This is a release combining recordings Eric Parkin made in the early '70s of the music of William Baines and of E.J. Moeran. (Parkin recorded the Baines pieces again in the mid-'90s for the Priory label.) Baines was a Yorkshire composer who died at the age of 23 in 1922. The notes from the original release, included here, suggest that Baines had a provincial musical education and independently developed a style of writing that in some ways resembled Alkan or Scriabin. Yet Baines might have had access to the music of those ...
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This is a release combining recordings Eric Parkin made in the early '70s of the music of William Baines and of E.J. Moeran. (Parkin recorded the Baines pieces again in the mid-'90s for the Priory label.) Baines was a Yorkshire composer who died at the age of 23 in 1922. The notes from the original release, included here, suggest that Baines had a provincial musical education and independently developed a style of writing that in some ways resembled Alkan or Scriabin. Yet Baines might have had access to the music of those composers, as well as that of Debussy and Bax, with whom he also shares some characteristics. What comes through his music -- its coruscating tonalities and references to landscapes -- is a sense of free-form composition that isn't quite improvisational, but it isn't bound to conventional Romantic techniques of writing. It is very picturesque, purposefully, often meandering in mood and only occasionally building to intense passion. The Seven Preludes have the greatest range of emotion...
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