Peter de Jager is one of Australia’s most versatile musicians, thrilling audiences with his performances of music from Bach to Xenakis on various historical keyboard instruments, and intriguing them with his own compositions, which have been performed and commissioned by Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, Speak Percussion, Astra Chamber Music Society, Arcadia Winds, and many others. He studied composition with Stuart Greenbaum and Elliott Gyger, and his creative influences are extremely broad, taking elements of organum, Renaissance and Baroque polyphony, Romantic harmony, contemporary music theatre, Modernist form and texture, hard rock and pop, and traditional Japanese and Arabic music, and integrating them into a coherent language strongly concerned with mathematical and organic structures.
Peter recently performed the complete works for solo Piano and Harpsichord at the 2017 Melbourne Festival to critical acclaim, and his performance the same year of Chris Dench’s monumental Piano Sonata, which he commissioned, won him an Art Music Award from the Australian Music Centre. He works regularly with several Australian chamber ensembles, and is currently on faculty at the Australian National Academy of Music as an Associate Artist.
