Explore the vast range of titles available.

Dr Arnold Cooke, president of the Minerva Bath Rowing Club, dominated the age 65 to 69 lightweight category 2,000m race in a time of seven minutes and five seconds.

\"We came seventh but we were disappointed really because that same year we had just lost out to the Russians in Europe and won a silver medal. Six weeks later they won the gold but we hadn't got our training right.\" \"My cancer was diagnosed early last year and I was due to start another bout of chemotherapy but we delayed the start until the indoor rowing competition was over.\" \"I started training in August-September time for this year's challenge,\" he said.

This time, though, [Michael Collins] is both the soloist and the conductor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as he is for the other two concertos here, by Arnold Cooke and William Mathias. Both are well worth reviving. Though Cooke's music is rarely heard now (1906-2005) he was an interesting figure in British music, a pupil of Hindemith whose own works had more than a touch of the English pastoral. As Collins' wonderfully supple and fluent performance of 1955's First Clarinet Concerto shows, Cooke's orchestral writing was also highly accomplished.

Gradually, [Arnold Atkinson Cooke]'s music established a reputation. In 1934 his Concert Overture No 1 was presented by Sir Henry Wood at a Queen's Hall Prom enade Concert, having won a prize in a Daily Express competition; his Harp Quintet of 1932 was performed with the harpist Maria Korchinska at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert in 1934; and the Griller Quartet introduced his String Quartet No 1 in 1935. In 1940 Cooke completed his Piano Concerto before being called up into the navy the following year: the work was premiered two years later by Louis Kentner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Cooke's largest work, the three-act opera Mary Barton (1954), had a libretto based on Mrs Gaskell's novel about north of England industrial unrest, but remains unproduced (Cooke was staunchly leftwing). A suite from his score for the Royal Ballet, Jabez And The Devil (1961), was also heard at that year's Promenade Concerts, and recorded on the Lyrita label. To the modern repertoire of the recorder, Cooke made a serious, pioneering contribution, his music championed by players like Carl Dolmetsch and John Turner. Cooke largely ceased writing after 1987, though a Suite For Organ - part of a substantial body of work - was first performed by Simon Preston in 1989; and in 1996 came a setting of one of Blake's Songs Of Innocence for voice and recorder in memory of soprano Tracey Chadwell - his last music.

He succeeded Walter Leigh as director of music at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, and from 1933 to 1938 taught composition at the Royal Manchester College of Music. His Concert Overture, which had won third prize in a Daily Telegraph competition, had its first performance at a concert at the RMCM when the Hall Orchestra was conducted by RJ Forbes, the college's principal. He wrote six symphonies between 1946 and 1984. The first was conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in 1949; the last has never been performed. He wrote concertos for piano (1940), oboe (1954), clarinet (two, 1956 and 1982), violin (1958), cello (1973) and a Concerto for Orchestra (1986). His chamber works include five string quartets (1933-78), a wind quintet, clarinet quintet, two cello sonatas, oboe quartet, piano quartet, string trio and many works for recorder.

Arnold Cooke (1906-2005), though English born and bred, was one of Hindemith's distinguished students who, like his contemporaries Bernard Heiden, Franz Reizenstein, and Harald Genzmer, remained loyal to the master's idiom and aesthetic.

[ARNOLD NEWMAN Alistair Cooke] has been watching America and reporting on it to the folks back home since 1946. Most of that commentary has taken the form of weekly broadcast talks for the BBC but for 25 years Cooke was also the Manchester Guardian's chief American correspondent. For one thing, [Ronald Wells] introduces his collection in a remarkably pedantic way. He attempts to place Cooke in a tradition best represented by Alexis de Tocqueville; he also manages to drop John Locke's name and Thomas More's into a turgid analysis which should have focused instead on H.L. Mencken. By the time the reader has finished 17 pages of this stuff (making the introduction four times longer, and ten times drier, than the average Cooke essay), he is either comatose or in such a foul mood that even the octagenarian's urban prose can't salvage the day. Wells misses the point about Cooke almost completely. He is not a political observer in Tocqueville's league. To prove the point, here is Cooke talking to Wells last February as work on this book was reaching its final stages:

Two recordings featuring clarinetist Thea King are reviewed: (1) Somervell's \"Clarinet Quintet in G\" and Jacob's \"Clarinet Quintet in G\" also featuring the Aeolian String Quartet (Helios); and (2) Howells' \"Rhapsodic Quintet,\" op. 31 (1917), Cooke's \"Quintet\" (1962), Maconchy's \"Quintet\" (1963), Frankel's \"Quintet\" (1956), and Holbrooke's \"Eilean Shonah\" also featuring the Britten String Quartet (Helios).