These premiere recordings of viola concertos written especially for Brett Deubner are by two leading American composers whose appealing styles are full of engaging melodies and vital rhythms. Amanda Harberg's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra meditates upon soaring flight and the fragility of life, concluding with joyful energy and syncopation. Her Elegy commemorates a beloved music teacher. Inspired by tales from around the world, Max Wolpert's work draws on ancient traditions of music and storytelling. His Viola Concerto No. 1 ''Giants'' gazes at the lost magic of a distant past, calling up singing harps, dancing storm clouds, and a fiendishly ticking clock inexorably counting down to the end of the world.

Songs of Solitude was conceived by the violist Hiyoli Togawa at a time when a virus was forcing people across the world into isolation and she herself needed to find a new rhythm of life as concert after concert was being cancelled. As she relates in the booklet to the disc, playing Bach – music that combines powerful emotions with a crystal-clear structure – became part of her daily routine, along with walks along the empty streets of Berlin. During these, the importance of remaining creative became even clearer to her, along with the idea to offer people the opportunity through music to reflect upon the difficulties of living through a pandemic. Having recently collaborated with the composer Kalevi Aho, she came upon the idea of asking him and a number of other composers to write for her – pieces that would ‘reflect life and work in the time of the coronavirus and that distil isolation in music’. The result is Songs of Solitude – works for solo viola commissioned from 11 different composers and interwoven with sarabandes from Bach’s cello suites. The individual pieces range from the meditative (Toshio Hosokawa reminiscing in his version of the traditional Sakura) to the defiant (Johanna Doderer’s Shadows). Some of them even provided Hiyoli with musical company – Aho’s Am Horizont requires her to play two parts on the viola while singing a third, and the piece by John Powell is written for nine voices, recorded in multitrack. The album was recorded in Berlin during three periods, June to October 2020, as the various pieces arrived and the restrictions in place at the time permitted.

The works on this album were written between 1935 and 2019 by four Hungarian composers: Béla Bartók, who was the teacher of Sándor Veress, who taught György Ligeti, who in turn was an early but formative influence on Péter Eötvös. Their compositions all share the idea of a dialogue between cultured and popular elements, between a Western music tradition and folk music, particularly of Eastern Europe. This idea was formulated in the early 20th century by Bartók himself, who considered the use of folk elements in a piece of art music not only as a tool to revitalize the Classical tradition but also as a mean to unite different cultures. In the works recorded here, the dialogue is manifested in various ways, for instance through references to Baroque idioms and forms as well as folk styles in the solo sonatas by Bartók and Ligeti. In the case of Adventures of the Dominant Seventh Chord by Péter Eötvös it is the dominant seventh chord that stands as a symbol of Western tonality. Recurring frequently, the chord never reaches the expected resolution, however – instead it is confronted with non-tonal materials inspired by the folk music of Eastern Europe.

Based in Germany, the violinist Nurit Stark was born in Israel into a family which hails from Romania. Peter Eötvös’s work – which was written for her – therefore provides the perfect ending to this very personal project, dealing with the ability of music to cross cultural, geographical and ideological borders.

With his Op. 44 quintet from 1842, Robert Schumann transformed the constellation of piano and string quartet from one that just served as a showcase for the pianist into a true chamber ensemble. Following his example, Brahms and Dvorák produced their own masterly quintets, and during the 20th century composers as diverse as Elgar, Fauré and Shostakovich added to the short list of piano quintets that get regular performances. On the rather longer list of rarely heard quintets we find those recorded here, by pianist Bengt Forsberg and a quartet of some of Sweden's finest string players. Both works were composed during the 1910s, and straddle in different ways the divide between post-romanticism and modernism. Of French descent, the Russian composer Georgy Catoire studied the piano in Moscow as well as Berlin and it is primarily his piano music that is heard today. With its original use of harmony and inventive rhythmic structure, the quintet is nevertheless one of the most seductive works in Catoire’s output. Although better known than Catoire, Polish-born Ignaz Friedman is famous not for his compositions but as one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, admired by Rachmaninov as well as Horowitz. Written in 1918, his Quintet in C minor is tuneful, but also dramatic, sombre and melancholy at turns. This may be a reflection of the ongoing war, but it has also been suggested that it was inspired by the death of Friedman’s father, an itinerant Jewish musician, and that the theme of the third movement, derived from Polish folk music, may be a tribute to him.

Himself a viola player, Adrian Jones constructed his six-part concerto Nybyggnan, a folk music saxophone concerto in chamber music format, using a set of newly written tunes in a folk idiom imbued with elements from jazz, heavy rock and classical music. Written for chamber forces it also forges a bridge between the folk and chamber music scenes. Nybyggnan was composed for Daniel Reid, a saxophonist and something of a pioneer in Swedish folk music. Also heard are Mr. Reid’s own Rings on Water as well as Adrian Jones arrangement of the traditional Tingsmarschen (‘The District Court March’).

Despite her youth, Ellen Nisbeth has received acclaim both in her native Sweden and abroad and is one of the Rising Stars selected by the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) for the 2017/2018 season. A former student of London's Royal College of Music, she hails from a family of Scottish origin and feels a particular affinity for the landscapes of Scotland, and for the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. For her first recital disc Ellen Nisbeth has devised an all-British programme which includes her own transcriptions of selected songs from Songs of Travel – Ralph Vaughan Williams's settings of poems by Stevenson. The songs intersperse the remainder of the programme, and one of them – Let Beauty Awake – has also lent its title to the entire disc. Together with the eminent pianst and chamber musician Bengt Forsberg, Nisbeth goes on to perform the impassioned Viola Sonata composed in 1919 by Rebecca Clarke – a well-known piece among viola-players, but deserving of a wider audience. The centrepiece of the disc is Benjamin Britten’s Third Suite for Cello, transcribed for viola by Ellen Nisbeth herself – composed for Mstislav Rostropovich, the suite is based on Russian themes which Britten only presents in full towards the end of the substantial work. The same method is used in Lachrymae, here in the original version for viola and piano, where John Dowland’s song If my complaints could passions move is presented in full at the very end of the piece.