Huw Watkins’ song cycle Echo, composed for soprano Ruby Hughes and premiered in 2017 at Carnegie Hall, is at the center of this artfully crafted recital. Setting texts by five different poets, the cycle is a work centered on melancholy – on transience, remembrance, and in the final song a numbed cry of inconceivable loss. As such it permeates the entire program, adding a new and unexpected depth to that which precedes as well as follows. Another strand of the recital is the idea of how composers across the ages have addressed and echoed one another lovingly in their music – often in the most nuanced and unconscious way. Bach’s solo keyboard works capture something of a sense of timelessness, or more accurately, inspire an emotional connection that transcends time. A similar affinity seems to inform Britten’s folksong arrangements and his realizations of Bach’s Geistliche Lieder as well as the Purcell realizations by Thomas Adès and Tippett. A different kind of echo is created by the inclusion of Britten’s version of Dafydd y Garreg Wen(David of the White Rock) – a nod to the performers’ shared Welsh heritage. Closing the disc, three songs by contemporary British composers admired by both Watkins and Hughes also resonate with the previous works, bringing the program full circle.

REVIEW:

Here, in a recital that includes two world premieres, Hughes and longtime collaborator Huw Watkins combine contemporary works with works from centuries past. Somber themes connect them: the transience of life. Loss. Grief.

Watkins’s five Echo songs are exceptionally beautiful. Listen to the falling cascades in his setting of Emily Dickinson’s “For Each Ecstatic Instant.” Admire how vocally responsive Hughes is in the Purcell, how fragile and precious she sounds in Errollyn Wallen’s “Peace on Earth,” and how much she can communicate with barely a whisper of sound. Marvelous.

-- Stereophile

Byrd’s first song collection was published in 1588. In the following year he writes that he had ‘bene encouraged thereby, to take further paines therein, and to make the pertaker thereof, because I would shew my selfe gratefull to thee for thy loue, and desirous to delight thee with varietie, whereof (in my opinion) no Science is more plentifully adorned then Musicke.’ This 1589 collection, therefore, offers songs of 3, 4, 5 and 6 parts, ‘to serue for all companies and voyces: whereof some are easie and plaine to sing, [while] other more hard and dificult.’ Byrd clearly sought to be as inclusive as possible for all musicians, amateur and professional. With the 1589 collection, Byrd’s complete early song collections are now committed to recording. Together they provide a variety themes and textures, as well as vocal and instrumental combinations, demonstrating the richness of Elizabethan courtly music.

Before a phrase from the Gran vals by Francisco Tárrega unexpectedly shot to international fame as the Nokia ringtone, his most celebrated pieces included the Capricho árabe, composed in 1892. The piece is inspired by the mixture of Muslim Castilian and Christian cultures which had always been a feature of the Valencia region where Tárrega grew up.

Tárrega’s friend and near-contemporary Isaac Albéniz was a virtuoso pianist who also played the guitar. Even though he evoked the guitar brilliantly on the piano, he never composed any music for the instrument. ‘Malagueña’ was first published in the collection España. Published in 1892 as ‘Prélude’, the piece widely known as ‘Asturias’ is also imbued with the spirit of southern Spain.

Federico Mompou’s Suite compostelana was commissioned by Andrés Segovia and was published in 1964, the same year as Segovia’s first recording of the piece.

The Italian guitarist and composer Carlo Domeniconi has drawn on several national traditions for his works, but has a particular interest in Turkish music which he has studied in depth. The Variationen über ein anatolisches Volkslied (Variations on an Anatolian Folksong) were composed in 1982 and are based on the song (türkü) ‘Uzun ince bir yoldayim’. Koyunbaba is a four-movement suite for guitar which started as an improvisation, and was then notated soon afterwards. The composer describes the score as ‘no more than a sketch’ and insists that players improvise in their performance – which Krzysztof Meisinger does to great effect with his additional ‘Invocazione’ at the start of the work.

REVIEW:

It’s a pity Mompou didn’t write more for the guitar. His only work for that instrument, the Suite compostelana, is a minor masterpiece, profound in its simplicity. It takes a player of Meisinger’s stature to pull off a successful performance, and here the Preludio, Cuna and Canción are especially well rendered.

-- Gramophone

For his second album for Chandos, the flute virtuoso Adam Walker explores the music of British composers with pianist Huw Watkins. Vaughan Williams’s Suite de ballet was commissioned by the French flute virtuoso Louis Fleury (who had given the première of Debussy’s Syrinx). The work uses eighteenth-century French dance forms, a common practice in ‘neo-classical’ composition. Bax’s Four Pieces rescue music from an abandoned ballet originally conceived for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Sir Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina was originally written for treble recorder; James Galway’s championship of the piece made it a staple of the flute repertoire. Howard Fergusson’s Three Sketches were composed intermittently over a period of twenty years. The theme of the third piece is a Hindu melody, ‘Koyalinya bole ambuvan’ (Cuckoos sing in the mango tree). Sonatas by York Bowen and William Alwyn complete this varied and engaging program.

REVIEW:

Seventy-seven minutes of British music for flute and piano might at first glance seem like 40 minutes too much. But that ’s without taking on board the nimble and dazzling skills of flautist Adam Walker, or the individual strengths of the works presented...a new pleasure is never far away in this most accomplished recital, full of the sounds of spring.

-- BBC Music Magazine

If Chopin ‘invented’ the Mazurka, then surely by the same token Grieg ‘invented’ the Lyric Piece. Over his lifetime he published ten volumes of Lyric Pieces, containing 66 individual works.

Born in Bergen, Grieg studied in Leipzig and became established as Norway’s leading composer, successfully synthesizing Norwegian folk music with the forms and conventions of the German tradition. While he was internationally acclaimed for his Piano Concerto and the incidental music to Peer Gynt, the vast majority of his output lies not in large-scale works, but in smaller, more intimate forms, especially songs and, of course, his Lyric Pieces.

Peter Donohoe writes: ‘as a teenager I expanded my knowledge of the music of Grieg to include many solo piano pieces as well as the better-known orchestral works. I was beguiled by his style, and the reason remains somewhat intangible. Although one is able to identify the originality of Grieg as a composer – the Norwegian folk element in his music, his natural gift for memorable melodic lines, his occasional diversions into unique and extraordinarily forward-looking harmonies, and, to some degree, his emotional naïveté – there is a unique, unidentifiable kernel in his output that defies analysis, as is true of the work of all the great composers... All these works are pristine examples of his diverse and original style – Norwegian with a Germanic flavour – and it has been a huge and satisfying pleasure to return to them to create this and future recordings.’

REVIEW:

Donohoe, with a devotion to Grieg’s music dating back to his early years, clearly has the measure of this repertoire. He gets inside the gentler pieces, such as ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Summer Evening’, with beautifully poised playing. Grieg in his more overtly national mood, as in the famous and virtuoso ‘Halling’, is presented with infectious enjoyment and the simpler pieces are never patronized.

-- BBC Music Magazine

Following their critically acclaimed ‘Psalms’ album, St John’s College, Cambridge and Andrew Nethsingha present a selection of Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis recordings from January and July 2022. Much of the third volume in their series of Evening Canticles focuses on music in a twenty-year period, from 1945 to 1965. Philip Moore’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis were commissioned especially for St John’s College, Cambridge.

REVIEWS:

It’s sad that Nethsingha’s departure means that the next volume will be the last. I can’t think of a greater or more apt epitaph to the music director’s time at St John’s.

-- Gramophone (Editor's Choice, May 2023)

These contrasting works, embracing solo writing and full-bodied, lavish textures, give the choir the chance to display their warm sound and versatility. They do, wholeheartedly.

-- The Guardian (UK)

This is the fourth volume in our The Library EP series. The idea behind it is to explore, maintain and grow our library of close-harmony repertoire. “Close-harmony” is arguably the part of our work for which we are best known, and our library of thousands of pop, jazz and folksong arrangements is one we’re always determined to nurture. The track-listing for each volume in the series is designed to celebrate old favorites alongside brand new arrangements created especially for these recordings, which we hope will become the ‘old favorites’ of the future. The King’s Singers were founded on 1 May 1968 by six choral scholars who had recently graduated from King’s College Cambridge. Their vocal line-up was (by chance) two countertenors, a tenor, two baritones and a bass, and the group has never wavered from this formation since.

Since 2004, Andreas Haefliger has been presenting Perspectives, a series of recital programs, in concert and on recordings. Each program focusses on one or two Beethoven sonatas, juxtaposed with works by other composers which in some way interact with Beethoven’s music and with each other. Now, for his latest release on BIS, Haefliger has instead opted for an all-Beethoven recital, choosing to present the composer’s three sonatas Op. 31 as a group. In his introduction to the disc, Haefliger describes the set as occupying ‘a very special place in the Beethoven sonata cycle: It preserves a link to the past but gives us also a vision of the works to come, exploring humour and tenderness, nature and the psychology of the human mind.’ The recording took place in the Salle de Musique in La Chaux-de-Fonds, celebrated for its superb acoustics, on a Bechstein concert grand which Haefliger describes as ‘a piano which, while a modern instrument, retains a nostalgic quality in its sound world and was a constant source of inspiration during the sessions.’

REVIEWS:

This is a superb release on all counts, and anyone who cares about these sonatas ought to give it a listen. In addition to Beethoven and Haefliger, the third star of this SACD is the C. Bechstein Concert Grand D 282 that the pianist plays, in a recital hall in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

-- Fanfare

The performances are crisp and meticulous. Everything is worked out precisely, and one can feel the artist’s serious purpose. There is little humor or relaxation; perfection is the goal, and Haefliger gets close. There is little to criticize. These are really very fine performances, and the Bechstein piano with its relatively light bass serves the music well.

-- American Record Guide

Paul Wranitzky moved to Vienna from his native Moravia at the age of 20, mixing with the likes of Haydn and Mozart. As the most important symphonist in Vienna in the late 1790s, his style influenced the early symphonies of Beethoven. The Symphony in D major ‘La Chasse’ reflects the popularity of hunting music, and is heard here for the first time in its expanded version. The overtures to Mitgefühl and Die gute Mutter represent Wranitzky’s skill as a composer for the theatre, as does the masterfully scored Symphony in C major in which the composer repurposes some incidental and ballet music.

Nikolay Tcherepnin, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg, achieved fame as a conductor, directing the premiere of his ballet Le Pavillon d’Armide as the opening to Diaghilev’s first Ballets Russes season in 1911 which also marked the Paris debut of Nijinsky. A work of great importance in the history of modern ballet, with choreography by Fokin, this enchanting score brings to life a Gobelin tapestry in a mysterious and haunted pavilion in the grounds of a French chateau. Cocteau described its effect as ‘better than a poem by Heine, than a story of Poe, than any dream, this is nostalgia for things partly seen, insubstantial and insistent.’ This recording was first released in 1995 on our Marco Polo label, and being the only complete recording of this stunning work currently available. This recording was acclaimed on its initial release, with Classic CD concluding that ‘excellent performances from the Moscow Symphony Orchestra under Henry Shek and sympathetic engineering make this worth seeking out’, and Fanfare stating that ‘the performance is thoroughly convincing and ably recorded... an enjoyable discovery.’

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)

When we think of Ludwig van Beethoven images of a stormy and passionate but tortured genius are brought to mind, alongside the transformative effect of his work on musical history. All of these things are true, but no artist lives in a vacuum, and even music that opens a portal onto ‘the infinite realm of the spirit’ has its wider context. Illustrated with music from each period, this enlightening life history by esteemed musicologist Davinia Caddy tells us about Beethoven’s place in society from his earlier career as a fine pianist, his life on the edge of the Napoleonic war, his professional triumphs and many romantic misfortunes, and that famous defiance of deafness and declaration that he would ‘seize Fate by the throat’. The musical excerpts include the ‘Pathétique’ and ‘Moonlight’ Sonatas, ‘Diabelli’ Variations, Symphonies Nos. 2, 3, 6 and 9, ‘Emperor’ Concerto, Missa solemnis and Fidelio, among many others.

Featuring performances by...

City of London Choir | Béla Drahos | Kenneth Schermerhorn | Kodály Quartet | Jay Baylon | Inga Nielsen | Kölner Kammerorchester | Nina Tichman | Capella Istropolitana | Maria Kliegel | Michael Halász | Sergio Gallo | Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra | Westminster Boys' Choir | Helmut Müller-Brühl | Hilary Davan Wetton | James Taylor | Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia | Nashville Symphony Orchestra | Stefan Vladar | Edmund Battersby | Lori Phillips | Stuttgart Piano Trio | Jeno Jandó | Royal Philharmonic Orchestra