Huw Watkins In my craft or sullen art tenor Huw Watkins piano Paul Watkins cello violin The Elias Quartet Huw Watkins

Sonata for Cello and Three Auden Songs 8’47 The Nash Ensemble Eight Instruments 13’44 10 Brussels in Winter 3’31 Artistic Director Amelia Freedman CBE FRAM 1 Allegro 4’36 11 Eyes look into the well 2’51 Paul Watkins cello 2 Lento 5’04 12 At last the secret is out 2’25 Ian Brown conductor 3 Allegro 4’04 Mark Padmore tenor Philippa Davies flute Paul Watkins cello Huw Watkins piano Richard Hosford clarinet The Nash Ensemble Ursula Leveaux bassoon Laura Samuel violin Ian Brown conductor 15’02 Partita for solo violin Catherine Leonard violin 13 Maestoso 4’07 Lawrence Power viola Four Spencer Pieces 15’15 14 Lento ma non troppo 1’06 Duncan McTier double bass 4 Prelude 1’46 15 Lento 4’31 and Huw Watkins piano 5 Shipbuilding on the Clyde 1’49 16 Comodo 1’04 6 The Crucifixion 1’36 17 Allegro molto 4’14 Elias Quartet 7 The Resurrection of Soldiers 5’51 Alina Ibragimova violin Sara Bitlloch violin Separating Fighting Swans 2’28 8 Donald Grant violin 9 Postlude 1’45 18 In my craft or sullen art: Martin Saving viola Marie Bitlloch cello Huw Watkins piano Goodison Quartet No 4 17’31 Mark Padmore tenor Elias Quartet

Total timing 71’01 Mark Padmore appears by arrangement with Harmonia Mundi USA. Alina Ibragimova appears on this recording with kind permission from Hyperion Records. Photo: Hanya Chlala 2 Huw Watkins: Composer as Musician by Bayan Northcott

The subtitle might seem paradoxical: surely all composers, by definition, are clarity, such ease, or, to use a more equivocal term, such facility, is also musicians? Yet, as one listens to the unfolding of a piece by Huw Watkins, one liable to provoke criticism. One recalls how often Mendelssohn was charged is convinced that, for him, composition is a natural function of an all-round with failing to fulfil his dazzling early promise, or with all-too skillfully skating musicianship, rather than something that is separate from his distinguished over the emotional depths; how Bennett’s sheer expertise has sometimes career as a pianist. One is the more persuaded of this by the intensely been held against him, as though it impaired his individuality. creative quality of his performance of music by others: his remarkable ability to infuse any bunch of notes, no matter how contrived or arbitrary, with Among the most insightful and open-minded of our performing artists, musical shape and meaning. Doubtless this sense of musical wholeness flows Watkins already seems to have been around for ages and it is easy to forget in the first instance from his family background, with his violin-making father, that his work list stretches back little more than a decade. To judge whether music-teaching mother, his equally gifted cellist (and latterly conductor) he has managed to personalize and deepen his initial musical gifts over that brother Paul and their playing of chamber music as part of everyday life. period, one would have to survey not just the vocal and chamber works represented on this recording, but the orchestral output, including his well- Such a background, once widespread (think of Mendelssohn), now rarer received Violin Concerto (2010), and his recent work for the musical stage. (though think of Richard Rodney Bennett), is likely to endow a young For the present, as we listen to the varied characters of the pieces on this composer with a special clarity of ear and ease of invention from the start, recording, with their skillful interplay of traditional continuities and more and one hears these freshly at play in the Sonata for Cello and Eight schematic techniques, perhaps all we need to ask is whether any other Instruments (1999), Watkins’s earliest score to attract attention. Yet such contemporary composer quite writes, quite sounds like this?

4 5 Sonata for Cello and Eight against the background of traditional repeated notes prove a recurrent feature of how Watkins, even at his most aggressively movement forms – with even a hint of neo- the Spencer Pieces proper. Watkins chromatic, contrives to keep his textures Instruments (1999) classicism in the woodwind apostrophes of describes ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ as clean of the dispiriting greyness of so In 1998, Faber Music asked 11 of its the slow movement – the harmony sounds ‘fast, rhythmically intricate and energetic’ much ‘advanced’ piano writing. The house composers each to nominate a more as if generated from gradually shifting and adds that ‘the juxtaposition of different Maidenhead Music Society commissioned promising newcomer to receive a chamber modal note-collections. And the volatile ideas in the music reflects the level of the work in 2001 and Watkins gave the ensemble commission in celebration of the foreground argument is both obsessive and detail in the painting’. Here, the polymetric premiere in the parish church at Millennium. It was Thomas Adès, an fragmented in manner, occasionally superimposition of repeated notes suggests Cookham, the Thames-side village outstanding all-round musician himself, suggesting a fortuitous analogy with the the hammering of rivets, whereas the brief Spencer lived in for so long and who selected Watkins. The resulting brightly-facetted late ensemble textures of but violent third movement is audibly transfigured in his paintings. Sonata for Cello and Eight Instruments Stefan Wolpe, whose music Watkins had driven by a hammering of nails suggested (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, 2 violins, hardly heard when he wrote the piece. by ‘The Crucifixion’. viola, double bass) was duly launched by Tightly composed and nicely contained Three Auden Songs (2009) The distant, tolling bell of the Prelude Paul Watkins and the Nash Ensemble within its 14-minute span, the Sonata could returns at the still opening of the longest for tenor and piano under Martyn Brabbins at the Purcell well attain a standing in Watkins’s output movement ‘The Resurrection of Soldiers’, These settings were commissioned by the Room in March 1999. According to the comparable with the pregnant Sinfonietta, with convergent high and low sonorities Theatre Royal de la Monnaie for the tenor composer’s programme note, the first Op. 1 in that of Benjamin Britten. suggesting a passing echo of ‘Le gibet’ Mark Padmore and his accompanist movement is a vigorous Allegro sonata from Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. In due Andrew West, who gave the premiere in form with the cello resting only in the more course the music passes over into a Brussels in 2009. The three chosen texts, lyrical central section. The middle Four Spencer Pieces (2001) convolved fugue, but so subtly that it is dating from 1938, 1940 and 1936 movement he describes again as a lyrical for solo piano difficult tell exactly where the transition respectively, are all fairly early, elliptical solo against an austere background This sequence for solo piano actually occurs – or where it passes back again Auden, dense with riddling allusions. provided by the woodwind, while the finale comprises six pieces, since the four titled into the preludial music. Watkins describes Watkins articulates this density through is another Allegro, reaching a climax and movements inspired by paintings of Sir ‘Separating Fighting Swans’ as both a tenor lines that alternately parallel and dissolving into a recapitulatory coda. Stanley Spencer are enclosed between a scherzo and finale. Here the note subtly counter the verbal rhythms of the Yet these few pointers scarcely hint at the Prelude and Postlude in which serenely repetitions articulate chordal riffs and text, while confining his accompaniments playful intricacy of the actual score. For descending harmonies settle on repeated- ostinati in a toccata-like texture. Not least to a consistent, unifying texture for each while it indeed appears to be composed notes, tolling like a distant bell. And striking about the Four Spencer Pieces, is song. ‘Brussels in Winter’ unfolds as a

6 7 lyrical succession of asymmetric phrases Partita (2006) soon subsumed in the more folk-like response to the text is relatively contained, for tenor, with high, icy figures skirlings and cross-rhythms of its climactic a little plaintive, only momentarily bursting underpinned by a slower-moving bass line for solo violin firework display. out at the words: ‘Not for the proud man for piano – and just a momentary Watkins composed this virtuoso work for apart/ From the raging moon I write…’ harmonic enrichment at the words: ‘The the brilliant young violinist Alina In my craft or sullen art (2007) The setting ends over dark chords, which winter holds them like an Opera-House’. Ibragimova, who gave the first performance Since 2004, the financier, arts revolve onwards into an extended central ‘Eyes look into the well’ is accompanied in the in November 2006: it administrator and sometime chairman of movement for quartet, with a return of the throughout by a steady five-beat-to-a-bar was commissioned jointly by BBC Radio 3 the Stock Exchange Sir Nicholas Goodison, arpeggio idea and a gradual working up tread of chords, simply rising or falling, and the Royal Philharmonic Society as part and his wife Judith Goodison, have been into an agitated climax. The second setting thickening or thinning to match the of the New Generation Artists scheme. commissioning a series of string quartets of ‘In my craft or sullen art’ is also agitated ominous sense of the words – a strikingly Considering the title and the medium, one with voice for the Wigmore Hall, with In my and rhetorical, with, this time, some different approach to this chilling text from might expect a Bach homage. But apart repetitions of words, and only calming for craft or sullen art – launched by Mark the more declamatory and sectional setting from its finale, which Watkins describes as the final lines – leaving the quartet to add Padmore and the Petersen Quartet in May by Lennox Berkeley in his Five Poems of ‘a very fast, relentless gigue’, the Partita a poignant postlude which ebbs away on 2007 – comprising Goodison Quartet No. W. H. Auden (1960). In the nervy, jazz- encompasses little that could be described the arpeggiated pitches from which the 4. The structure of this substantial piece, inflected ‘At last the secret is out’, voice as neo-Baroque: no double-dotted work first emerged. If the double setting of however, has very little to do with classical and accompaniment often stop and start rhythms, no courante, sarabande or the Thomas is an ingenious response to a quartet forms or even with such a in rhythmic unison. Somewhere in the gavotte. The opening Maestoso is a slow, richly suggestive text, one is compelled to precedent as Schoenberg’s background one hears an echo of Britten’s rondo-like prelude in which a principal idea add that the handling of quartet texture, No. 2. Rather, it comprises a continuous setting of ‘As it is, plenty’ from his early of grinding, four-note chords alternates with harmony and part writing shows a mastery fantasia-like structure, during which, most Auden settings On this Island (1937). It is more ruminative episodes. Watkins and finesse that many might labour a unusually, the same text is given two the tradition of Britten and Berkeley that describes the brief, gentle second and lifetime to achieve. contrasting settings for tenor voice. Watkins actively renews in these beautifully fourth movements as interludes. These wrought Auden settings. frame an extended, largely linear central It opens with a shadowy interplay of string Lento which feels its lyrical way forward in arpeggios and lamenting chord varied repetitions and extensions of progressions, waywardly developed as an arabesque-like phrases characterized by extended prelude to the first setting of successions of thirds. As for the Molto ’s two-verse meditation on Introduction and notes Allegro finale, any Bach-like inflections are his poetic calling. Here, Watkins’s © Bayan Northcott, 2012

8 9 Three Auden Songs In My Craft or Sullen Art Huw Watkins

Brussels in Winter Eyes look into the well In my craft or sullen art Huw Watkins is a prominent figure in British music in Exercised in the still night the triple, and mutually supportive roles of pianist, Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string, Eyes look into the well, When only the moon rages composer and teacher. Born in South Wales, he studied Coming on fountains rigid in the frost, Tears run down from the eye; And the lovers lie abed Its formula escapes you; it has lost With all their griefs in their arms, at Chetham’s School of Music, at King’s College The certainty that constitutes a thing. The tower cracked and fell I labour by singing light Cambridge with and , From the quiet winter sky. Not for ambition or bread Only the old, the hungry and the humbled and with at the Royal College of Keep at this temperature a sense of place, Under a midnight stone Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages Music, where he now teaches composition and piano. And in their misery are all assembled; Love was buried by thieves; The winter holds them like an Opera-House. But for the common wages The robbed heart begs for a bone, Of their most secret heart. As a pianist, he performs regularly as a soloist and in Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night The damned rustle like leaves. Where isolated windows glow like farms, Not for the proud man apart chamber music – often in partnership with his elder A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van, Face down in the flooded brook From the raging moon I write brother, the cellist Paul Watkins, and with violinists With nothing more to say, On these spindrift pages A look contains the history of man, Nor for the towering dead Alexandra Wood and Alina Ibragimova. He has Lies One the soldiers took, And fifty francs will earn a stranger right With their nightingales and psalms premiered concertos by John Woolrich and Michael To take the shuddering city in his arms. And spoiled and threw away. But for the lovers, their arms Zev Gordon. Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages His recent compositions include a Piano Trio for the Nor heed my craft or art. Florestan Trio and a Violin Concerto for Alina At last the secret is out Ibragimova, which was premiered at the 2010 BBC At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end, Proms by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend; Dylan Thomas Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Edward Gardner. Still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire. He is currently writing an opera for a joint production Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, ‘Brussels in Winter’, ‘Eyes Look into the Well’ between Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera. Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, and ‘At Last The Secret is Out’ by W.H. Auden. Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh Used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. © 2012 Schott Music There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye. Copyright © 1939, 1940, 1935. All rights reserved. For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall, The scent of elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall, ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’ by Dylan Thomas Information about the artists on this disc can be found on (taken from The Poems, published by Orion) The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss, has been reproduced with the permission of our website: www.nmcrec.co.uk There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this. W. H. Auden David Higham Associates.

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13 Sonata for Cello and Eight Instruments was New Zealand, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, With thanks to the trusts, foundations recorded at the Menuhin Hall, Yehudi Menuhin the United Kingdom and the United States, and School, Surrey on 27 October 2010. Four Spencer are also available through our website and individuals who have invested in Pieces, Three Auden Songs and In my craft or www.nmcrec.co.uk sullen art were recorded in the same venue on NMC recordings are available to download in MP3 28-29 January 2011. NMC’s Debut Discs series: and FLAC format from our website. DAVID LEFEBER Recording Engineer/Producer FOR FURTHER DETAILS PLEASE CONTACT: The Astor Foundation Partita for solo violin was recorded by BBC Radio 3 NMC Recordings Ltd, on 15 October 2007 at St Silas Church, Kentish Somerset House, Third Floor, South Wing, Town, London. Strand, London, WC2R 1LA The John S Cohen Foundation LINDSAY KEMP Recording Producer MARTIN APPLEBY Recording Engineer Tel. +44 (0)20 7759 1827/8 The Fenton Arts Trust Fax. +44 (0)20 7759 1829 DAVID LEFEBER Digital Editing/Mastering E-mail: [email protected] Nicholas and Judith Goodison COLIN MATTHEWS Executive Producer Website: www.nmcrec.co.uk SABBA KEYNEJAD Cover image All rights of the manufacturer and owner of the Mercers' Charitable Foundation FRANCOIS HALL Graphic design recorded material reserved. Unauthorised public performance, broadcasting and copying of this The Stanley Picker Charitable Trust Sonata for Cello and Eight Instruments is recording prohibited. published by Faber Music. All other works on this disc are published by Schott Music. Four Spencer Pieces, Three Auden Songs, In my The Radcliffe Trust craft or sullen art, Sonata for Cello and Eight Sonata for Cello and Eight Instruments is a Faber Instruments ® 2012 NMC Recordings Ltd RVW Trust Music Millennium Series commission. The Millennium Series was devised by Faber Music as Partita for solo violin ® BBC 2012 Jennifer Roslyn Wingate a celebration of the Millennium, and as a © 2012 NMC Recordings Ltd reflection of the company’s commitment to the music of the future. Eleven young composers were NMC D164 each nominated by one of Faber Music’s house The BBC word mark and logo and Radio 3 logo are The individuals who donated through composers to write a work for chamber ensemble. trade marks of the British Broadcasting The Big Give Christmas Challenge Huw Watkins was nominated by Thomas Adès. Corporation and used under licence. NMC Recordings is a charitable company BBC Logo © BBC 2012 (reg. no. 328052) established for the recording of December 2011 contemporary music by the Holst Foundation; it is (see www.nmcrec.co.uk/debutdiscs) grateful for funding from Arts Council England. HANNAH VLC˘EK Label Manager ELEANOR WILSON Sales and Marketing Manager ANNE RUSHTON Executive Director DISTRIBUTION NMC recordings are distributed in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Incorporating a BBC Recording Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands,

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