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Paul Watkins, Huw Watkins – Paul & Huw Watkins Play American Works for Cello and Piano (2015/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:53 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
Between 2012 and 2015, cellist Paul Watkins and pianist Huw Watkins released a four-volume series of British chamber works on Chandos, so their first album of American cello music, featuring pieces by Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, and Aaron Copland, marks a change of direction. While their previous releases were dominated by late Romantic music, this album is a salute to 20th century composers, though the selections are rather conservative in approach, with none being avant-garde. Certainly Barber’s Cello Sonata in C minor, Op. 6 is the most conventional in form and style, followed by the Waltz and Celebration from Copland’s ballet, Billy the Kid, which is both tonal and memorably tuneful. The rugged sonatas by Carter and Crumb are more ambiguous and challenging in their materials, yet they are impressive showpieces that also offer drama and pathos, which are readily communicated here. Bernstein’s transcription of the Three Meditations from Mass is the most difficult piece to categorize, because it was adapted from various sections of that eclectic theater piece, and without context, it resembles a loose medley more than a coherently constructed composition. The brothers’ performances are all polished and passionate, so even if the program isn’t even in mood or quality, the playing is always captivating and satisfying.
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Tamsin Waley-Cohen & Huw Watkins – Beethoven: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1, 5 & 8 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:39 minutes | 1,17 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Huw Watkins return with the start of a Beethoven Violin Sonata Cycle here recording the 1st, 5th and 8th sonatas. Gramophone Magazine said The heart gives a little leap at the prospect of…a duo as engaging and intelligent as Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Huw Watkins. This cycle is sure to be one of the highlights of Signums year, as well as of Beethoven 250. Beethovens twelve violin sonatas add up to a comprehensive exploration of the possibilities and potential of writing for the two instruments on equal terms possibilities that he was ideally placed to understand. The three sonatas on this recording are waypoints on a journey, crafted by a composer who was both violinist and pianist, and who never ceased exploring the practical possibilities of the instruments for which he wrote.
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Tamsin Waley-Cohen, Huw Watkins – Bohemia (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:04 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
Tamsin Waley-Cohen is joined by pianist Huw Watkins for a new disc exploring folk-inspired Bohemia from before the First World War – featuring works by Antonin Dvořák, Josef Suk and Leoš Janáček.This disc followsTamsin’s recent critically-praised disc of Roy Harris and John Adams’ Violin Concertos with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as well as previous discs with Huw Watkins exploring some lesser-known gems of the violin and Piano repertoire.
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Adam Walker & Huw Watkins – Shadow Dances, British Works for Flute (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:26 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
For his second album for Chandos, the flute virtuoso Adam Walker explores the music of British composers with pianist Huw Watkins. Vaughan Williams’s Suite de ballet was commissioned by the French flute virtuoso Louis Fleury (who had given the première of Debussy’s Syrinx). The work uses eighteenth-century French dance forms, a common practice in ‘neo-classical’ composition. Bax’s Four Pieces rescue music from an abandoned ballet originally conceived for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina was originally written for treble recorder; James Galway’s championship of the piece made it a staple of the flute repertoire. Howard Fergusson’s Three Sketches were composed intermittently over a period of twenty years. The theme of the third piece is a Hindu melody, ‘Koyalinya bole ambuvan’ (Cuckoos sing in the mango tree). Sonatas by York Bowen and William Alwyn complete this varied and engaging programme.
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Kerenza Peacock, Huw Watkins, Laura van der Heijden – Rodrigo Ruiz: Behold the Stars (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:23 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
Signum’s first disc with Rodrigo Ruiz highlights the Mexican composer’s musical and literary passions, in performances by world-class soloists Kerenza Peacock, Huw Watkins and Laura van der Heijden.
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Sheila Jaffe, Huw Watkins – Lachrymae (Works by Franck, Britten and Elgar) (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:32 minutes | 1,29 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Coviello Classics
Four years ago, just after the birth of their first daughter, Sheila Jaffé’s husband, pianist Peter Longworth, passed away. This album is a deeply personal reflection on the experience of grief that followed. The Franck sonata was a regular in Sheila’s home – and Sheila and Peter played it together in lieu of a ‘first dance’ at their wedding. Recording at Potton Hall in Suffolk, with the Welsh pianist Huw Watkins, the album includes Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae (recorded after a field trip to the Britten library at the Red House and fish and chips on the Aldeburgh coast) and concludes with Elgar’s vast and expressive Sonata for Violin and Piano.
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Ruby Hughes & Huw Watkins – Echo (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:03:12 minutes | 1,85 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS
Huw Watkins’ song cycle Echo, composed for soprano Ruby Hughes and premiered in 2017 at Carnegie Hall, is at the centre of this artfully crafted recital. Setting texts by five different poets, the cycle is a work centred on melancholy – on transience, remembrance, and in the final song a numbed cry of inconceivable loss. As such it permeates the entire programme, adding a new and unexpected depth to that which precedes as well as follows.
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Paul Watkins, Huw Watkins – British Works for Cello and Piano Volume 1 (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:56 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Chandos
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries many British composers produced superb works for cello and piano, but few of these actually made their way into the general repertoire. Here we have four very different works by four very distinct musical personalities, performed by the cellist Paul Watkins, an exclusive Chandos artist, accompanied by his brother, Huw Watkins.
Composer: Charles Hubert Parry, Frederick Delius, Granville Bantock, John Foulds
Performer: Conductor] Paul [Cello Watkins, Huw Watkins, Paul Watkins
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