Born in London in 1951, Philip Sawyers studied violin with Colin Sauer, Joan Spencer and Max Rostal, and composition with Helen Glatz (a pupil of Vaughan Williams and Bartok), with guidance from Buxton Orr, Patric Standford and Edmund Rubbra. Between 1973 and 1997 he was a member of the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden. He now works as a violinist, composer and teacher.

It’s a perfectly natural response when encountering a composer’s work for the first time to compare it to music we already know. We all do it, and this instinct to relate the new to the familiar can help us begin to understand new musical languages and idioms. However, if we really want to get to grips with new voices, to fully understand what we’re hearing and how it’s affecting us, it’s important to move past reacting to music in terms of what it is like, and to move on to engaging with what it is as quickly as we can.

The Cello Concerto was commissioned by the Sydenham International Music Festival in 2010 and written for cellist Maja Bogdanovic. The work is in 3 movements and is scored for a classical-size orchestra.

Commissioned by the Sydenham International Music Festival, Symphony No.2 was premiered in June 2008 by the London Mozart Players conducted by Robert Trory. The only stipulation on the commission was that the orchestral forces were the same as in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the last piece on the programme.

This Concertante for violin and strings was commissioned by the Czech violinist Tomas Tulacek in 2006 as a welcome addition to the limited number of works, including examples by Haydn and Mendelssohn, for this somewhat unusual combination of instruments.