Born in York in 1953, Robin Walker has studied many different musical languages and cultures, ranging from composition lessons with Anthony Milner and David Lumsdaine to a period in India where he was inspired by Buddhist temple music. Since the late 1980s he has lived in rural parts of Lancashire. In 1999 I commissioned Robin to write a solo piece as the final work in a concert programme I was putting together—a musical exploration of the British Isles. The destination was the English Lake District, and his music evokes not only the beauty and tranquillity of the lakes and mountains in that region, but also the energy and drama of that imposing landscape at dusk. In concert performances, I precede the work with four lines from An evening walk by the nineteenth-century Lakeland poet William Wordsworth:

The song of mountain streams unheard by day,
Now hardly heard, beguiles my homeward way.
All air is, as the sleeping water, still,
List’ning th’ aëreal music of the hill.

from notes by Laurence Perkins © 2025