A Forgotten English Romantic
Duncan Honeybourne (piano)
English-music beachcombers will appreciate these undemanding creations, among which occasionally (as in Reef's End) something more individual rises to the surface. Fine performances, but too...
A Forgotten English Romantic
Duncan Honeybourne (piano)
Purchase product
English-music beachcombers will appreciate these undemanding creations, among which occasionally (as in Reef's End) something more individual rises to the surface. Fine performances, but too...
About
Duncan Honeybourne’s new disc for EM Records explores the piano music of a forgotten romantic composer-pianist, the Englishman Greville Cooke. This larger-than-life character wrote for his instrument with telling individuality, melting tenderness and searing intensity. Cooke combined a professorship in composition at the Royal Academy of Music with parallel careers as a poet and Anglican priest, rising to become a canon of Peterborough Cathedral and a regular broadcaster in both musical and spiritual roles. EMRCD022 presents Cooke’s superbly evocative, richly passionate music – bearing wonderful titles such as Cormorant Crag , WhisperingWillows , Sundown and Reef’s End –with miniatures by Holst and Vaughan Williams to create a disc of English romantic piano music of vibrant colour and wide-ranging expressive power.the living choral tradition that continues to flourish today.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
October 2014
English-music beachcombers will appreciate these undemanding creations, among which occasionally (as in Reef's End) something more individual rises to the surface. Fine performances, but too closely recorded.
November 2014
Cooke's style, most affecting in lyrical mood, breathes something of that luxuriant Romanticism with which we are now much more familiar in the piano music of York Bowen...From the range of pieces here, Honeybourne, with his delicate chemistry of touch and arm weight (watchwords for Matthay), persuasively coaxes out Cooke's personal sense of poetry and gentle humour.