hall, the Purcell Room and Fairfield Hall, Croydon. Outside London, notable performances have been at the Cheltenham, Bath, Huddersfield and Sevenoaks Festivals, York Minster and Exeter Cathedral.

He is also a keen amateur botanist and has photographed all 48 of the wild orchids of the UK - since 1981 he has written musical portraits of them all, including a string quartet and a piano concerto. They are all published by Goodmusic.