Fearful Symmetry

John Sykes (1909-1962) was a pianist, composer and schoolteacher. He gained his FRCO as a schoolboy and became Organ Scholar at Balliol College Oxford. Later, he studied with both Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob. He spent most of his career teaching music at Kingswood School, Bath. He left behind a good deal of music, but only a handful of works were published. This recording is of songs, solo piano works and a piano duo. The songs are largely settings from William Blake's Poems of Innocence and Experience, but there are also settings of poems by Sykes's friend and contemporary, Randall Swingler.