York Bowen

Despite achieving considerable success during his lifetime, many of the composer's works remained unpublished and unperformed until after his death in 1961.

Bowen's compositional style is widely considered ‘Romantic’ and his works are often characterized by their rich harmonic language.

While studying at the Royal Academy of Music, Bowen won numerous awards including the Sterndale Bennett Prize in 1902 and the Worshipful Company of Musicians Medal.

During the First World War Bowen played in the Scots Guards Band but during service in France he contracted pneumonia and was forced to return to the UK.

Bowen returned to composing and performing after the war and continued to work as a teacher, examiner, lecturer and adjudicator.

He taught at the Tobias Matthay Piano School for over forty years and remained a professor at the Royal Academy of Music until his death in 1961.

Among his students were Myers Foggin, Derek Holman, Charles Lynch, Ivor Newton, Kathleen Richards, Betty Roe, Leo Rowlands and Timothy Salter.

28, and many other renowned violinists of the time later gave performances of the work, including Joseph Szigeti, Michael Zacharewitsch and Efrem Zimbalist.

Bowen also composed works for many of his other contemporaries including Carl Dolmetsch, Léon Goossens, Beatrice Harrison, Pauline Juler and Gareth Morris.

Alongside Arnold Bax and Benjamin Dale, Bowen was one of the first English composers to add original works to the modern viola repertoire.

[3] Aside from his performances with Lionel Tertis, one of Bowen's most successful collaborations was the piano duo that he formed with fellow professor at the Royal Academy of Music, Harry Isaacs.

As a composer Bowen was noted for his inventive piano duets and he continued to perform many of these compositions with Isaacs throughout his career.

Similarly, in 1928 Bowen gave the first performance of William Walton's Sinfonia Concertante for Orchestra and Piano at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert at the Queen's Hall.

In addition, Bowen produced editions of many of Chopin's nocturnes, preludes, valses, ballades and scherzos between 1948 and 1950.

[2] Although his influences include Rachmaninoff, Medtner, Chopin, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, Bowen's music is very much defined by its distinctive textures and harmonies.

Although his active career spanned more than fifty years, Bowen's compositional style altered very little and he continued to employ a diatonic key system with use of chromatic harmonies throughout his life.

The varying standards of difficulty of his compositions make Bowen's instrumental music accessible to a wide range of musicians.

This is particularly true of Bowen's piano works which span from study pieces such as Twelve Easy Impromptus, Op.

As a result of this, performances of Bowen's works diminished and much of his music remained unperformed in the decades after his death.