REVIEWS

Gramophone 1986

Two of the main preoccupations of Peter Dickinson’s ingenious and entertaining Piano Concerto are the co-existence of ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ musics and the idea of simultaneity, of more than one thing happening at once. Dickinson’s ingenuity lies in the audibility of this demonstration and in the fact that his simultaneous strands can so clearly be heard and distinguished. The sense of perspective, of seeing one music through another (almost literally at one moment when a brief ‘window’ of D major…opens in the midst of another toccata) is very striking, and draws one back for further hearings, for the pleasure of watching this finely crafted orrery of a concerto go through its intricate but lucid rotations.

Michael Oliver in Gramophone (1986)