Toccata Classics continues its exploration of the music of Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) with this selection from his huge choral music output. It ranges in mood from the folk-like simplicity of the Missa Secunda in honorem Sanctae Margaritae and his bright carol settings via the astringency of some late a cappella pieces to the fresh and buoyant Christmas Cantata. This recording is also the first by the new London-based chamber choir Ascolta founded in 2015 by Peter Broadbent, one of Britain’s leading choral conductors, known for his consistent commitment to contemporary music.-- S

REVIEW:

Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) was a beloved professor at the Budapest Academy of Music and a composer whose music had eluded me up to now. I am glad to make his acquaintance because he wrote classy, charming fare that doesn’t have to work overtime to make its points. Several of these works are accorded their first-ever recordings by Maestro Broadbent’s Ascolta Ensembles, and we are the better for their efforts.

Farkas’s 12-minute Mass is an affectionate, straightforward take on the liturgy. (I’d love to sing it someday.) The carols and ‘Ave Maris Stella’ are the true charmers of the set. The Emmaus Cantata after St Luke is made of sterner stuff and is also worth getting to know.

-- American Record Guide

Frank Sinatra dubbed Robert Farnon ‘The Guv’nor’ in 1962 when the two men first came together in London to work on an album. This summed up Farnon’s reputation as being synonymous with the highest standards of craftsmanship across the widest spectrum of music-making, earning him four Ivor Novello awards and the Order of Canada. His fame was established with BBC wartime radio broadcasts and the ubiquitous Portrait of a Flirt. Further success came with TV themes such as the stirring Colditz March and the impressionistic beauty of such gems as À la claire fontaine. The performances on this acclaimed recording are given with ‘warmth, polish and a remarkable naturalness of idiomatic feeling’ (The Penguin Guide).

Review:

These 17 short pieces are drawn from among the elite of British style light music. Their dates are mostly scattered throughout the 1940s with outliers in the 1950s and 1970s. They were written by a Toronto-born man who was a prince among light music practitioners. He never lacked for work even when the genre began to stagger.

There are plenty of familiar moments including the Westminster chimes in the slippery-gliding polished Westminster Waltz and the unaccustomed gauntness of the Colditz March written later on for BBCTV’s successful Colditz series. Manhattan Playboy has a few Gershwin twists and twirls and streetcar references among Farnon’s usual broad bow-wave melodies. For all his faculty for commercial sheen he never lost touch with his gentle high summer pastoral side, as in Lake of the Woods, How Beautiful is Night, Pictures in the Fire, À la claire Fontaine and In a Calm. Each adds some contrast in what would otherwise have been a little unremitting. The 1946 State Occasion is a foray into Sovereign pomp and circumstance, much as Haydn Wood’s contemporary marches as well as the Empire March by Montague Phillips. Gateway to the West is among the most satisfying of his pieces and reeks of a confident sunny travelogue of the 1940s cinema ‘shorts’.

The collection launches with the well-practised exhilarations of Portrait of a Flirt. Farnon returns to the theme sometimes in comedic garb. Peanut Polka and Jumping Bean both recall the cinema sing-a-longs when a ball would bounce from word to word on screen to encourage the audience to sing and keep time.

This is good and true to style with a nice mix of moods.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

This album brings together three works for cello and piano. The first of them, Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 1, is a cornerstone of the repertoire for this medium. It was composed in 1917 and premièred by cellist Gérard Hekking and pianist Alfred Cortot.

The second, Gordon Crosse’s Wavesongs, is a modern masterpiece and written for this present recording’s cellist Alexander Baillie in 1983. The work ranks among Crosse’s most personal inspirations, as well as being an impressive composition in its own right. The third is a transcription of an early, appealing work by Maurice Ravel. Written in April 1897, and sometimes referred to as Sonate posthume, Ravel’s [First] Violin Sonata is among his earliest extant works.

This singular discographic project unites the sacred pianistic work by Franz Liszt to those by Bonifacio Maria Krug, both composers and abbots. If Franz Liszt is already known to the public, Krug (abbot in the abbey of Montecassino in 1864) is an important discovery proposed by the young and talented pianist Silvia Vaglica assisted by the Benedictine father Fabrizio Messina Cicchetti. Both Liszt and Krug joined with fervor the directions that will later be outlined by the Cecilian movement regarding the issues related to music in the liturgy, and the music proposed in this recording testifies their commitment to bringing the sacred themes out of their customary borders, contrarily to what happened in the middle of the nineteenth century in Italy, when the theatrical style also spread in liturgical compositions.

This collection of Gabriel Fauré’s mélodies is the first recording to be conceived for a bass voice. It juxtaposes some of the composer’s best-loved songs with some of his lesser-known works. This recital program draws out connections of poets and poetic themes, some of which restore the composer’s own original groupings. This is also the first recording to be based on the new Peters Edition, which eliminates countless errors in older publications. The young American bass Jared Schwartz received the 2013 ‘People’s Choice’ Award in the American Traditions Vocal Competition.

REVIEW:

There are a total of 25 songs on this disc and each of them has been recorded with care and affection for the music of this wonderful French songwriter. Schwartz’s excellent new recording on Toccata gives us pristine sound; it is a recording that should be in the collection of everyone who loves French song.

-- Fanfare

David Temple conducts the Crouch End Festival Chorus and London Mozart Players with a formidable group of soloists on this album celebrating the works of the siblings Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel (nee Mendelssohn). Fanny’s cantata Hiob, based on the Book of Job, is the second of three cantatas composed between February and November 1831, although it remained unpublished until 1992. Later in her short career, encouraged by her brother and her friend Robert von Keudell, Fanny did begin to publish her works. The Gartenlieder, Op. 3 for unaccompanied choir were composed in 1846, and inspired by the gardens and summerhouse at the family’s Leipzigerstraße residence, in Berlin, where she held her choir rehearsals. Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht is a secular cantata, a setting of the poem by Goethe, originally performed in 1831. Mendelssohn revised the work extensively in 1843, and it is this later version that is performed here. His Christmas cantata Vom Himmel hoch, based on a Lutheran chorale, was completed in 1831.

Allmanna Sangen began its existence as a male-voice choir affiliated to the University of Uppsala in 1830, but was reformed as a mixed choir in 1963. Ever since, the choir has expanded its repertoire and stylistic range, often surprising audiences with its unconventional approach to familiar works and with collaborations across genres. On Femina moderna, the choir and its conductor Maria Goundorina present a programme with recent works by Swedish and international women composers: no less than ten of the thirteen works included were written in 2000 or later. Most recently composed is Anna Karin Klockar’s Speeches which in 2016 won first prize in a competition for women composers arranged by the choir. The competition, the Allmanna Sangen & Anders Wall Composition Award, was first held in 2014 in celebration of the choir’s 50th anniversary as a mixed choir. The winning work on that occasion, Sandskrift by Maria Lofberg, is also included on this disc, along with pieces by composers such as Lera Auerbach and Libby Larsen, Cecilia McDowall, Galina Grigorjeva, and Nana Forte.

On a new double-album of solo organ works by Leo Sowerby (1895–1968) and another prominent Chicago composer, Frank Ferko (b. 1950), versatile keyboard virtuoso David Schrader plays four of Sowerby’s “greatest hits” for organ, including the monumental Symphony in G major, plus the rarely heard “March” from Suite for Organ, on the 68-rank Wicks Opus 2918 at St. Ita’s Catholic Church, Chicago. The world-premiere recording of Sowerby’s late Two Sketches is available on the album’s digital editions. Schrader plays a diverse program of eight Ferko compositions, all world-premiere recordings, including several based on music by 12th-century composer and Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Schrader performs on three noteworthy manual-action organs at the House of Hope Presbyterian Church, St. Paul, Minnesota, including the instrument for which one of the works was specially written.

Recorded during the 2020 lockdown, Richard Boothby explores the solo and duo Viol music of Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger. The lyra viol and its music is one of the last undiscovered gems of music, and Alfonso Ferrabosco is its greatest exponent. It is in the category of ‘hard to define, easy to recognise’: it is at once an instrument, a style of playing and a genre of instrumental music, and, while not exclusively English, by far the largest part of its repertory is from these isles. A composer favoured by Queen Elizabeth I and James I, Ferrabosco also wrote music for stage works by playwright Ben Jonson, some of which would by heard in performance at Shakespeare's Globe. Added to this he was a renowned player of the viol – a visiting court musician declaring that there was no player of ‘La lyre’ in Italy: “who was fit to be compared with the great ‘Farabosco d’Angleterre'."

Richard Boothby has been playing the viol ever since David Fallows handed him a tenor viol in 1977. After further study with Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Salzburg, he helped to found The Purcell Quartet in 1984 and Fretwork in 1985. He has endeavoured to enrich the viol-consort repertory with new music from today’s finest composers, from Elvis Costello to George Benjamin, from Alexander Goehr to Nico Muhly. With the Purcell Quartet, he recorded nearly 50 albums for Hyperion and Chandos; and with Fretwork over 40 albums for Virgin Classics, Harmonia Mundi USA and most recently, Signum Classics.

REVIEW:

These are intimate performances of intimate music, yes; but the writing and the playing are such that chordal and contrapuntal textures, beefy bass lines and flute-like cantabiles just about do the job of an entire consort of viols.

-- BBC Music Magazine

This programme presents the first integral recording of the complete published and manuscript duets by the Catalan master Jose Ferrer, last of the charismatic Romantic guitarist-composers, whose light-touched skill at creating music of elegance, charm and nuanced shading made him a darling of cultured society. Taking us from languorous dances to the glamor of Italian grand opera, this is mesmerizingly beautiful music redolent of a lost era of soirees and gallantry, Iberian salons and forgotten Parisian boudoirs. Norwegian guitarist, theorbo-player and mandolinist Jorgen Skogmo studied with Robert Brightmore and David Miller at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As solo guitarist he has won several prestigious international prizes including Admira Young Guitarist of the Year and the 2002 Ivor Mairants Guitar Award. Jens Franke trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and King’s College, London. An artist of eclectic taste, he has worked with English National Ballet, and was formerly orchestral guitarist of the European Union Youth Orchestra, in which capacity he appeared in concert with Bernard Haitink, playing well-known venues all over the world.