You'll struggle to find Baker's name in reference books, but his brand of beautifully crafted 'community music', much of it reminiscent of Britten at his best, is certainly worth knowing. *****

Classic FM Magazine - November 2006

This is Gebrauchmusik in the best sense of that word: carefully, often elegantly composed and with a clear sense of its social purpose, be it for the Scottish community in which John Bevan Baker lived and worked for his family. It is also a timely reminder that modesty is no bar to musical ambition; the small scale of many of the pieces on this new CD belies their larger effect. As Peter Maxwell Davies says in a generous appreciation of Bevan Baker's career in the booklet that accompanies this recording, "there are composers who make new music within and for the wider professional and amateur world in places far from those critics where professional orchestras and opera houses flourish."

'Some composers blaze trails', Bevan Baker said of himself; 'others go along behind clearing the path and trying to encourage that direction - I am one of those composers.' Listening to Songs of Courtship you may think Bevan Baker over modest as he spins a kind of musical gold in these short settings of poems written in the seventh century BC by Mao Shih and translated by the great Chinese scholar Arthur Waley. The writing for piano is fluent in If along the highroad, while the distantly oriental chords that open A moon rising are evocative in themselves and a surefooted prelude to the entry of the voices. Throughout, the word setting is scrupulous, with the music resisting the temptation to illustrate the text. If there are hints of Ravel here then the influence is entirely benign. Bartok, too, seems to be there in the driving rhythms of the final number Wedding Song. The Consort of Voices do these musical miniatures proud.

Nearly all the music here was written in the final fifteen years of Bevan Baker's life, when it seems he enjoyed one of those enviable Indian summers that are granted to a few artists. His son in law, the cellist William Conway, who is the co-founder and artistic director of the Hebrides Ensemble, who plays on this CD, suggests that Bevan Baker was being asked for more music in his later years and that he was writing specifically for the Black Island singers, the vocal ensemble that he had helped to form. That, however, doesn’t explain the rich vein of instrumental music that Bevan Baker mined in these years. There’s the delightful Suite for Piano with his children pictured within, stumbling, dancing, tripping, in a sequence of dances, but also told the tenderest bedtime story in Berceuse. Spring is a solo violin piece, composed in 1983 for the composer's eldest daughter, Sarah, based on bird-calls, it ends with the true harbinger of spring, the cuckoo. How fitting that it's played here by its dedicatee, Sarah Bevan Baker.

If there's a delicately coloured lyricism, in Triptych (1950) for cello and piano, with William Conway joined by the pianist Graeme McNaught, it's Bevan Baker's last work Eclogue, written in 1994, that gives the fullest account of this admirable composer's achievement. Here the writing is never less than graceful in a series of solos, duets, trios and quartets for the members of the Hebrides Ensemble, who had originally commissioned the work Pastoral, certainly in many of its moods, but fragrant with the smell of wild thyme on the hills. The final piano solo might serve as an epitaph for a musician who hid his light under a bushel much too modestly.

Christopher Cook, International Records Review - November 2006

Born in Middlesex in 1926 to an English father and a Scottish mother, John Bevan Baker studied organ and composition at the Royal College of Music; after a brief stint as Assistant Organist at Westminster Abbey, the pull of his Scottish roots proved too strong and he moved to Aberdeen as City Carillonneur. He taught music in Aberdeen, then at Fortose Academy and in Glasgow before retiring to Fortrose. There his creativity blossomed and he wrote many works. Some were commissioned by professional musicians, others for school and community groups (including the Black Isle Singers, an amateur choir founded by him in 1985). That some of his choral settings, instrumental and chamber music have found their way onto CD is a tribute not only to the enterprising Linn record label but also to the efforts of his son-in-law, cellist William Conway, whose belief in the quality of Bevan Baker’s music is shown to be entirely justified. This disc contains a fascinating mixture of pieces. Eclogue for mixed quintet (oboe, bassoon, violin, cello and piano), written in 1994 just before he died, is a short, intense rhapsody, sparingly written but with a haunting lyricism. Triptych for cello and piano, 1980, displays the same economy of style; the chromatic four-note motif that opens the energetic allegro is found in various guises in the beautiful, dreamy central movement and in the driving, sparkling allegro vivace. A Song for Kate, written in celebration of his first grandchild’s birth, is a warm berceuse for string ensemble, and the light-hearted but spirited Spring for solo violin is equally beguiling. Duo for oboe and cello and Suite for Piano complete the chamber and instrumental music. Of the two choral works, Songs of Courtship, scored for four-part choir and piano duet, is the more distinctive, setting thirteen texts (translated from the Ancient Chinese) with great imagination, sometimes light-footed, sometimes more robust and even lush, but always rhythmically challenging. The opening of the first song is almost Brittenesque in character, reminiscent of the Ceremony of Carols, while elsewhere there are hints of Vaughan Williams, Bridge and Howells. This enchanting cycle is sung with great affection by the Consort of Voices, who are joined by strings, organ, trumpet and tubular bells for Bevan Baker’s colourful setting of 15th century Scottish poet William Dunbar’s poem Rorate Coeli Desuper. The CD booklet foreword by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies perfectly sums up Bevan Baker’s music: “This is beautifully crafted, transparently honest music, of great warmth and melodic fecundity, and I am delighted it is receiving wider attention.

McAlister Matheson Music newsletter - October 2006

A late-flowering composer who was inspired by his love of Scotland...

I found it difficult to credit that John Bevan Baker's Songs of Courtship, completed in 1988 and receiving their first recording here, were from the same pen as the other pieces on this CD. Even Rorate Coeli Desuper, also from 1988, appears to inhabit a different musical world from the Songs, yet this piece also suggests a gulf between the composer's approach to voices and to instruments. On this track, a setting of a poem by 15th-century Scottish poet William Dunbar, the choral writing seemed to be striving to achieve an effect, while that for the instruments - not least supple early passages for cello and bass - flowed naturally, effortlessly creating an atmosphere. The Songs, a set of admittedly inventive miniatures, were conceived for the amatuer choir that Baker founded in Fortrose on the Moray Firth where he spent his retirement from music teaching, so I may be accused of judging them too harshly; but some of the instrumental pieces were also written for non-professionals and I found all of these more engaging, stimulating and satisfying. Whatever, Peter Maxwell Davies described Baker's music as "beautifully crafted, transparently honest... of great warmth and melodic fecundity" and you may consider that to be a sufficient recommendation. I had no reservations about the instrumental works, which are full of life, developed with a vigorous and organic logic and performed with great affection. I don't think it is too fanciful to hear Baker's love of Scotland and its countryside and coastlands throughout these pieces.

Barry Witherden, Gramophone - November 2006

Tribute to a modest man with the common touch...

Some composers blaze trails; others go along behind clearing the path and trying to encourage that direction - I'm one of those composers." These words, by John Bevan Baker, sum up the modest and honest integrity of a composer who lived a quiet life in Scotland up to his death 12 years ago. And were it not for an enterprising new CD, out this month on Linn Records and dedicated entirely to his music, the likelihood is that Bevan Baker's sizeable artistic legacy could easily have remained buried in undeserved obscurity.

That's certainly the view of William Conway, the composer's son-in-law, who has spent much of his own distinguished musical career finding opportunities to perform a canon of work he believes is of huge interest in its accessibility to amateurs and professionals alike, and in the sincerity and skill of its composition.

Conway is the artistic director of the Hebrides Ensemble, currently Scotland's most exciting mixed chamber ensemble specialising in contemporary music, and together with the Edinburgh-based Consort of Voices has engineered a recording project that is far more than simply a sentimental tribute to his father of his wife (the violinist Sarah Bevan Baker).

On the contrary, every one of the works featured on this new disc - an illuminating combination of choral settings and instrumental chamber music - reflects a sharp and refined musical mind, something far more deep-rooted than its self-effacing warmth and prominent lyrical expression would suggest.

What strikes you most about these works, however, is that just about all of them date from the last 15 years of Bevan Baker's life. That's something that has often puzzled Conway. "I first met John in 1980, when he wrote Triptych for me to perform at a recital I was giving at the Black Isle Arts Society," he says. Conway performs Triptych - its plaintive charm and energy is seductive - on the new CD with pianist Graeme McNaught. "It made me wonder why John had written so little in the years up to that."

As the connection deepened through marriage into the family, Conway kept urging his father-in-law to write more. "He was a composer who liked to write exclusively for those around him. So, many of those late works were aimed specifically at performances by the Black Isle Singers, which he formed and directed himself, or by many of our own musical friends whom we invited up to Fortrose."

The result was a late flurry of creativity, which included a one-act opera, The Seer - tragically never performed during the composer's lifetime.

Indeed, one of the most impressive works on this recording is Eclogue, which Bevan Baker had all but completed when he died. "It was sitting on the piano the day he died," Conway recalls. "It was basically finished, but he hadn't quite tied up the last few bars. We got the composer Nigel Osborne [Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University] to tie up the loose ends, which he did, and the work was finally performed."

The sheer delicacy of its scoring for mixed quintet, and the effortless melodies that flow from its mildly astringent harmonies are certainly not that of a waning mind. What they do represent are a style of composition that exists more for the beauty of its genuine conception and purpose than anything trailblazing or pushing the bounds.

In the other representative works, stylistic borrowings are openly evident. "John particularly liked Bartók and Lutoslawski, and he didn't hide those influences" says Conway. There is no escaping these, either in earlier works such as the Piano Suite - spiced with the same cellular rotating motifs favoured by Bevan Baker's direct contemporary, the Scots-based composer Kenneth Leighton - or in the characterful Spring for solo violin, which was written as a birthday present to his daughter, Sarah, Conway's wife.

Perhaps, too, it is the Romantically-fired Impressionist strains of A Song for Kate - another family trinket, written for his first granddaughter with echoes of Ravel - or even the Howells-like lushness of the two substantial choral works on the disc - the deeply evocative Songs of Courtship and ingeniously-textured Rorate Coeli Desuper - that have led many to dismiss Bevan Baker's music as less than fashionable for its time.

According to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, writing in the Linn sleeve note "Bevan Baker's creative peak came at a time when composers at the borders of tonality and beyond, writing for specialist professional performers, were perceived as the only trail-blazers, and received most of the critical attention. This is beautifully crafted, transparently honest music, of great warmth and melodic fecundity." But is that hardly surprising? Bevan Baker's early career was that of someone definitely going somewhere, and with a keen mind of his own.

Born in Middlesex in 1926 to a family of top academics, his pacifist leanings led to war service as a miner in Northumbria (one of the so-called Bevin Boys), before entering the Royal College of Music (RCM) to study composition with no less a figure than Ralph Vaughan Williams.

On leaving the RCM, he took up the prestigious post of assistant organist of Westminster Abbey, the first rung on a journey that could have easily have seen him rise swiftly up the music establishment ladder. But it wasn't for him.

The next move was to Aberdeen, where he combined the unusual post of City Carilloneur (playing the keyboard-operated bells of St Nicholas Church) with teaching duties at Robert Gordon's College. There he met and married his wife June, with whom he had five children. After a spell of teaching in Glasgow, he finally settled in Fortrose, where he died in 1994.

Bevan Baker would have been 80 this year, so Linn's tribute recording has a special significance. It is also a potent reminder that, had he lived longer, this late burst of energy could easily have produced so much more music deserving of wider performance than to the close-knit community he habitually wrote it for.

Look further into his music - currently being fully catalogued by the family - and you find musicals, choral works and even opera, which are so attractive and accessible, they would be ideal for performance by amateur and professional groups alike. That is the charm of Bevan Baker's music. Like his admirer, Maxwell Davies, he combined creative ingenuity with a common touch. That's maybe not a fashionable attribute to have these days, but it's one to be proud of.

Kenneth Walton, The Scotsman - 11 September 2006