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Fanfare

The only prior mention I can find of Robin Walker in the Fanfare Archive comes in 44:1, in a review of a CD of tributes composed by the friends and colleagues of John McCabe. In my review of these 19 works (Colin Clarke also reviewed the disc), I mentioned that one of my favorites in the collection was And will you walk beside me down the lane? by Walker. Thus I looked forward to auditioning the present disc devoted entirely to his music, and I was not disappointed. After studies with David Lumsdaine at Durham University and Anthony Milner at the Royal College of Music, Walker became a serious student of Modernism, as Milner himself was. But sometime during the mid-1980s, Walker reassessed his musical priorities, and came to the conclusion that his instinctual basis of musical composition had been flawed. That realization began a rather lengthy process that led him into a firmly tonal aesthetic that he came to embrace in his recent music.

This embracing is obvious from the first notes of the disc’s opening work, A Prayer and a Dance of Two Spirits, a repeated series of G-Major chords. However, melodies in the upper register of the violin and treble recorder soon intrude to produce a glassy and quite novel sound, and the harmonies shift into more complex tonal regions. Despite its conservatism, I’ve never heard a piece like quite like this. When possible, I like to compare the music of a relatively unknown composer to someone the reader will likely know, but that’s simply not possible here. There are notes here and there that hint at Bloch, Barber, or Vaughan Williams, but not enough really to suggest the style of another composer. The first movement, rather obviously the “Prayer” of the title, is subtle and gentle, while the second, the dance, takes a couple minutes to get cranked up, but when it does forms a quintessential example of dance found in the British Isles, both lively and folk-influenced. The recorder here sounds a good deal like the penny whistle of Irish folk music, and the violin engages in some fancy folk fiddling. The piece is gorgeous throughout, a characteristic enhanced by the spot-on intonation of the performers.

The Song of Bone on Stone for double bass solo forms a marked contrast to the preceding work. It opens with some dramatic sounds that may be produced as a Bartok pizzicato, where the string is made to slap against the fingerboard of the instrument. The remainder of the work features much use of natural harmonics, double-stops (down in the lower register of the instrument), and other devices that evoke some kind of prehistoric era. The piece is meant to portray in music a ritual that the composer has adopted: Each time he passes a small stone trough near his home, he bends down to allow his front teeth to touch its top edge, i.e., the bone against the stone. Well, wherever your muse leads you, composers, follow it! If I like this piece marginally less than the preceding one, it’s primarily because I’ve never been overly fond of the double bass as a solo instrument. I Thirst, on the other hand, portrays one of Jesus Christ’s seven last words from the Cross as he per¬formed his atoning work. While Walker is an agnostic, he recognizes the value of the words of Jesus as they speak of forgiveness, selflessness, abandonment by the Father, and (in this depiction) human need. This work for string quartet, then, is a meditation in which the desiccation of Christ, depicted in tonally obscure overlapping chords and sonorities, is “relieved” by a sequence of harmonics. The piece is beautifully constructed and makes a powerful impact, although to my ears, the harmonics suggest rather than quench the thirst of the Savior.

That the double bass has a special place in Walker’s heart (he studied the instrument for a period of time) becomes obvious with the inclusion of a second work for the solo instrument (although for this one, he adds a piano part). Turning Towards You was written in memory of a friend who guided the composer into a level of self-awareness that he feels he would not have otherwise attained. The “You” of the title is the truth—truth of a sort that his departed friend embodied. This work intersperses highly rhythmic disjointed sections featuring much Bartok pizzicato with moments of quiet reflection, I suppose meant to indicate the self-examination to which he was led by his friend. I like this work more than the previous double bass piece because the low-pitched double-stops of the first one sound like so many grunts, although I by no means imply that The Song of Bone lacks merit. His Spirit over the Waters for solo cello is another work written in tribute to a deceased friend, in this case Keith Elcombe, a prominent musician in the Manchester area. The opening phrase leads the listener believe that Walker is about to launch into the Hebrew chant Kol Nidrei, but it quickly becomes evident that this is not the direction the piece is taking. In the work, he states that he is seeking to represent the emotion of bereavement through lyricism, and through material that is extended and transformed according to the rituals of shaping observed in tradition. Thus, the music forges eloquent melodic lines that ebb and flow, and occasionally cease movement, becoming static repetitions of a given note. There is more scalar activity in this work than is found in any of the other pieces of this recital, and such activity is well melded to form a cohesive and convincing whole.

The disc closes with a pair of five-minute solo pieces for the two soloists of the opening work. The first of them is A Rune for St. Mary’s, performed by recordist John Turner, whose crystalline tones enhance the beseeching character of the piece. Lastly, one hears She took me down to Cayton Bay, exquisitely rendered by violinist Emma McGrath. The piece effectively fuses the spirit of folk music with the intensity found in romance.

The music of Robin Walker is engaging and effectively written, and will provide enjoyment to anyone who will give a listen. This is, in fact, precisely what I am encouraging the reader to do in the 1,125 words of this review and headnote.