The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904-70) was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a valued professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the nearby Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in its own debut recording, that has made the first album of Bricht’s music. The recording reveals another major Viennese voice and points to yet another potentially important career cut off in the bud by the Nazis. Bricht was reportedly Franz Schmidt’s favorite student, and the late-Romantic styles of the two men are indeed very closely aligned in their mix of Baroque counterpoint, Classical form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony: Bricht’s Symphony in A minor might almost be Schmidt’s No. 5.

The orchestral music of the English composer David Hackbridge Johnson (b. 1963) is one of the most important discoveries to have been made by Toccata Classics. This second volume brings two mighty symphonies: the dark and tragic No. 10 (2013), cast in a single monumental span, and the three-movement No. 13 (2017), a fierce and fiery affirmation of life. They are complemented here by an orchestral ‘motet’ which passes plainchant in kaleidoscopic review. Writing in Gramophone, Guy Rickards said of Hackbridge Johnson’s Ninth Symphony: “what is so astonishing is not his ambition in attempting such large, big-boned structures… but that he possesses the compositional technique to achieve them so completely… This is a profound, complex, and visionary utterance.” Paul Mann, who here leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is a regular guest conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and the Far East. He enjoyed a famous collaboration with the legendary rock group Deep Purple and was a close friend of its keyboardist Jon Lord. He first came to international attention as first prizewinner in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, and as a result was appointed assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. This is his twelfth project with Toccata Classics.

The music of London-born William Wordsworth (1908–88) – a great-great-grandson of the poet’s brother Christopher – lies downstream from that of Vaughan Williams and Sibelius; like that of his contemporary Edmund Rubbra, Wordsworth’s music unfolds spontaneously, as a natural process, with a sense of grandeur perhaps enhanced by his move to the Scottish Highlands in 1961. Three of the four works recorded here display the sober dignity of the instinctive symphonist; the Variations on a Scottish Theme reveal a sly sense of humor behind the serious countenance. John Gibbons has conducted most of the major British orchestras. He has been Principal Conductor of Worthing Symphony Orchestra- the professional orchestra of West Sussex- with which he has given many world premieres of neglected works. He studied music at Queens’ College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, winning numerous awards as conductor, pianist and accompanist. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, vice chairman of the British Music Society, and choral director at Clifton Cathedral. His own music has been performed in various abbeys and cathedrals as well as on the South Bank, London.

The Toccata Classics survey of the music of the Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000) continues with this fifth album of his orchestral music. Earlier releases have presented the lighter side of his music, with its quasi-Baroque textures and buoyant good humor, but this one shows Farkas working on a larger scale and in generally darker mood. Here he uses the full resources of the symphony orchestra in a number of powerful and dramatic works, including two movements from a symphony that he later withdrew and an orchestration of Liszt’s Funerailles. A lighter bonne bouche-the Dances from the Matra, rather like Kodaly’s Dances from Galanta- rounds things off. Gabor Farkas (no relation to the composer) graduated from the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest in 2005, finishing his doctoral studies there in 2014 at his alma mater under the mentorship of Zoltan Kocsis. In March 2012 he won the Franz Liszt Award ( the highest Hungarian state award for artists).

Throughout his long career Liszt’s songs – perhaps the most neglected part of his enormous output – took a radical approach to form: he eschewed convention in his search for a sincere musical response to each text. His free-spirited creativity meant that a single song would often call on a range of stylistic devices, among them bel canto vocal lines, unaccompanied recitative, orchestrally conceived piano textures and audacious harmonic procedures. This first recording of his songs by a bass voice brings out both the power and poetry of Liszt’s remarkable imagination. The American bass Jared Schwartz was born in Berne, Indiana, where he began piano lessons at the age of three, violin at seven and French horn at ten. He began a double major in pre-med and music at Bethel College, Indiana, then studied piano with Alexander Toradze and voice with Victoria Garrett, earning a graduate degree from the Eastman School of Music. For Toccata Classics he has already recorded albums of songs by Faure and Flegier.

REVIEW:

Schwartz's forte singing is most impressive, and his voice remains lustrously smooth and elegant in all registers. His vocal coloring, use of contrasting dynamics, and feeling for the text combine to make his readings thoroughly engaging. When he sings with gentleness and lyricism he weaves a magic spell, as in ‘Des Tages Laute Stimmen Schweigen’, which ends sublimely as he delivers the final line of the text (“As night embraces you with gentle silence”). It is stunning.

Mary Dibbern, who collaborated with him in his Flegier album and in preparing his Fauré album, does a superb job with Liszt’s often challenging accompaniment. She also wrote the comprehensive and informative notes for the release.

I learned to enjoy Liszt through his songs, especially his early high-flying Schiller and Petrarch settings, sung by tenors. I am now enjoying a voice that plumbs the sonic and textual depths of the songs.

-- American Record Guide

The Scottish musician Helen Hopekirk (1856-1945) was regarded as one of the major concert pianists of her generation. She also made a lasting contribution as a piano teacher in Boston, Mass., after her emigration in 1897. As a composer, she forged an intriguing path by turning to the music of her native country as the wellspring of her creativity. The early pieces can sound like Brahms in the Highlands, and her later works marry Debussyan Impressionism with Hebridean folk-music, to evocative, touching and exhilarating effect. This is the first album dedicated to Hopekirk's music. Gary Steigerwalt, who is writing a biography of Helen Hopekirk, recently retired as a professor on the music faculty of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusets, where he taught for 35 years. He gave the first performance in over a century of her Concertstuck with the Mount Holyoke College Symphony Orchestra in 2015.

The Bulgarian Emil Tabakov (1947) follows in the footsteps of such musicians as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, being active as both composer and conductor. Like Mahler, he prefers to write for large forces and now has nine symphonies and an impressive series of concertos to his name. Again like Mahler, Tabakov's symphonies explore the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. Both the First Symphony and the Viola Concerto use small motifs to build up compelling symphonic structures, generating expansive, sometimes bleak, post-Shostakovichian landscapes that can explode with violence and energy. The composer and conductor Emil Tabakov began to compose at 14. From 1975 to 1979 he conducted the Ruse Symphony Orchestra. He then directed the Sofia Soloists Chamber Ensemble, the Sofia Philharmonic and several others. Alexander Zemtsvo has been performing as a solo violist since the age of 15 and at 23, was appointed Principal Viola of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2012 he left the LPO to dedicate himself to a career as soloist, conductor and chamber musician. In 2014 he made his conducting debut with the International New Symphony Orchestra Lviv, and the next year was apointed artistic director and principal conductor.

Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) was one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth century. His fundamental style is a Stravinskian Neo-Classicism, animated by the dance-rhythms of his native Poland. It is also energized by a masterly command of counterpoint. This second installment in this first-ever survey of his piano music demonstrates its stylistic range, from Neo-Baroque via Polish folk-music and the orient to the Blues. Early in his career, Tansman settled in Paris, where he was helped by Ravel, but he was also another of the Jewish composers forced to flee Europe by the Nazis. A native of Texas, Danny Zelibor studied at Texas Christian University, where he studied with Tamas Ungar winning numerous accolades and scholarships. A top prize-winner in the 2014 Los Angeles International Liszt Competition, he is also a graduate of the University of North Texas, where he studied with Joseph Banowetz. He is currently pursuing a degree in Collaborative Piano.