Arnold Cooke

Piano Sonatas no.1 (1938) & no.2 (1965)
Flute Quartet (1936)
Three Songs of Innocence for soprano, clarinet & piano (1957)
Rondo in B flat for horn & piano (1950)
Nocturnes – a cycle of five songs (1956)

Raphael Terroni (piano); Melanie Lodge (soprano); Jonathan Jaggard (horn); Patrick Williams (flute);
Lorraine Schulman (clarinet); Warren Zielinski (violin); Morgan Goff (viola); Justin Pearson (cello)

Dutton Epoch CDLX 7247

A nice disc of chamber music and piano sonatas by Arnold Cooke who nearly made his 100 (1906-2005) and is best remembered for having studied with Hindemith and substantially adopting his style - not mere epigonism, Calum MacDonald insists...

The instrumental works are performed well by (mainly) London freelancers, but the disc is let down by the soprano and by the lack of sung texts (you can rarely get the sense of poems sung by sopranos without the words in front of you) in the booklet, which wastes space on redundancies in over-inclusive CVs. Do we really need to know that one of the players is a great nephew of Sir John Barbirolli, etc?

Peter Grahame Woolf