NI 5699 In 1999 the gave the first performance of Watkins’ Sonata for and PAUL&HUW Eight Instruments, which had been commissioned by Faber Music. In reviewing this work, The Times said that ‘at 22, is already a composer to be reckoned with’. The piece has been performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in London, Paris, WATKINS Copenhagen and Aldeburgh under the direction of Sakari Oramo and Peter Rundel. BRITISH CELLO SONATAS In 2000 the BBC National of Wales gave the first performance of Watkins’ Sinfonietta under Grant Llewellyn. As a result of this collaboration, a concerto was commissioned for the same orchestra, which received its premiere in May 2002 under Martyn Brabbins with the composer at the piano. In 2001 Watkins’ String Quartet No.2 was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival by the Petersen Quartet, and the Brahms Ensemble Hamburg gave the first performance of his Variations on a Schubert Song at the Gstaad Festival. The 2001/02 season saw Watkins’ first US commission – Nocturne for solo horn and chamber orchestra – which was first performed and recorded in March by David Jolley and the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Mischa Santora. His String Quartet No.3 was written for the Belcea Quartet, who gave its premiere at Wigmore Hall inFebruary 2004. Future commissions include works for the London Orchestra, the BCMG and the Nash Ensemble.

ALSOAVAILABLE

NI 5702 'Forbidden Music' NI 5704 Benjamin Britten Music by Klein, Krasa & Schulhoff The Suites for solo cello Daniel Hope, , Paul Watkins Paul Watkins, cello

Recorded by Nimbus Records at Wyastone Leys, Monmouth, U.K. June 10th -14th 2001 P 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited © 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited

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and duo recitals at the Wigmore Hall, City of London Festival, South Bank Centre, SONATAS FOR CELLO AND PIANO Bridgewater Hall and Queens Hall, Edinburgh. As a conductor he has worked with the BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Paul Watkins & Huw Watkins Symphony, English Chamber Orchestra and abroad with the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam, Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra in Norway and the Umeå Symphony Frank Bridge (1879-1941) Orchestra in Sweden. This season will see conducting debuts with the City of Sonata in D minor Op.125 (1917) 23.04 Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Scottish 1 Allegro ben moderato 10.18 Chamber Orchestra, English Sinfonia, Britten Sinfonia and the Philharmonia at the Royal 2 Adagio ma non troppo 12.46 Festival Hall. Paul plays on a cello made by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in Paris in 1846. Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) 2003/4 Sonata in C Op.65 (1961) 20.18 3 I Dialogo: Allegro 6.25 4 II Scherzo - pizzicato: Allegretto 2.24 5 III Elegia: Lento 6.40 HUW WATKINS 6 IV Marcia: Energico 2.07 7 V Moto Perpetuo: Presto 2.42 Huw Watkins was born in South Wales in 1976. He studied piano with Peter Lawson and Peter Pettinger and composition with Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr and Julian Alexander Goehr (b.1932) Anderson. In 2001 he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Sonata Op.45 (1984) 12.33 Royal College of Music which he held for two years. He is now a professor of composition 8 I Andante moderato 5.37 at the RCM. 9 II Recitando 1.00 10 III Allegro vivo 5.56 Huw Watkins is in great demand both as composer and pianist. The Independent on Sunday described him as ‘a pianist of alert intelligence and a composer with something to say’ Huw Watkins (b.1976) following his 1999 Park Lane Group Young Artists Concert at London’s Purcell Room. In Sonata (2000) 13.58 March 2000 he gave the London premiere of his Violin Sonata at Wigmore Hall with the 11 I Allegro 4.13 violinist Daniel Bell. In the same month he was soloist in Messiaen’s Sept Haikai with the 12 II Lento 5.51 Northern Sinfonia at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. He is regularly heard as a soloist 13 III Presto 3.54 and with artists such as Daniel Hope, Nicholas Daniel and Alexandra Wood. He has recorded Thomas Adès song cycle The Lover in Winter with the countertenor Robin Blaze Total playing time 69.53 for EMI Classics.

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PAUL WATKINS SONATAS FOR CELLO AND PIANO

Paul Watkins is one of Britain’s foremost cellists. Born in 1970, he studied cello with This disc presents four sonatas for cello and piano by two composer-pupil pairs spanning , Melissa Phelps and Johannes Goritzki and first came to public attention more than eight decades, from Frank Bridge’s Sonata dating from the time of the First as winner of the string section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1988. Alongside World War, to Huw Watkins’s work from the turn of the new millennium. Benjamin his playing, Paul is also a keen conductor and in 2002 won both first prize and audience Britten was famously Bridge’s only composition pupil, and Watkins studied with prize at the Leeds Conductors’ Competition. Alexander Goehr at King’s College, . Paul’s concerto performances with the BBC Symphony Orchestra include five Proms Frank Bridge, like Britten and Tippett after him, was an avowed pacifist. Many of his (concertos by Elgar, Sullivan, Lutoslawski, Tobias Picker and most recently William friends and colleagues – George Butterworth and Ernest Farrar among them – were killed Schuman’s A Song of Orpheus) and Strauss Don Quixote at the Royal Festival Hall. on the battlefield, while others, such as Ivor Gurney, never fully recovered from the Elsewhere in the UK he has performed with the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic horrors they witnessed. Many years later Bridge would gather the strong emotions that Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of rose in him from the time of the conflict and compose the Concerto elegiaco for cello and Wales, BBC Scottish Symphony, City of London Sinfonia, Bournemouth Symphony and orchestra, a lament for his lost colleagues (he changed its title to Oration before the first Royal Scottish National working with, amongst others, Sir Andrew Davis, performance to identify more explicitly the work as an outcry against war’s futility). But Leonard Slatkin, David Robertson, Mark Elder, Alexander Lazarev, Mark Elder, James at the time of the First World War he composed another, smaller-scale work for cello, itself Judd, Richard Hickox and Sir Charles Mackerras. partly an anguished response to the situation in Europe. Paul’s first Nimbus recording of music written in Theresienstadt with violinist Daniel The Cello Sonata in D minor, Op. 125, was composed between 1913 and 1917. Bridge Hope and violist Philip Dukes, was issued in June 2003 and awarded a Gramophone worked on it intermittently throughout this period, during which he was also working on “Editors Choice”. His second recording of the complete Britten solo Cello Suites was his Summer. It was conceived as a three-movement work, with an released in September 2003 to great acclaim. In January 2002 he recorded the Tobias Picker in Russia for Chandos. His BBC recordings include the Haydn C Major elegiac slow movement flanked by independent Allegros. However, the Adagio caused Concerto with Mark Wigglesworth, Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations with Sir Andrew Davis him much anguish, and when the Sonata appeared, it was in two movements: the Adagio and the Sullivan Concerto conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. In a review of his world and finale were linked and compressed, and Bridge added an extended coda, which premiere CD of Takemitsu Orion and Pleiades, Gramophone stated, “this performance, with restates and reworks music from the opening movement. Antonia Butler was the cellist in Paul Watkins an ultra-refined soloist, makes the best possible case for the Takemitsu style”. the first French performance of the Sonata, and she later recounted: ‘I first played the Sonata with a contemporary pianist of [Bridge’s] called Ada May Thomas … she told me Alongside his concerto appearances, Paul is a dedicated chamber musician and has been that during the First World War, when he was writing the slow movement, he was in utter a member of the Nash Ensemble since 1997 with whom he tours regularly to Germany despair over the futility of war and the state of the world generally, and would walk and America. He recently performed recitals at the Concertgebouw with around Kensington in the early hours of the morning unable to get any rest or sleep – and Vadim Repin and Alexander Kerr and in Hamburg with Daniel Hope. He has given solo

6 3 NI 5699 NI 5699 that the idea of the slow movement really came into being during that time.’ The first five short movements. The first is a sonata-style dialogue, distilling rising or falling performance of Bridge’s Cello Sonata was given at the Wigmore Hall on 13 July 1917 by seconds into an almost Brahmsian argument. The cello plays pizzicato throughout the the cellist Felix Salmond and the pianist William Murdoch. Salmond ensured the work’s following scherzo, while an impassioned elegy forms the central slow movement. The popularity by subsequently performing it throughout Europe and America. ensuing march is joined without a break to the moto perpetuo finale. The teenage Benjamin Britten received some of his earliest serious tuition in composition Alexander Goehr was born in in 1932, the son of the conductor , but from Bridge. The elder composer had ‘realised that here was something quite remarkable’, grew up in England. For many years from the mid-1970s he taught at Cambridge and agreed to give Britten occasional lessons – quite a surprise at the time, for Bridge took University, becoming a leading polemicist and advocate of contemporary composition, no other pupils. The two composers also shared pacifist beliefs; Britten’s most explicit some of his writings and radio lectures being anthologised in 1998 in the collection musical expression of which was to be the War Requiem of 1962. Finding the Key. Many of his works have shown a marked individuality in applying a progressive mindset to standard forms: symphony, concerto, and a string of , A couple of years before this Britten had heard for the first time the cellist Mstislav including Arianna, his re-imagining of Monteverdi’s lost . Goehr’s harmonic Rostropovich. It was the period of the Kruschev ‘thaw’; the new post-Stalin liberality thinking – combining and modality – developed continually, and reached a meant that Russian artists were given greater opportunity to travel abroad, and watershed in his Cello Sonata, composed in 1984. One of a string of ‘classical’ chamber composers no longer lived in fear of the denunciation which had blighted the careers of works that includes the Piano Trio (1966) and four string quartets (1956–90), it is cast in a Shostakovich and Prokofiev in the 1940s. Rostropovich and Shostakovich were in London single movement that falls into three parts: an expansive Andante moderato and a lively in September 1960 for the London premiere of the latter’s First Cello Concerto, and Allegro vivo, linked by a passage for unaccompanied cello designated ‘Recitando’. Shostakovich invited Britten to share his box at the Festival Hall. After the concert Britten was introduced to the great cellist, and they struck up a deep and lasting friendship. The Huw Watkins demonstrates his considerable talents as both pianist and composer on this first of a series of works Britten composed for ‘Slava’ was the Sonata in C, which was disc. A former pupil at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, he went on to study completed in January 1961 and its manuscript sent to Russia, with an invitation to with Goehr and Robin Holloway at King’s College, Cambridge, and later with Julian Rostropovich to perform it at that year’s Aldeburgh Festival. They convened nervously at Anderson (another Goehr pupil) at the Royal College of Music. He has composed a string Britten’s London flat to rehearse the work. Rostropovich recalls: ‘Ben said, “Well, Slava, of works for his brother, the cellist Paul Watkins, including the Sonata for Cello and Eight do you think we have time for a drink first?” I said, “Yes, yes”, so we both drank a large Instruments, which was premiered in 1999 by the Nash Ensemble, of which Paul Watkins whisky. Then Ben said: “Maybe we have time for another one?” “Yes, yes”, I said. Another is a member. His recent Sonata for Cello and Piano is the only sonata on this disc set in the large whisky. After four or five very large whiskies we finally sat down and played traditional three-movement form. The Allegro pits a two-note piano figure against a through the Sonata. We played like pigs, but we were so happy.’ Cellist and composer discursive cello descant; the central Lento offers no calm oasis, as double-stopped figures sobered up and gave the first performance of the work at Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall on 7 alternate with jagged arabesques. The final Presto is a rhythmic tour de force which July; it was so well received that the last two movements were repeated. The score was broadens into a section recalling the mood of the first movement, before drawing to a terse published soon after, the cello part edited by Rostropovich himself. The Sonata is cast in close. © 2004 David A. Threasher 4 5 PAUL&HUW Nimbus WATKINS Nimbus BRITISH CELLO SONATAS

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) Alexander Goehr (b.1932) PAUL & HUW WATKINSSONATASHUW CELLO & BRITISH • PAUL WATKINSSONATASHUW CELLO & BRITISH • PAUL Sonata in D minor Op.125 (1917) 23.04 Sonata Op.45 (1984) 12.33 1 Allegro ben moderato 10.18 8 I Andante moderato 5.37 2 Adagio ma non troppo 12.46 9 II Recitando 1.00 10 III Allegro vivo 5.56 Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Sonata in C Op.65 (1961) 20.18 Huw Watkins (b.1976) 3 I Dialogo: Allegro 6.25 Sonata (2000) 13.58 4 II Scherzo - pizzicato: Allegretto 2.24 11 I Allegro 4.13 5 III Elegia: Lento 6.40 12 II Lento 5.51 6 IV Marcia: Energico 2.07 13 III Presto 3.54 7 V Moto Perpetuo: Presto 2.42 Total playing time 69.53

NI 5699 NI LC 5871 Made in the UK by Nimbus Records 5699 NI P 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited © 2004 Wyastone Estate Limited http://www.wyastone.co.uk