Arnold Cooke


Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer.

Career

Cooke was born at Gomersal, West Riding of Yorkshire into a family of carpet manufacturers. As a child Cooke learned the piano and later the cello and was already composing by the age of 7 or 8. He was educated at Streete Preparatory School, Repton School and at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he read History taking Part 1 of his Tripos in 1927 and gaining his B.A., but he changed to read music where his composition teacher was E. J. Dent. At Cambridge, Cooke continued to play the cello in the CUMS orchestra and in a string quartet. He was President of the Cambridge Musical Society from 1927 to 1928. In 1929, he gained his Music degree and went to Berlin where he studied composition and piano at the Berlin University of the Arts under Paul Hindemith. He later became Musical Director of the Festival Theatre at Cambridge, and in 1933 was appointed a professor at the Royal Manchester College of Music. He moved to London in 1938 to further his career.
In the 1930s Cooke carved out a reputation for himself as a promising young composer, and his music was taken up by leading interpreters. The harpist Maria Korchinska introduced his Harp Quintet in 1932; Sir Henry Wood conducted his Concert Overture No.1 at the 1934 Promenade Concerts and the Griller Quartet premiered his String Quartet no. 1 in 1935. In 1936 Havergal Brian singled out for praise a cantata, Holderneth, a setting of a text by the American poet Edward Sweeney. Louis Kentner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult premiered his Piano Concerto in 1943,
which he had completed just before his call-up in 1941. The concerto had been commissioned by the South African pianist Adolph Hallis in 1939 but the outbreak of WWII meant that Hallis had to return to South Africa so Kentner gave the first performance in a BBC studio broadcast on 11 November 1943. The work received subsequent broadcast performances from Franz Reizenstein with the BBC Northern Orchestra under Clarence Raybould in 1952 and Eric Parkin with the BBC Northern Orchestra under Brian Priestman in 1972.
In the Second World War, he served in the Royal Navy, first in the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious and subsequently as a liaison officer in a Norwegian escort vessel and a Dutch tug that took part in the D-Day Landings. After demobilisation he returned to London in 1946, becoming a founder member of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain, and from 1947 until his retirement in 1978 he was Professor of Harmony and Composition at Trinity College of Music in London. In 1948, through the recommendation of E. J. Dent he obtained a doctorate from Cambridge submitting as his composition portfolio his Symphony no. 1, Piano Concerto and Sonata for viola and piano. After a stroke in 1993 he virtually ceased to compose, but lived to the age of 98 dying at his nursing home in Five Oak Green in Kent.
Four of his symphonies and other orchestral works have been issued on the Lyrita label, whilst the Clarinet Quintet and the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 were recorded on Hyperion. MPR Records has embarked on a series of chamber music recordings.

Music

As a composer Cooke was highly productive and tended to work in traditional genres. He wrote two operas – Mary Barton after the novel by Mrs. Gaskell and The Invisible Duke. The ballet Jabez and the Devil was a commission from the Royal Ballet. He composed six symphonies, several concertos, copious chamber music including a clarinet quintet and five string quartets, many instrumental sonatas, and some important vocal music. His music seems to show the influence of Hindemith almost throughout his career, leavened with a more English sense of lyricism.

Selected works

Opera