Bowen: 24 Piano Preludes for Piano
The seemingly endless invention of the 24 Preludes for Piano follows the key scheme employed by Bach in The Well-Tempered Clavier, through a landscape of harmonic subtlety and craftsmanship of the most refined sort.York Bowen was a British composer whose fifty-year career musical career spanned much of the 20th century. Bowen was not only a prolific composer, he was also a pianist, conductor, Organist, Violinist and Horn player. He premiered many important works and his own music was featured many times at the Proms, among other concert series, and he had a host of critical champions. Sir Henry J Wood, for instance, believed Bowen had never received proper recognition and Camille Saint-Saens regarded him as the ‘finest of English composers’ early in his career. His compositional style changed little throughout his life, so that his later oeuvre was less celebrated than his earlier works, as music fashion had moved on.
