Roy Agnew

Biography

Roy Agnew was a famed Australian pianist and composer of the early 20th century. One historian of Australian music, Larry Sitsky, has spoken of a “tendency in the Agnew sonatas toward an economy of themes and expression.” There was an economy of instrumentation, too!, most of the output for which Agnew is known was intended for a piano solo.

Agnew studied in London in the 1920s, and in 1927 composed his first great work, the Sonata Fantasie, which he dedicated to the pianist William Murdoch, a fellow Australian of some renown, both for his concerts and world tours and for his arrangements of Bach. Murdoch admired Agnew’s Fantasie and played it several times in concert, thus providing Agnew with an entrance ramp into the international musical scene.

Much of Agnew’s work shows the influence of Alexander Scriabin, the Russian Symbolist composer of a generation before. Sitsky – a composer himself as well as a musical scholar -- writes that Agnew “achieves a tumultuous atmosphere by constant changes of meter and mood” that seem Scriabinesque.