The organist and harpsichordist John Worgan (1724–90) was one of the most highly respected musicians in the London of his day: Handel admired his playing, and Burney described him as ‘very masterly and learned’. All that survives of his harpsichord music are a ‘New Concerto’, an independent Allegro non tanto and two collections, one of six sonatas and the other of thirteen teaching pieces, but they encompass an eclectic variety of styles and a surprising range of emotions – proud, spirited, witty, impulsive, touching, vivacious – making Worgan sound something like an English Domenico Scarlatti.

The composing career of Simon Bainbridge (born in London in 1952) is spanned by the four chamber works in this album, all of them cast as single narrative spans. The First String Quartet, written when its composer was not yet twenty, blends lyricism and pointillism, rather as if it were recasting abstract poetry in sound; and the recent Second offers a kaleidoscopic tableau of color and nervous energy inspired by visual art. In his Cheltenham Fragments, as the title suggests, Bainbridge uses mosaic technique to build up textures and thematic outlines. And the long lines of the virtuosic Clarinet Quintet generate fleetfooted whirlwinds as they unfold. Linda Merrick and the Kreutzer Quartet worked closely with the composer on the preparation of these recordings.

Although Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems exist in two-piano transcriptions prepared by the composer himself, it was his Czech student August Stradal (1860–1930) who transcribed twelve of them for solo piano – versions which demand almost superhuman virtuosity. Stradal died before he could tackle the last of the symphonic poems, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe; Risto-Matti Marin has made good that lacuna with his own virtuoso transcription, and adds six of Stradal’s transcriptions of Liszt songs for good measure. The Finnish pianist, Risto-Matti Marin, began his piano lessons at the Kuopio Conservatoire as a pupil of Jouni Räty and continued with professional studies there under Jaakko Untamala. In 1998 he transferred to the Sibelius Academy to study with Erik T. Tawaststjerna, and from 2002 onwards also studied with Teppo Koivisto. He gained a Master´s degree in music in 2004. Since 2005 he has studied at the Sibelius Academy DocMus department. Winner of the first prize in the Kuopio Piano Competition in 1996 and the Helmi Vesa Piano Competition in 1999, Marin was awarded the third prize in the Weimar International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in 2003.

Grigory Krein (1879–1955), a member of an astonishing dynasty of Russian-Jewish musician-composers, was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the major composers of his day. His piano music charts a stylistic evolution from the early influence of Grieg, Reger (with whom he studied) and Debussy towards a more complex and chromatic language with harmonies that synthesize the sound-worlds of Skryabin and Szymanowski; there’s also an echo of the rhapsodic Celtic wildness of Bax. Indeed, all of these pieces are informed by a remarkable sense of energy – latent in some and given its head in others.

Joly Braga Santos (1924–88) was one of the most important composers in twentieth-century Portugal. In his early works his fondness for modal harmony, absorbed from the Portuguese masters of the Renaissance, and his busy counterpoint combine to make him sound surprisingly close to such particularly English composers as Vaughan Williams and Moeran. Although his harmonic language became more astringent with time, it retained a burly sense of humor and a powerful charge of energy, often infused with the spirit of Portuguese folk-dance.

Although the American composer David Maslanka (1943–2017) wrote in a wide range of genres, it is for his generous output of music for wind band that he is best known. Three of the works heard here are in effect symphonic poems, all three infused with that big-hearted sense of space found in the best of American music and the quiet dignity of those endless open landscapes, but also energized by a powerful sense of freewheeling drama. The fourth piece is a charming and hugely engaging presentation of the instruments of the symphonic wind ensemble, a latter-day Peter and the Wolf – likewise intended for children and similarly bubbling with good tunes. The composer himself was closely involved in the preparation for these recordings – the last major project involving his music before his death – which now stand as a testament to a man much-loved in American musical circles.

The early piano music of the Dutch composer Bernhard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer (1888–1953) suggests the art of the miniaturist painter. These ‘portraits’ of birds, flowers, landmarks and other natural phenomena have the static and studied quality of Japanese prints and owe much to French Impressionism: they sit somewhere between Debussy and Satie, and unfold with gentle, unhurried dignity. Albert Brussee offers a final bonne bouche with his own gentle tribute to Van den Sigtenhorst Meyer.

Although the Mexican composer Julian Carrillo (1875–1965) came to be remembered as a pioneer in the science of acoustics, the music he wrote in the first part of his career has a late-Romantic opulence and spaciousness that was very much of its age. Here his powerful and dignified Second Symphony, which sits somewhere between Bruckner, Wagner and Rachmaninov, is joined by two early pieces d’occasion and excerpts from his grand historical opera of 1910, Matilde, or Mexico in 1810, which marked the centenary of the Mexican War of Independence.

The 37 short pieces by Prokofiev transcribed for violin and piano brought together here ought really to come with a health warning. So distinctive are the contours, angles and extensions of the Prokofiev tune, drawn from an apparently inexhaustible hoard, that even a short exposure to the memory circuits of the mind can result in permanent occupation. This album is full of them, creating a panoramic tour around five decades of an exceptionally rich, diverse but ultimately sadly truncated life. Violinist Yuri Kalnits has participated in festivals throughout the world and has played at some of the world’s most important venues. He is a dedicated chamber musician as well as concert soloist.

Far from being a treatment of the usual Latin, the Requiem of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) sets spiritual and secular texts on death from a number of the world’s cultures, including Whitman, Villon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sutra from Zen Buddhism and the Jewish Kaddish. The work of a young man (Rosner was 28 when he wrote it), this Requiem is both monumental and wildly energetic – but it also encompasses passages of transcendent beauty. His musical language clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colors, producing a style that is instantly recognizable and immediately appealing. Some of the music was first written for an aborted operatic treatment of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, where the main character plays chess with Death; in like spirit, Rosner’s Requiem is a major statement of human defiance in the face of mortality, even if its gentle closing pages bring uneasy acceptance.

REVIEW:

Arnold Rosner’s Requiem (1973), no exaggeration intended, is one of the great works of the 20th Century. Rosner (1945-2013) was a postmodernist at a time when modernism was unshakable in academic circles. He studied at SUNY/Buffalo—a notorious hotbed: the faculty laughed at him. They were wrong. They couldn’t deal with his love of Renaissance and early music (Dufay especially), his tonality and post-tonal language. Written when he was 28, the maturity and vision is striking. Inspiration for this work was triggered by his fascination with Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. He wanted to adapt it for an opera, but Bergman refused permission. He began to write it anyway, and some of it appears in the Requiem. His sources include the New Testament, François Villon, the Kama Sutra, Whitman (When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed), Dante, the Kaddish, and the Dies Irae. All are set with sensitivity and profound musicality. The London Philharmonic is great, but Ms Hollis’s soprano is wobbly. Helpful notes by Rosner scholar Walter Simmons. Texts and translations. Don’t miss this.

-- American Record Guide (Allen Gimbel)

This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900–92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination – and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has its origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek’s treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy – and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.

The English composer-conductor Henry Cotter Nixon (1842–1907) had entirely disappeared from music history until this series – presenting all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings – revealed him to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber, Brahms and Sullivan. This third and final volume mixes music for the concert hall and the stage and adds the Coronation March for Edward VII that turned out to be Nixon’s last composition. Most of the pieces here were left incomplete, but thanks to Paul Mann’s orchestrations they now confirm Nixon’s position as one of the superior tunesmiths of Victorian England.

As composer, pianist and educationalist, the Prussian Philipp Scharwenka (1847–1917) was one of most highly respected musicians of his day, although his star faded soon after his death. His music – more conservative and classical in orientation than that of his pianist-composer brother, Xaver – sits somewhere between Chopin and Brahms, with echoes of Schubert and Schumann. This first installment of a survey of his piano music is intended to put these immediately attractive works before the public once again – for the first time in over a century. They are played here by the Portuguese pianist-composer Luís Pipa, professor of piano and chamber music at the University of Minho, near Porto, following up on his well-received Toccata Classics album of music by his compatriot José Vianna da Motta.