For Example

2009
1.0.0.0- pf.str
Duration 9’

Recording:
Jon Lord: piano
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Clark Rundell
Cormac Henry: flute
(To Notice Such Things, Avie, AV 2190)

Jon Lord’s note:
For Example began about 5 or 6 years ago [2004-5] as a small piano piece which I had written to dedicate to some friends of mine, a wonderful string orchestra from Trondheim in Norway – the Trondheim Soloists, and their artistic director and principal cellist Oyvind Gimse. It was really a nod towards a very early favourite composer of mine, Edvard Grieg, and I played it with them in its original form – with a string arrangement by Johannes Rusten – a couple of times in Trondheim.

Recently I found myself drawn more deeply into the piece, and I began to orchestrate it anew. Now it has become not just a homage to Edvard Grieg – (e.g.) – but also a deeper thing: a memorial, an elegy for a lost time, a memory and a look back to my childhood and to my piano teacher of all those years ago. I first went for lessons with him aged 8 or 9 and continued with him until I left school at 17.

He it was who introduced me to the music of Grieg, among many others, and with him I played the famous piano concerto on two pianos – he on the Bechstein grand playing the solo part, and me on the far less well-cared-for Baldwin upright, playing a piano reduction of the orchestral score. He was, one might say, a troubled man. He had, I believe, failed as a concert pianist, and had retreated home to Leicester to teach, and to live out what seems to have been an unenviably solitary life. However, he was an inspirational teacher, and without the part he played in my past, I would not have this present.