Two Forgotten Romantics Event

Duncan Honeybourne explores the piano music of two forgotten composer-pianists, the Englishman Greville Cooke and the Irishman Archy Rosenthal. These two larger-than-life characters wrote for their instrument with telling individuality and searing intensity, and Duncan's programme includes Rosenthal's barnstorming Variations on "Hush-a-Bye-Baby" and Cooke's evocative "Cormorant Crag", "Whispering Willows", "Sundown" and "Reef's End". Cooke combined a professorship in composition at the Royal Academy of Music with a parallel career as an Anglican priest, rising to become a canon of Peterborough Cathedral, whilst Dublin-born Rosenthal was a pupil of Godowsky and friend of Grieg, who was a professor at the Royal Irish Academy and Trinity College of Music before settling in Australia. Duncan will be recording piano music by both fascinating figures for EM Records in 2014.