Arnold Cooke

He wrote a considerable amount of chamber music, including five string quartets and many instrumental sonatas, much of which is only now becoming accessible through modern recordings.

Hindemith's composition class also included Harald Genzmer, Oskar Sala and Franz Reizenstein, the latter remained a lifelong friend and kept Cooke's Piano Concerto in his repertoire.

The harpist Maria Korchinska introduced his Harp Quintet in 1932; Sir Henry Wood conducted his Concert Overture No.

In 1936 Havergal Brian singled out for praise a cantata, Holderneth, a setting of a text by the American poet Edward Sweeney.

[1] Louis Kentner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult premiered his Piano Concerto in 1943,[5][6] which he had completed just before his call-up in 1941.

[8] During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Navy, first in the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious, and subsequently as a liaison officer in a Norwegian escort vessel and a Dutch tug that took part in the D-Day Landings.

After a stroke in 1993, he virtually ceased to compose, but lived to the age of 98, dying at his nursing home in Five Oak Green in Kent in 2005.

His early music follows an English tradition with traces of Elgar, John Ireland and others, but this changes drastically from the time of his study with Hindemith.

If the mature music shows the influence of Hindemith, Bartók and Shostakovich, it is also leavened with a more English sense of lyricism, whilst the shadow of Brahms is also present.