Day Sixteen: Huw Watkins, Lament
During the summer of 2020, in fact on the hottest day of the year during a rare pocket of time whereby regulations allowed it, Huw Watkins and I recorded Lament, a new work for horn and piano written by Huw especially for a new CD we recorded together.
"When Ben Goldscheider asked me to write a new piece for a CD celebrating the legacy of Dennis Brain, I immediately thought of Poulenc’s Elégie (written in memory of Brain) and its juxtaposition of violent anger and lyrical beauty, and felt I wanted to do something similar. Lament begins quietly, with long, expressive horn lines emerging from a web of piano harmony. At its climax, the horn writing becomes anguished, accompanied by increasingly dissonant piano chords, before a muted return to the opening music, the harmony less consoling now." – Huw Watkins
This year, 2021, is the centenary year of the legendary horn player Dennis Brain. As such, I wanted to celebrate his legacy, the result being a CD project in which we recorded two works by composers Brain worked with, Sir Malcolm Arnold and Benjamin Britten, two works written in his memory by Francis Poulenc and Sir Peter-Maxwell Davies and then was fortunate enough to have the support of the Guild of Horn Players who commissioned two new works for the project, this piece by Huw Watkins as well as a new transcription by Roxanna Panufnik. The CD will be released on the Three Worlds Records Label on the 14th May 2021. Watch the video at the bottom of the blog to learn more about the project and the other repertoire on the disc.
Huw Watkins, Lament for horn and piano.
A pianist and one of Britain’s foremost composers, Huw Watkins was born in Wales in 1976. He studied piano with Peter Lawson at Chetham’s School of Music and composition with Robin Holloway, Alexander Goehr and Julian Anderson at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. In 2001 he was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, he now teaches composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
His own compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Nash Ensemble, Belcea and Elias quartets, BBC Symphony Orchestra, LSO, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, amongst others.
As a pianist, Huw Watkins is in great demand with orchestras and festivals including the London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, the BBC orchestras and Aldeburgh, East Neuk and Cheltenham Festivals. He has performed globally at concert halls including at Wigmore Hall, the Barbican, the Library of Congress in Washington, the Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Institute in NY, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Detroit, Kristiansand Orchestra in Norway, Columbus (USA) with ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Domaine Forget and Toronto Summer Music Festival and in Italy, France, Germany, Hungary and Portugal.
Strongly committed to the performance of new music, Huw has had a few piano concertos written for him by Philip Cashian, Helen Grime and Tansy Davies.
He won the Chamber Music of Lincoln Center’s 2016 Elise L.Stoeger Prize in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of chamber music composition. He was composer in the house with the Orchestra of the Swan and Composer in Association with BBC NOW.
He performs regularly with his brother Paul Watkins, as well as Tamsin Waley-Cohen and has featured as both Composer in Residence and pianist at festivals including West Cork Chamber Music, Presteigne and Lars Vogt’s ‘Spannungen’ Festival in Heimbach, Germany. Huw Watkins is regularly featured on BBC Radio 3, and has recorded for labels such as Signum, Chandos, Nimbus, BIS and NMC.
