Page 36 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Performances of her works are arriving with increasing frequency as she approaches
her 75 birthday: recently there was a virtuoso piece, “Cwicseolfor” (an ancient
th
spelling of “quicksilver”) for the pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, and an album of her
orchestral works Tower, Strata and Mythologies, played by the Castalian String Quartet
and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Kemp, is out in May.

At Leeds, Beisembayev also won an award for best performance of a contemporary
work, the prize for which involved commissioning a new concerto. Alberga’s is the
happy result. “It was exciting to get this commission and to write for Alim,” she says. “I
was given free rein to write a piano concerto around 25 minutes long. It’s a completely
abstract, purely musical work that has no extramusical ideas. Its only inspiration from
my own life is that I used to be a pianist.”

She first developed a passion for music as a child in Kingston, Jamaica. “My mother
had started a high school and was very interested in the arts,” she says. “A music

teacher would come in and we lived on the premises, so I used to hear piano lessons
going on all the time.” By the age of five she wanted to become a concert pianist. “I
started composing when I was eight or nine, but it didn’t occur to me that I could be a
composer. Probably there were not many role models. So I carried on with the piano.”