Katharine Parker
Katharine Parker's small body of songs and piano pieces carries Edwardian sentiment with a personal, wistful colour. Tonal and sumptuously harmonic, the music sits close to Grainger's lighter manner, from delicate sketches to salon waltzes.
Four Musical Sketches map her piano voice most clearly: One Summer Day, A Patchwork of Shadows, Red Admiral and Down Longford Way, the piece Grainger praised and later orchestrated. Beside them sit A Water Colour, a Chopinesque Nocturne, the salon waltz Arc-en-Ciel and the fox-trot Brushing up the Leaves. The songs, including Six Songs and The Light of the Lotus, move between melancholy lyricism and lighter parlour or theatre manners, sometimes with the piano doubling the voice. Almost all of the surviving music was written between about 1913 and the mid 1930s, roughly an hour in total.
Katharine Parker is featured on the following titles
Down Longford Way: The Music of Katharine Parker
Katharine “Kitty” Parker (1886–1971) grew up near Longford in northern Tasmania. After early studies in Melbourne she became Percy Grainger’s pupil; he thought her the best student he ever had.
Compositions by Katharine Parker also appear on
A Patchwork of Shadows
In 1994 Ian Munro was one of only two or three major pianists based in Australia. Passionate about the music of his composer peers, he shaped one of the most carefully chosen programmes then available on disc.