Huw Watkins succeeded Simon Holt as the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s composer-in-association in September, but the orchestra has been performing his works periodically since his piece Sinfonietta in 2000.
Watkins’s trajectory has been remarkable, as this composer portrait underlined in works spanning a decade up to 2014. His versatility knows no bounds. As a pianist and chamber musician, he is a key interpreter of the foremost British composers – he himself must now be counted among them – and his sensibilities as a performer clearly inform his own work. Partita for solo violin – written in 2006 and played here with her usual authority by Lesley Hatfield – helped clarify Watkins’s propensity to create an unselfconsciously lyrical flow of material and to balance it with a consciously meticulous craftsmanship.
Yet the integrity of musicianship and his ear for timbre allows him to write with equal facility on the very largest scale, as his 2005 piece Anthem for full orchestra and the Double Concerto for viola and cello demonstrated. Philip Dukes and Josephine Knight, who premiered the work at the 2005 BBC Proms, were again the eloquent exponents, and conductor Garry Walker conducted with much insight.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the works that spoke with greatest immediacy were the most recent: two pieces connected to Watkins’s 2013 chamber opera In the Locked Room.
In Remember, the highly evocative cycle of four songs for soprano and orchestra – sung by Ruby Hughes and conceived for her – the second setting, Thomas Hardy’s poem Shut Out That Moon, Hughes’s expressivity together with Watkins’s authoritative writing for strings conveyed huge emotional intensity. Speak Seven Seas for clarinet – played by Robert Plane, with Dukes on viola and Watkins on piano – had an apparently easy ebb and flow, but its dramatic tension was manipulated with the same unerring control.
- To be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now, date to be announced.
