Archive for Robin Walker

Announcing A New Album of Music by William Baines

2022 sees the centenary of the death of the Yorkshire composer William Baines (1899-1922). He wrote in the region of 150 pieces in many genres in his brief and parochial life, but it is the piano with which he is most associated. As Gramophone magazine commented on an earlier album of piano music, “The name William Baines may be unfamiliar to many readers but I would certainly place him among the major figures in English piano music in the early part of this century. The output he produced during his tragically short life – he succumbed to incipient tuberculosis at the age of 23 in 1922 – is truly phenomenal.”

Duncan Honeybourne © Kris Worsley Photography
Duncan Honeybourne © Kris Worsley Photography

The distinguished English pianist Duncan Honeybourne, long a champion of Baines’ piano music, has put together a programme that includes first recordings of Seven Preludes – Set 2, and Pictures of Light, together with the established works Tides and Paradise Gardens amongst others. Duncan will be joined by the singer Gordon Pullin – whose seven recorded volumes of English Tenor songs sample the entire repertoire of the genre – in the Five Songs of William Baines, written by him within a week in September 1919, and never before publicly recited or recorded.

The disc will include At the Grave of William Baines, a substantial piece for piano written by Robin Walker as a tribute to the composer upon the centenary of Baines’ birth in 1999. The grave is in Horbury, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but Baines had lived and died on the same street in York where Robin was brought up a generation or so later.

The recording sessions will take place in Hereford at the end of May 2022 and the album will be scheduled for release by Divine Art Records in the autumn.

Gordon Pullin
Gordon Pullin

Gordon Pullin first sang the songs of William Baines in York, accompanied by Francis Jackson, the Minster organist. They also performed some of them at Nun Appleton Hall, where the piano was one that Baines himself would have played.  Gordon Pullin has always specialised in English Song, making a number of CDs for the British Music Society entitled ‘The English Tenor Repertoire’, and giving recitals on the BBC which included songs by Parry, Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Ireland, Bax and many others (including Francis Jackson), as well as many first performances. He sang the first two of the Baines songs in the play about the composer, ‘Goodnight to Flamborough’, which was broadcast on the BBC.
 
Duncan Honeybourne enjoys a diverse profile as a pianist and in music education. Following his concerto debuts at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, and the National Concert Hall, Dublin, he made recital debuts in London, Paris and at international festivals in Belgium and Switzerland. Commended by International Piano magazine for his “glittering performances”, Duncan has toured extensively as soloist and chamber musician, broadcasting frequently on BBC Radio 3 and radio networks worldwide. His many recordings reflect his long association with 20th and 21st century British piano music, and he has given over 70 world premieres, including works written for him by John Joubert, John Casken and Cecilia McDowall. For Divine Art, he previously recorded an album of piano music by Luke Whitlock (DDA 25121).
 
Robin Walker, who is contributing his work to this recording as a tribute to Baines, and is also producing the disc for Divine Art, is an established composer from Yorkshire, deserving also of a wider international audience. His work appears on three Divine Art CDs including one (‘Turning Towards You, DDA 25180) devoted to his chamber music which was chosen as one of his ‘Records of the Year 2019’ by Richard Hanlon of MusicWeb International.

William Baines: piano music and songs (Final Title to be Confirmed)

Label: Divine Art
Catalogue Number: DDA 25234

Performers

Gordon Pullin (tenor)*
Duncan Honeybourne (piano)

Works

William Baines

Seven Preludes: Set 2 /  Pictures of Light /  Paradise Gardens /  Tides  /  Silverpoints  /  The Island of the Fay  /  The Naïad  /  Five Songs *

Robin Walker

At the Grave of William Baines

Explore Previous Releases

Robin Walker’s Turning Towards You A MusicWeb Recording of the Year

MusicWeb International critic Richard Hanlon has named Turning Towards You: Music By Robin Walker one of his 2019 Recordings of the Year!

“I have recently begun to discover the music of Robin Walker, a York-born composer in his early sixties whose music invariably projects the tang and the loam of the northern English landscape. Turning Towards You is an absorbing miscellany of seven of his works, all of which blend terrific craftsmanship with profoundly beautiful sound. His Double Concerto, A Prayer and a Dance of Two Spirits for recorder, violin and strings is a real find. Walker is another independent spirit who has much to say, and who manages to do so in original and accessible terms.”

—Richard Hanlon, MusicWeb International

See his full, original review

Robin Walker Chamber Works

We are pleased to announce a new album of chamber works from Robin Walker. The album will include a range of works, including his magical double concerto for violin, recorder and string orchestra (A Prayer and a Dance of Two Spirits). Robin is already known to us. His tribute to the late John McCabe And Will you Walk Beside Me Down the Lane was featured on the highly praised recent album ‘A Garland for John McCabe’ released in February.

The album will be recorded over two sessions in the coming months. The first, at St. Thomas’s Church, Stockport, is on 5th July, with the Manchester Sinfonia conducted by Richard Howarth, who will record the double concerto for violin and recorder, A Prayer and a Dance of Two Spirits, with Emma McGrath (violin) and John Turner (recorder). At this session Emma will also record the solo violin piece She took me down to Cayton Bay specially commissioned for the disc by The Ida Carroll Trust. Robin is a native Yorkshireman, and Cayton Bay is a modest seaside resort on the Yorkshire coast. In the piece he has taken the opportunity to blend the ecstasy of the romantic violin with the grounded timelessness of folk-song. Being an exponent of folk-violin as well as a master performer of the concertos of the Romantic repertoire, Robin anticipates Emma’s complete understanding of the piece.

Emma will fly in especially for the recording session from Tasmania where she is Concert master of The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. She is a former associate leader of The Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and was a string finalist in The BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2002.

While in Stockport, John Turner will record Walker’s solo recorder piece A Rune for St Mary’s. St. Mary’s is the parish church of Stockport and the ‘rune’ the piece is based on is a thousand-year-old stone cross in a field above the farm where the composer lives in the Pennine Hills of Northern England. From some angles it looks like a cross – from other angles it seems to be a primitive stone face presiding over the hillside.

The second recording session will be in late September, during which two pieces for double bass will be recorded by the virtuoso player Leon Bosch. The more recent of the two pieces involved Robin taking lessons on the instrument. He remembers that in the course of the lessons “it was like getting to know a large and unusual person, several centuries older than myself.” The solo piece is called The Song of Bone on Stone and it sings of human fragility (‘bone’) in contact with the implacable permanence of Nature (‘stone’). The recording session will also include a solo cello piece called His Spirit Over The Waters, performed by Jennifer Langridge, and is a memorial for a university colleague of Robin’s in Manchester.

In addition to the works to be recorded this summer, the album will contain one older recording, the miniature string quartet I Thirst performed by Manchester Camerata Ensemble.

Robin Walker was born in York, England in 1953 and attended schools attached to York Minster – where he was Head Chorister – for ten years. He studied at Durham University with the Australian composer David Lumsdaine, and subsequently at the Royal College of Music in London with the late Anthony Milner. He taught at various universities for a decade before withdrawing from academic and city life. He moved to the Pennine Hills of the West Riding of Yorkshire in order to concentrate on composition, and has lived on or next to a farm for the last thirty years. His current preoccupation is with the instinctual basis of musical tradition, and its expression in opera.