NI 5699 In 1999 the Nash Ensemble gave the first performance of Watkins’ Sonata for Cello and PAUL&HUW Eight Instruments, which had been commissioned by Faber Music. In reviewing this work, The Times said that ‘at 22, Huw Watkins 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 Orchestra of Wales gave the first performance of Watkins’ Sinfonietta under Grant Llewellyn. As a result of this collaboration, a piano 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 Symphony 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, violin Philip Dukes, viola 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 8 NI 5699 NI 5699 and duo recitals at the Wigmore Hall, City of London Festival, South Bank Centre, SONATAS FOR CELLO AND PIANO Bridgewater Hall Manchester 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. 2 7 NI 5699 NI 5699 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 William Pleeth, 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, Cambridge. 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 Orchestras 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 symphonic poem 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 Cello Concerto 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 chamber music 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 Berlin in 1932, the son of the conductor Walter Goehr, but from Bridge. The elder composer had ‘realised that here was something quite remarkable’, grew up in England.