Pianist wins high honour

● Talented pianist Tristian Evans has recently gained a coveted distinction award in the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music’s highest diploma, being admitted a Fellow of the Royal Schools of Music after performing an all Ravel recital at St. Paul’s School, London in July. Tristian, who received the Mr Jeffreys and Mrs Christina Jeffreys Memorial Prize for Wales after gaining the highest mark throughout the whole of Wales for his ABRSM grade 8 examination in 1999, subsequently studied music at Bangor University where he won several prizes including the Phillip Pascall and D.E. Parry Williams Memorial Prizes, as well as the Welsh-medium Dr. John Roberts Jones Prize awarded by the University. After graduating with a first-class BMus (Hons) degree in 2005, he received scholarships by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that enabled him to embark on the MA course, which he passed with distinction before gaining his PhD at Bangor in 2010. He was appointed a lecturer in Music at the University prior to becoming a freelance pianist and musicologist. He has delivered papers at international conferences and study days around the United Kingdom as well as in Belgium, Finland, Malta, Poland and the USA, while his monograph on the film music of Philip Glass was published by Ashgate Publishing in October last year. Based in the Caernarfon area and married to Lucy, Tristian plans to celebrate his success by giving another all Ravel recital in North Wales in the near future, concluding with the virtuosic Gaspard de la nuit, which is arguably one of the most challenging works in the whole of the piano repertoire.