Posterity likes to play with labels that are supposed to characterize lesser-known composers: The Catholic Bach (Zelenka), The Spanish Mozart (Arriaga) - and The English Rachmaninov, with which the English pianist and composer York Bowen (1884-1961) was labelled.

To this day, it remains a mystery as to why the English composer and pianist York Bowen has largely fallen into obscurity, and his music is unknown even to experts today even though Camille Saint-Saëns considered Bowen to be the "best English composer".

Pianist Nuron Mukumi was immediately fascinated by Bowen's 24 Preludes, published in 1950 each prelude has its own character and style, as if they had been written by another composer of the late Romantic period and yet at the same time they are unified under a distinctive personal idiom that unmistakably marks the preludes as Bowen's compositions.

Nuron Mukumi presents the 24 Preludes, op.102, on PROSPERO. Indeed, one is immediately fascinated by this music, which is anything but a Rachmaninov copy, but rather cultivates a style all of its own. And one wonders: how could these works be so easily forgotten?

Portraits of Bowen was recorded in the Teldex Studios, Berlin, with sound engineer Martin Sauer, who brilliantly realises the aesthetics of the preludes by using the silkywarm sounding Neumann microphones from the 1950s.

Additionally, no effort was spared with regard to the piano itself: in order to bring out the different characters of the individual preludes even more effectively, piano maker Daniel Brech provided his Steinway D grand piano with two differently adjusted keyboard mechanics.