PERCY HILDER MILES CHAMBER MUSIC VOLUME 2 | MPR

Ian Tindale, piano

On this second instalment exploring Percy Hilder Miles' unpublished chamber works, we hear his Piano Sonata of 1920, a delightful melodic work in three movements, and  also the charmingly inventive ‘Six Album Leaves’ of 1894, something of a tribute to Schumann. Although a wonderfully inventive composer, Percy was musically a tad conservative in his tastes and did not like the musical direction of the Second Viennese School where composers such as Berg, Schoenberg and Webern moved away from traditional tonality. He wrote his own brief and to be truthful quite entertaining parody in 1917 one day before dinner penning the rather ironic title ‘Sunshine Over the Avon’. The disc also features performances of works for viola and clarinet with string quartet.