Between Friends (2019)

Jonathan Dove
BETWEEN FRIENDS
in memoriam Graeme Mitchison

Commissioned by Penny Wright & Andrew Neubauer for the London Piano Festival 2019 with support from the Kings Place Music Foundation

Many of my happiest memories of playing two pianos involve Graeme Mitchison (1944-2018). Graeme was a scientist whose boundless curiosity crossed many disciplines: he wrote about the Fibonacci series in plants, the nature of dreams, quantum physics. He was also physically adventurous, enjoying paragliding, mountaineering and fast cycling. And he was an excellent pianist. The music-room of his house in Cambridge had two pianos (his living room also contained a fine Bösendorfer grand), and over a span of forty years, my visits to him would always include lively renditions of our favourite two-piano pieces, along with fascinating arrangements and sometimes new discoveries, interspersed with heady conversation. Graeme was wise and stimulating company, and a wonderful duet partner: we always seemed to feel music at the same tempo, and with the same intensity.  It was enormously satisfying, and I would return to London, my head ringing with intoxicating sounds and new ideas.

When Graeme died, I thought of trying to reflect some of his scientific ideas in music – but in the end, it was his character, and the enormous pleasure of being in his company, that informed Between Friends, which is dedicated to his memory. I am very grateful to Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva for inviting me to write this piece, giving me an opportunity to try to capture something of this friendship.

The piece is in the form of four conversations, the first of which acts as a short prelude to the second.