Huw Watkins In my craft or sullen art Mark Padmore tenor Huw Watkins piano Paul Watkins cello Alina Ibragimova violin The Nash Ensemble 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 Wigmore Hall 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.