Various Composers - British Works for Flute (Adam Walker; Huw Watkins)

Information

• York Bowen - Miniature Suite
• Ralph Vaughan Williams - Suite de Ballet
• Lennox Berkeley - Sonatina, Op. 13
• William Alwyn - Sonata
• Arnold Bax - Four Pieces
• Howard Ferguson - Three Sketches
• York Bowen - Sonata, Op. 120

Adam Walker, flute

Huw Watkins, piano

Date: 2023

Label: Chandos

https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2020265

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Review

Seventy-seven minutes of British music for flute and piano might at first glance seem like 40 minutes too much. But that’s without taking on board the nimble and dazzling skills of flautist Adam Walker, or the individual strengths of the works presented – particularly York Bowen’s 1946 Sonata and his much earlier (and not very small) Miniature Suite. With Huw Watkins, too, we know we’re in for flexible and sensitive piano playing, responsive to every shadow and dance in all these pieces from the first half of the 20th century.

The two Bowen items never ignore the obvious delights of writing for the flute: the pastoral arabesques, the simulated bird song. But there’s an added thoughtfulness to the composer’s approach, even in the superficially slight material of his 1907 Suite. Four decades later in his Sonata, Bowen’s post-Romantic universe remains intact, though with nothing sterile in any of its three movements, least of all in the brilliant scamper of the finale, marked allegro con fuoco.

In other pieces, it’s fascinating to trace the foreign influences coming and going. French dance forms and echoes of English folk song mingle in Vaughan Williams’s Suite de Ballet, while Bax’s Four Pieces, extracted from a never-orchestrated ballet score written under the sway of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, usefully offer lighter alternatives to his voluptuously scintillating symphonies. A few pieces like Alwyn’s Sonata promise more than they deliver, but a new pleasure is never far away in this most accomplished recital, full of the sounds of spring.

-- Geoff Brown, BBC Music Magazine

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Adam Walker (born 1987 in Retford, Nottinghamshire) is an English flautist. He studied with with Gitte Sorensen at Chetham's School of Music, and Michael Cox at the Royal Academy of Music. In 2002, he became the youngest ever winner of the British Flute Society Competition, and in 2004 was a Concerto Finalist in the BBC Young Musicians Competition. Walker made many appearances on BBC Radio before making his Proms debut in 2008, the same year that he was appointed principal flute of the London Symphony Orchestra. As a soloist, he has performed with major orchestras around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Walker_(flautist)

http://www.adamwalkerflute.com/

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Huw Watkins (born 13 July 1976) is a British composer and pianist. Born in South Wales, he studied at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, King's College in Cambridge, and Royal College of Music in London. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music. As a composer, Watkins' works has been premiered by renowned artists and ensembles, such as Paul Watkins (Huw's brother), Alina Ibragimova, the Nash Ensemble, the Belcea Quartet, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the London Symphony Orchestra. As a pianist, Huw can be regularly heard on BBC Radio 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huw_Watkins

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