The English composer Robin Walker (born in York in 1953) is one of the unsung giants of contemporary British music. He writes music which marries subjective emotion and discipline in what he calls ‘passionate classicism’. Working in a tradition which passes through Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Tippett and Birtwistle – channelling energy into form – Walker has created some of the most vigorous and exciting orchestral music of recent years, as the four powerful works on this CD demonstrate. Walker attributes the physicality of his music to the fact that, for nearly thirty years he has lived on, or next to, farms in the Pennine Hills of the West Riding of Yorkshire, where in his work around the farm he learned the primacy of nature in the sustaining of human life.

The career of Alexander Walker (no relation) has taken him all over the world. In the UK he has conducted concerts with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia and New Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Working regularly at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, he has toured with the Royal Ballet to the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theatres in Russia, throughout the USA, including the Metropolitan Opera and Kennedy Center, as well as to Singapore, Korea, Japan and Turkey. Alexander Walker studied with Ilya Musin at the St Petersburg Conservatoire and has since performed throughout the former Soviet Union where many of his concerts have been broadcast on national television and radio.