William Howard presents a recital to launch his new album Sixteen Contemporary Love Songs, which will be released on the Orchid Classics label in June. Copies of the new CD will be available at the concert.

The programme combines three great romantic piano works with a selection of recently written love songs for solo piano commissioned by William Howard for his Love Song Project, including London premieres of pieces by Nico Muhly, Elena Kats-Chernin, Piers Hellawell and Michael Zev Gordon.

The major work in the first half is Schumann’s Humoreske, a kaleidoscopic expression of different moods and emotions, written in the turbulent period before the composer’s marriage to his beloved Clara, to whom he wrote:

I have been rhapsodizing about you, and have thought of you with a love such as I have never experienced before. The whole week I have been sitting at the piano, composing and writing, laughing and crying all at once. All this you will find nicely portrayed in my Op 20, the grand Humoreske…

The recital ends with Chopin’s Scherzo in B flat minor, one of the composer’s most flamboyant and best loved works, and his Ballade in F minor, described by John Ogdon as ‘the most exalted, intense and sublimely powerful of all Chopin's compositions’.

Programme:

Howard Skempton Solitary Highland Song

David Knotts Album Leaf

Nico Muhly Falling Pairs (London Premiere)

Schumann Humoreske Op.20

Interval

Robert Saxton For Teresa

Piers Hellawell Love on the Escalator (London Premiere)

Michael Zev Gordon For Fiammetta (London Premiere)

Elena Kats-Chernin Roses in a Box (London Premiere)

Chopin Scherzo No.2 in B flat minor Op.31

Chopin Ballade no.4 in F minor Op.52