Fearful Symmetry

Rowan Pierce soprano, Gareth Brynmor John baritone, Iain Farrington piano, William Vann piano

John Sykes (1909-1962) was born in India where his father was working in the Indian Civil Service. He went to school at Clifton College, Bristol and he studied the organ while he was a pupil there, gaining his FRCO qualification. In 1928 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, with an organ scholarship, to read Modern History – music was not, at that time, offered as a first degree subject. He then gained the degree of B.Mus. in 1933 and after graduating, he spent a year studying composition (with piano as a second study) at the Royal College of Music, where he was a pupil of Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob. He joined the teaching staff of Kingswood School, Bath, becoming the school’s Director of Music in 1952. Sykes spent his whole working life at Kingswood, apart from war service – he was a conscientious objector – and he died of cancer in the school sanatorium in June 1962.

This recording is of songs, solo piano works and a piano duo. The songs are largely settings from William Blake’s poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience, but there are also settings of poems by Sykes’s friend and contemporary, Randall Swingler.

If you have bought the CD (or even if you haven’t!) you will find only 28 of the 29 tracks on it, since there was no room for more. You can download track 29 from here in either flac or mp3 format.