EMR CD022 | DETAILS
  EMR CD022
   
  A FORGOTTEN ENGLISH ROMANTIC: The piano music of
Greville Cooke
  Duncan Honeybourne (pf)
   
  Released May 2014 | EAN 5 060263 500193

Duncan Honeybourne's new disc for EM Records explores the piano music of a forgotten romantic composer-pianist, the Englishman Greville Cooke. This larger-than-life character wrote for his instrument with telling individuality, melting tenderness and searing intensity. Cooke combined a professorship in composition at the Royal Academy of Music with parallel careers as a poet and Anglican priest, rising to become a canon of Peterborough Cathedral and a regular broadcaster in both musical and spiritual roles. EMR CD022 presents Cooke’s superbly evocative, richly passionate music – bearing wonderful titles such as ‘Cormorant Crag’, ‘Whispering Willows’, ‘Sundown’ and ‘Reef's End’ – with miniatures by Holst and Vaughan Williams to create a disc of English romantic piano music of vibrant colour and wide-ranging expressive power.

TRACK LISTING AND AUDIO EXTRACTS
     

Greville Cooke (1894–1989)

    
1. ‘GOTHIC PRELUDE’ (1952) (World Première recording)  
2. ‘HIGH MARLEY REST’ (1933) (World Première recording)  
3. ‘WHISPERING WILLOWS’ (1952) (World Première recording)  
       
Gustav Holst (1874–1934)
  
4. ‘NOCTURNE’ (1930)  
       
Greville Cooke    
5. ‘IN THE CATHEDRAL’ (1929) (World Première recording)  
       

‘OVER THE HILLS...’ A SUITE OF THREE SHORT PIECES (1934)

(World Première recording)

    
6. ‘Tree-Top Lullaby’  
7. ‘So Fair a Field’  
8. ’Skip-Step’  
       
9. ’SONG PRELUDE’ (1955) (World Première recording)  
       
10. ‘CORMORANT CRAG’ (1934) (World Première recording)  
       

‘BARGAIN BASEMENT’: A SUITE OF SEVEN PIECES (1936)

(World Première recording)

  
11. ‘Good morning, Mr Harridge’  
12. ‘Oddment (Superior Quality)’  
13. ‘Throw-Out (Greatly Reduced)’  
14. ‘Genuine Reproduction (Excellent Value)’  
15. ‘Cheap Line (Absolutely not to be repeated)’  
16. ‘Going for a Song (Yours for a tenor, fiver, 3d)’  
17. ‘Remnant (Only one left)’  
       
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
A LITTLE PIANO BOOK (1934)		  
18. ‘Valse Lente’  
19. ‘Nocturne’  
20. Canon  
21. Two-part Invention in F  
22. Two-part Invention in E-flat  
23. Two-part Invention in G  
       
Greville Cooke  
24. ‘HALDON HILLS (DEVON)’ (1929) (World Première recording)  
25. ‘MEADOWSWEET’ (1929) (World Première recording)  
       
THREE PIECES (1929) (World Première recording)    
26. ‘A Sunny Morning’  
27. ‘In the Park (Afternoon)’  
28. ‘An Evening Lullaby’  
       
29. ‘SUNDOWN’ (1953) (World Première recording)  
30. ‘REEF’S END’ (1934) (World Première recording)  
REVIEWS
Beautifully shaped by Benjamin Frith... Beguiling sounds, graced by the tawny richness and unexaggerated line of Richard Jenkinson’s cello playing... The sense of purpose and sureness of line of Ian Venables’ music is pure oxygen.
EMR CD31 | BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Exquisitely rewarding... Ravishing accounts.
EMR CD029 | CHOIR AND ORGAN
This is music of great beauty and integrity and the performances fully do it justice. It would be criminal to let it pass you by.

EMR CD028 | INTERNATIONAL
RECORD REVIEW

The Bridge Quartet approach these pieces with a sympathetic and insightful warmth, and confirm their ambassadorial credentials for British chamber music. A lovely, radiant disc.
EMR CD025 | Gramophone
Duncan Honeybourne’s playing is astonishingly affectionate, yet never saccharine... Honeybourne plays with suave confidence.
EMR CD024 | INTERNATIONAL PIANO
Rupert Marshall-Luck is an ideal interpreter: generously but not effusively lyrical; agile and athletic... The warm, folk-song like slow movement is at times almost painfully beautiful, with a shimmering pastoral central section... Marshall-Luck is, again, indefatigable and keenly picks up on the work’s melancholic strain.  Finely recorded and with comprehensive booklet notes, this is a must for fans of 20th-century English repertoire.
EMR CD023 | THE STRAD