Graham Waterhouse was born in London in 1962 into a London family of musicians. He studied at Highgate School in London, at Cambridge University and at the music colleges in Essen and Cologne, composition with Hugh Wood and Robin Holloway and cello with Maria Kliegel, Young-Chang Cho and Eldar Issakadze; he received particular stimulus from Sergiu Celibidache and Siegfried Palm. Since 1992 he has lived in Munich as a freelance composer and cellist. He has performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra London and the Ensemble Modern and played the solo part of his own Cello Concerto Op. 27 in Weimar, Baden-Baden, Mexico City and Gorky. His output consists mainly of chamber music and instrumental concertos, including commissions for the Münchener Biennale, the International Double Reed Society and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival.
Chamber music, as Hans Krieger writes in the booklet, lies at the centre of Waterhouse’s work: the intimacy of small combinations and the dialogue of a few instruments suit his musicianly temperament, and not a few pieces are commissions, tailor-made for particular colleagues. Their expression is most direct when Waterhouse writes for his own instrument. The Three Pieces Op. 28 for solo cello of 1996, dedicated to Siegfried Palm, reach a meditative absorption in their rhapsodic gestures. Vezza, Limerick for cello and speaking voice provides a contrast of intricate humour; “Vezza”, as the English booklet text explains, is the German pronunciation of “weather”. Waterhouse plays both works himself.
In Contraventings Op. 46a the clarinet, free of strict metre and tonal ties, explores boundless spaces of sound; in the three-movement bow n’ blow duo it enters into a dialogue with the cello of meltingly rich colours, contrapuntal interweavings and mirrorings. Le Charmeur de Serpents Op. 39, written for Agnès Marc, has the player alternate between alto and sopranino recorder and at times even play both polyphonically at once, a snake charming in a thoroughly unconventional sense. The Prelude Op. 32 of 1992 unfolds a toccata-like momentum with complicated chord layerings and suspensions, and for all the sharpness of its dissonances its explosive energy reveals a line of tradition reaching back via Liszt to Bach.
The most refined in craftsmanship, Krieger writes, are the Gestural Variations Op. 43a, character variations in which the gesture changes from the abrupt to the grave, from the breathless to the pensive, from the menacing to the exuberantly ebullient, while the motivic material undergoes ever new transformations in polyphonic interplay. Waterhouse wrote them for the bassoonist Henry Skolnick, the oboist John Dee and the pianist Jose Lopez, who premiered them in Chicago in 1997, and in 1998 reworked them for clarinet, cello and piano. The Toccatina Precipitando, which sets cross-rhythms over an ostinato bass in 7/8, was composed for the same combination.
Waterhouse is joined by Markus Schön (clarinet), who regularly works as principal clarinet with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Michael Wendeberg (piano), a member of the Ensemble InterContemporain since September 2000, and Agnès Marc (recorders), who teaches recorder and chamber music at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The recordings were made in July 2000 and February 2001 in the Erholungshaus of Bayer AG in Leverkusen.