Huw Watkins

Having explored much of twentieth-century British works for cello and piano, the Watkins brothers now turn their attention to the American contribution to this repertoire.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Widely recognised as the leading Welsh composer of his generation, Huw Watkins is an increasingly prolific writer of works for chamber ensembles, alongside his distinguished career as a pianist. Composed between 2009 and 2022, the five works featured on this disc take the listener on a fascinating journey through Watkins’s recent musical evolution. The acclaimed Leonore Piano Trio begin with the earliest of these works – the 2009 Piano Trio No. 1 – whilst conductor George Vass’s Orchestra Nova brings us the Little Symphony for strings and exquisite Concertino for violin and strings, performed here by trio violinist Benjamin Nabarro.

Throughout his career, clarinettist Robert Plane has giventhe premiere performances of a number of works writtenespecially for him, and is renowned as a champion ofcontemporary music.