Peter Sheppard Skærved

Violinist Peter Sheppard Skӕrved is unusually committed to contemporary music: he has been the dedicatee of more than 400 works. His repertory is broad, however, dating back to the Baroque era, and he is noted as a performer on historical violins. Sheppard Skӕrved was born Peter Sheppard in 1966; he is married to author Malene Skærved and took the surname Sheppard Skærved. "I have a clear memory of a freezing walk home from school when I was 12 or so, and deciding that there certain extremely ambitious things which I wanted to do with music," he told The Cross-Eyed Pianist. By his late teens, he was already forging collaborations with important composers, including Hans Werner Henze. The list of composers with whom Sheppard Skӕrved has worked is quite long and includes many prominent names, such as George Rochberg, Judith Weir, and Michael Finnissy. An ongoing collaboration has been that with composer Thomas Simaku, with whom he has worked for stretches extending over a decade. Sheppard Skӕrved is an enthusiastic chamber player who founded and leads the Kreutzer Quartet; he has also performed with Ensemble Triolog and plays duos with pianists Aaron Shorr and Jan-Philip Schulze and fortepianist Julian Perkins, among others. Despite his focus on contemporary music, Sheppard Skӕrved has a large repertory extending back to the Baroque era, and he plays music from that period on a 1698 Stradivarius violin that was formerly owned by Joseph Joachim. He has also recorded on violins by Nicolò Amati and Andrea Amati. In the U.S., he has given recitals at the Library of Congress in Washington on violins drawn from that institution's collection. With more than 70 recordings to his credit, Sheppard Skӕrved is one of Britain's more prolific recording artists. He has recorded for Metier, Toccata Classics, Naxos, and other labels, with his recorded repertory matching the diversity of the music he performs. In 2020, Sheppard Skӕrved released, with Julian Perkins, an album of Schubert's three sonatas for violin and piano of 1816 on the Athene label. Sheppard Skӕrved is a lecturer in performance and a fellow at the Royal Academy of Music.