Nick Walkley recital: Europe by Cornet

On Tuesday, February 28, 2012, Nick Walkley, former Fairey and Leyland principal cornet and now Musician Walkley of the Band of the Irish Guards, performed a concert entitled Europe by Cornet at the Guards Chapel in Westminister, London. In the recital, he performed Herman Belstedt’s Napoli, Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen’s Elegy for Broken Hearts, in which the cornet (muted throughout) plays a melancholy cantilena over a pulsating background of atonal piano chords. Following this was an arrangement of Ravel’s Piece en Forme de Habañera, Vassily Brandt’s second Konzertstück. Walkley was then joined by Musician Nick Mott of the Coldstream Guards for the Larghetto from Joseph Horovitz’s Concerto Classico. Steven Miller played piano for these works. For his own adaptation of Gareth Wood’s Nocturne, Walkley was joined by a brass quartet from members of the bands of the Coldstream and Irish Guards, which included Nick Mott (cornet), Christopher Reid (horn), Phil Bannister (trombone) and Steve Clarke (bass trombone). A brass arrangement of Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair and Leonhard Paul’s arrangement of Krysztof Dobrek’s jazzy Unterwegs followed.

The final item was an atmospheric work by Nick Walkley entitled Dusk over Lough Gur, involving a pre-recorded sound clip of water effects. Layered onto this was looped drone effect, recorded live and replayed through a computer and fed back into the chapel, in addition to supplementary accompaniment from the surrounding musicians. The soloist then plucked out a tin whistle and played a lament before picking up a Bodhran (a traditional Irish drum) to add a slip-jig rhythm to the loop which then cued an original melody to emerge from the group and soloist, who had by then returned to the cornet.

Source: Rodney Newton & Nick Walkley