Photos: Métier Records Releases DISTANT HORIZONS Album Featuring David Palmer
The album features piano works by Robert Saxton, Thomas Metcalf, and David Palmer.
Métier Records is set to release Distant Horizons, an album by pianist David Palmer featuring works by Robert Saxton, Thomas Metcalf, and Palmer himself, on 13 November 2026.
David Palmer and Thomas Metcalf met through Robert Saxton when they were both his students at Worcester College, Oxford, and have worked on projects together continuously over the past decade.
The album is described as a multi-layered collaboration exploring and visualising themes of fragmentation and the intangible through the language of music, reflecting the close collaborative friendships between the three composers. As students, Thomas Metcalf and David Palmer were inspired by Robert Saxton's music, the rigour of his process, and his respect for and commitment to the craft of composition. The album is presented as a reflection of those values while displaying the evolution and development of their own compositional voices.
Saxton's work 'Distant Horizons' was commissioned by and dedicated to David Palmer: its seven movements each address an aspect of the title, exploring distance in music, whether that be in registers, intervals, harmony, or melody, and the idea of moving towards something ungraspable.
Metcalf's two pieces, 'Arrays' and 'Involuntary,' are separated by five years and display his compositional journey of aesthetic and technical exploration. 'Arrays' considers how a varyingly pixelated text can be used to create musical structure and material, an interpretation of what 'word-setting' entails. The work was highly commended by the jury of the Royal Musical Association's Tippett Medal (2023). 'Involuntary' contemplates involuntary musical imagery (INMI), the phenomenon known colloquially as 'earworm,' aiming to translate Metcalf's experience of it as an annoying transient memory into a single work for piano.
David Palmer's own piece, 'Twine,' takes its name from the method of its construction: multiple independent lines intertwined to form a single tightly bound strand which then gradually frays.
About the Composers
After early advice and support from Benjamin Britten, Robert Saxton studied with Elisabeth Lutyens, Robin Holloway, Robert Sherlaw Johnson and Luciano Berio. He was awarded first prize at the 1975 Gaudeamus Competition in Holland and, from 1985-86 was the Fulbright Arts Award Fellow at Princeton University, USA. His output includes orchestral, chamber, and solo music, and opera, through which he has collaborated with many major artists and ensembles. He is Emeritus Professor at Oxford University.
Thomas Metcalf is a musicologist and composer specialising in music, visual art, and intermediality, and is currently the Christopher Cox Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford.
David Palmer is a London-based composer and pianist specialising in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He is a College Lecturer in Music at Keble College, Oxford, and at the Royal College of Music Junior Department.
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