Following the announcement by Tasmin Little of her intended retirement from the concert platform, we wanted to create an album that would stand as both a tribute to, and celebration of, her outstanding career as a performer. What better way to do so than ask her to select her own, personal favorites from her recorded career? An exclusive Chandos artist since 2010, Tasmin has made a series of recordings that have proved a cornerstone of the Chandos schedules for a decade, and feature a range of composers and styles of quite breath-taking variety. The first album concentrates on concerti, and features both Walton’s and Britten’s concertos with Edward Gardner, along with the slow movement of her award-winning Elgar recording with Sir Andrew Davis. The second features works from Vivaldi though to Shostakovich via Brahms, and includes (among many other gems) her recording of Vaughan Williams’s iconic The Lark Ascending. It also celebrates Tasmin’s recital partnerships with three outstanding pianists: Piers Lane, Martin Roscoe, and John Lenehan. As she writes in her booklet note: ‘I am very happy that this final, double-album set should reflect so many aspects of me as a musician; and I remain full of gratitude for the tremendous opportunities I have been given to play and record with the greatest musicians of today. I hope you all enjoy this final release.’

Virtuoso violinist Francesca Dego joins forces with legendary conductor and period performance pioneer Sir Roger Norrington for this recording of Mozart’s 3rd and 4th violin concertos – the first time either soloist or conductor have recorded the works. The outstanding musicians of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra provide the accompaniment, with reduced numbers of strings and antiphonal violin seating to replicate the size and seating of the Salzburg court orchestra who gave the premier performances of these works. Norrington’s attention to detail and style is enthusiastically embraced by soloist and orchestra resulting in a beautifully fresh and captivating interpretation of these well-known works. Dego completes the album with the violin sonata Op.1 No.4 with her regular recital partner Francesca Leonardi.

Kellen Gray has reunited with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for a second instalment of African American Voices. Though representing differing schools of thought regarding African American classical music, the composers here are united by their roots in black history, culture and its rich musical heritage. Drawing upon jazz and spirituals – ‘I Want Jesus to Walk with Me’ serving as the source material – Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations engages with African American history, namely the Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. In this work, re-discovered in 2017, Bonds tackles the themes of strength, resistance, determination and faith. Bonds’ contemporary, the prolific composer Ulysses Kay cultivated a neoclassical voice, as his Concerto for Orchestra exemplifies, very much in line with William Grant Still and his teacher Paul Hindemith. A versatile musician, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson comes a generation later. In his Worship: A Concert Overture, we can hear a blend of Baroque counterpoint, elements of the blues, spirituals and black folk music.

REVIEW:

Margaret Bond (1913–1972) wrote her 1964 Montgomery Variations as a seven-movement theme-and-variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.” Bond’s impassioned cri de coeur bypasses the constraints of academic cd’s and don’ts as it chronicles in boldly theatrical music the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the tragic 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Bond dedicated the piece to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though sadly never heard it performed during her brief lifetime.

Ulysses Kay (1917–1995) reflects in his 1948 Concerto for Orchestra the influence of several of his mentors – including Paul Hindemith – as a thoroughly tonal work conceived in mid-20th century, in a moment in which the music of the followers of the Second Viennese School reigned supreme in the classical music worlds of both Europe and America. Kay’s classically structured, richly orchestrated, harmonically dense, and contrapuntally complex composition remains at its core a consonantly melodic, post-Romantic work.

In his 2001 Worship: A Concert Overture Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932–2004) successfully amalgamates sacred and secular music, incorporating blues in his nobly elegant treatment of Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.

-- All About The Arts (Rafael de Acha)

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Xiaogang Ye is regarded as one of China’s leading contemporary composers. He has written music in a variety of genres, including symphonic and chamber works as well as scores for the stage. Ye has also composed music for films and the two works recorded here are both examples of this. Sichuan Image consists of 29 brief and atmospheric pieces composed to accompany a filmed travelogue of the scenic province in Western China. In preparation for the work, the composer visited mountains, river, villages and ancient historical sites in Sichuan. Lending further color to the large symphony orchestra, four Chinese musicians perform on traditional instruments. The album closes with Concerto of Life, a suite in five movements for piano and orchestra with Noriko Ogawa taking on the solo part. The work is based on the score for a feature film of the same name telling the story of a piano teacher and his students. Ogawa has also appeared on a previous album of Ye’s music alongside the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor José Serebrier – a release named Editor's Choice in the Gramophone, whose reviewer described the performances as 'superb' and Ye's scores as possessing ‘lyrical elegance, searching drama and depth of color…’

Following their critically acclaimed first volume of Mozart’s violin concertos (CHAN 20234), Francesca Dego and Sir Roger Norrington complete the set, once again with outstanding support from a reduced Royal Scottish National Orchestra. This cycle not only represents the first time Sir Roger has recorded these concertos, but the present album is also his final recording project. All five concertos were written before Mozart was twenty; nevertheless, his rapid development as a composer is evident in the progression from the first to the fifth, which has an unusual Adagio section within the first movement, an extensive slow movement, and of course the extensive ‘Turkish’ episode in the final movement (probably based on Hungarian folk music). Whilst given on modern instruments with metal strings, these are performances immersed in Norrington’s lifetime of experience in period performance practice. As The Sunday Times noted of the first album: ‘Pairing the veteran Mozartian Norrington – a pioneer of historical performance practice – with the young Italian-American soloist Dego proves inspiring in what promises to be one of the freshest of recent cycles of the Mozart concertos.’

REVIEWS:

Dego’s finespun tone, exquisite timing and enchanting musical inquisitiveness, not to mention her delightfully spontaneous decorating of musical lines, combine to create an uplifting sense of the music being composed as it goes along…[Norrington] could hardly have wished for a finer recorded swansong than this Mozart series.

-- BBC Music Magazine (Julian Haylock)

This recording is characterized by excellently balanced interpretations. They are characterized by a light-hearted and fluid gesture… Francesca Dego also finds an exciting approach to Mozart… she scores here with a creative approach, tonal freshness and noblesse. The orchestra from Scotland, conducted by Roger Norrington, soars, with the violins in oppositional seating as in Mozart’s day, to intense music-making that doesn’t overpower, creating a fitting complement to the solo mood.

-- Pizzicato (Uwe Krusch)

REVIEWS:

...Torke speaks with his own voice and (more importantly) knows how to write a good tune or two. And so despite the danger of sounding like a shameless Gershwin rip-off, An American Abroad comes across more as a joyous updating of a tried and true concept, and contains at its heart a lyrical melody that Gershwin himself would have been proud to sign. The much briefer Jasper covers similar emotional ground, being a bright, breezy jeu d'esprit that effortlessly sustains its 12-minute length.

The major work, though, is Rapture, a percussion concerto that features--in each of its three movements respectively--drums and woods, mallets, and metal instruments. Percussionist Colin Currie has a field day wielding his various pieces of musical artillery, and the outer movements play an entertaining game of having the soloist set a series of complex rhythmic patterns while the orchestra then proceeds to construct a variety of tunes employing them. It's great fun, if a bit relentless, and the vaguely Balinese central movement offers a very lovely and quite necessary element of repose...this brilliantly performed and recorded selection fills an important niche in Naxos' American Classics series. Despite rather unhelpful notes by the composer, it would be churlish to deny this sunny and accessible music anything but the highest recommendation. [2/3/2003]

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

These works of Sally Beamish, composed 2003-12, highlight the inspiration she has found in her adopted homeland Scotland and its landscape and history, while also reflecting her interest in jazz and Scottish traditional music. Often collaboration closely with ‘her’ performers, the present disc’s the three concertante works are all played by the eminent soloists for whom they were written: James Crabb, Branford Marsalis and Håkan Hardenberger. Conductor Martyn Brabbins and the RSNO, an ensemble that has performed her works on several occasions, join the former two soloists.