"Few current violinists can claim as wide a repertoire and as active a policy of commissioning as Sheppard Skærved, and the present disc offers an excellent overview of his solo repertoire, recorded with due appreciation of Sheppard Skærved's incisive clarity-a trait equally apparent in his informative booklet note. Future players will have reason to acknowledge his contribution towards the violin's technical and expressive scope." International Record Review -April 2000
"The performance is so compelling that interest never wavers."(Rochberg ) Gramophone Magazine February 2004
Violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved has appeared as a concerto and recital soloist at major musical centres throughout the world, including the Far and Middle East, Europe and the United States. In Britain he has performed and broadcast at all the major venues and Festivals.
He is the dedicatee of over 150 new works, ranging from pieces by established British composers such as Nigel Clarke, David Matthews and Michael Finnissy, long creative relationships with international figures such as Hans Werner Henze, George Rochberg, William Bolcom, John McCabe, Paul Moravec and Dmitri Smirnov, to collaborations with the front-line of the European avant-garde.
Peter Sheppard Skærved has been associated with the music of Hans Werner Henze since first collaborating with him in a performance of his Concerto Il Vitalino Raddoppiato as an eighteen-year-old. This first collaboration led to highly regarded CD and television recordings of the opera The English Cat, made in Berlin and Bavaria in 1989 and 1991. Henze composed the Fünf Nachtstücke expressly for the début of Peter Sheppard Skærved and Aaron Shorr as a duo in 1990, when the two gave its world première. Since then, Peter Skærved has given critically acclaimed cyclic performances of all of Henze’s violin music. In 2001 his recording of Henze’s complete unaccompanied violin works was chosen as a BBC Music Magazine Disc of the Month.
In partnership with American pianist Aaron Shorr, he has toured worldwide, playing an eclectic and exploratory repertoire that ranges from the cyclic performance of no fewer than seventy works by Beethoven in one series at St Johns Smith Square, London, to becoming the first foreign musician ever to tour a programme of new Turkish repertoire in Turkey, in autumn 2003.
He has made over thirty critically acclaimed CDs, his recording of solo Rawsthorne and McCabe works was nominated for a Gramophone Award in 2002. He is the leader of the Kreutzer Quartet, with whom he has recorded the quartets of Gloria Coates for Naxos (8.559091 and 8.559152).
Peter Sheppard Skærved is a Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, he plays the 1699 ‘Adelina Crespi’ Stradivari.
Upcoming Engagements 2007
