Description
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.