Gervase de Peyer has enjoyed a distinguished career which has spanned over fifty years since early national tours as a soloist in 1949. In 1951 he co-founded the Melos Ensemble of London, and in 1956 became Principal Clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for seventeen years. From 1969 to 1972 this overlapped with the start of his twenty-year engagement in New York as founding member of the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center. He later founded the Melos Sinfonia of Washington in 1992.

Gervase de Peyer has performed and taught worldwide, working with such distinguished conductors and chamber musicians as Sir Thomas Beecham, Herbert von Karajan, Otto Klemperer, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Daniel Barenboim, Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman and Mstislav Rostropovitch. He has given the premières of many works including concertos by Arnold Cooke, Berthold Goldschmidt, Alun Hoddinott, Edwin Roxburgh and Thea Musgrave, the London première of Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata in 1964 and that of Joseph’s Horovitz’s Sonatina in 1981. As a prolific recording artist he is featured on a huge number of discs: his concerto recordings have won the Grand Prix du Disque, the Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Gros, and The Plaque of Honour of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of America.

Further information is available from his website.