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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.