Concertmaster and Director of Monday Main Concert
Peter has been Concertmaster of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique since 1992, when they recorded their first complete set of Beethoven symphonies. He appeared as its Concertmaster soloist for European and U.S. tours of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, a 2017 BBC Proms performance of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, and in 2018, major European and U.S. tours of Berlioz. In 2020, they performed all the Beethoven symphonies in Barcelona and U.S. including sold-out concerts at the Carnegie Hall, New York.
Peter formed The Eroica Quartet in 1993 with colleagues from the world of period instrument performance. The group immediately attracted attention with their vision of a revived Romantic approach to the string quartet literature, from Beethoven to Debussy. Their performance style was so unusual at the time that it struck listeners as radical. In 1997 they began their first Beethoven cycle, appearing at the City of London Festival and in the same year appeared at the Aix-les-Bains Nuits Romantiques Festival in France.
The Eroica quickly became established, and toured extensively in the United Kingdom as well as making visits to France and the U.S. Their American debut was in Washington, D.C. and the New York debut was in February 2001, at the Frick Collection. For Harmonia Mundi USA they recorded the Mendelssohn and Schumann quartets and Beethoven quartets Op. 74, 95 and 135. For Resonus Classics, they recorded the original 1825 version of Mendelssohn’s Octet, Op. 20 and, more recently, the quartets by Debussy and Ravel. Released to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth, this album represents the first modern recording of the works to feature performances on gut strings and with aspects of period performance.
Peter is a concertmaster of the Carmel Bach Festival in California. His role includes chamber music performances, directing the string orchestra and appearing as Concertmaster for most of the Festival Orchestra concerts. The CBF orchestra is very flexible with regard to period and modern instruments and style; he recently gave performances of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on baroque instruments at Hz415 followed by the Piazzola 4 seasons on modern (Hz440) in the second half of the same concert.
Peter also appears as Director elsewhere; recent engagements include projects with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Kymi Sinfonia from Finland and Orquesta da Camera in Spain. He was recently Guest Concertmaster with the Luxembourg Philharmonic, the Stockholm Radio Symphony Orchestra, and in 2017 was Guest Concertmaster for a Beethoven and Gade project with Concerto Copenhagen in 2019. He returned to Singapore for a new project in 2021.
