York Bowen: Complete Works For Viols & Piano 2 CD Set Hyperion UK Import 2008

Description: York Bowen: Complete Works For Viola & Piano 2 CD Set Hyperion UK Import 2008 Condition is LIKE NEW or BRAND NEW but without shrink-wrap. Flawless, with zero signs of use and 2 pristine discs. This will be packed very carefully and shipped US Media Mail with Tracking. We are happy to combine items to save you money on shipping. We can send you three typical DVDs for the price of 1. Just put your selection in your shopping cart and press the Request Total button (top right) and we will get back to you with the lowest combined shipping price. Remember Media Mail starts at $3.65 for the first pound weight (or fraction), but then only 70 cents for each additional pound (or fraction). And visit our store on eBay (GutenbergReads) to see the more than 900 interesting items we are selling. About the Composer: EDWIN YORKE BOWEN was born on 22 February 1884 at Crouch Hill, London, the third son of the founder of Bowen & McKechnie, whisky distillers. In 1898 Bowen won the Erard Scholarship of the Royal Academy of Music, with which he was to remain associated for the rest of his life and where he became a piano student of Tobias Matthay. At this point he dropped his baptismal name and the 'e' of Yorke', though certain of his reissued or newly published scores present him as 'E. York Bowen'. York Bowen was also an accomplished violist and horn player, in the latter capacity joining the regimental band of the Scots Guards at the start of the Great War. Invalided home with pneumonia in 1916, he became one of many for whom the harsh realities of the time brought artistic disappointment. Having married in 1912, Bowen spent his remaining years in faithful service to the Royal Academy of Music as a professor of piano. He died suddenly in November 1961. His compositional idiom had remained largely unchanged since his first successes. In this respect he invites comparison with his exiled Russian counterpart Nikolai Medtner, who spent his later years in North London and whose G minor Sonata, Op 22, featured in Bowen's repertoire, but whom Bowen appears never to have met While Mediner railed often against a hated but persistent 'Russian Brahms' sobriquet, in due course Bowen picked up an equally inaccurate tag as 'the English Rachmaninov. This obscures an eclectic breadth of other interests, while also overlooking the fact that Bowen was already becoming noted in London before Rachmaninov's celebrated Piano Concerto No 2 was heard there in May 1902. By then Bowen had already written his first two piano sonatas. The Rachmaninov influence arguably detectable in certain of Bowen's mature works took some time to percolate. Even then it remained intermittent and applicable more to broad external characteristics than to particulars of idiom. Moreover, Bowen began to show a variable but significant debt in other directions, including Richard Strauss but also Debussy, with his characteristic use of augmented triad formations as a consequence of the whole-tone scale. A breadth of first-hand instrumental knowledge doubtless the legacy of the Scots Guards, informs Bowen's large chamber output, rendering its recent revival a pleasurable surprise for performers as much as for listeners. Bowen's writing is frequently challenging, yet unfailingly practical in its matching of technical and physical means to expressive effect. Bowen was first and foremost a virtuoso pianist, instinctively attuned to an tude repertoire characterized by consistency of musical figuration, and one quickly notices the sheer fluency of movement and patterning in his music. One enjoyable consequence is that, where many contemporaneous composers of a more pastoral, folksong-inspired tendency struggled to maintain momentum in a finale, Bowen came into his own with undisguised relish, exploiting an inheritance of rondo-cum-sonata form to toe-tapping smile-inducing effect. Receptive to elevated salon fare, he possessed the subtlety to blur its distinction from the loftier aspirations of the concert hall. Accordingly, one may detect relatively little true difference in voice between slighter works and larger ones. In any case, the latter are often surprisingly compact-expansive in manner, not length. Their supposed 'development' sections sometimes replace organic evolution of ideas with contrasting episodes having more divertissement than cumulative intent about them. The result is a kind of ebb and flow of high-minded emotional intensity; a terrain which is candid, rewarding and harmonically sophisticated, but where a search for actual profundity is apt to miss the point. By the way: For the philanthropists out there, the vast majority of the items sold by us (Gutenberg Reads), are for the benefit of The Shepherd's Center of Greater Winston-Salem, whose mission is to help house-bound seniors live full and independent lives in their own homes. The center provides transportation to medical appointments and grocery shopping, assistance with minor repairs around the house, and companionship through visits. The citizens of Winston-Salem generously donate books, music, movies, and more to us to help us achieve our mission. By buying useful items from us, you will be helping the less fortunate in our city.

Price: 38 USD

Location: Clemmons, North Carolina

End Time: 2024-09-11T14:22:38.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4.63 USD