SOMM Recordings is pleased to release their second recording with the Chamber Ensemble of London, a virtuoso group of hand-picked string players directed by violinist Peter Fisher, whom The Times counts amongst "a handful of the world's finest musicians." Following the ensemble's 2022 SOMM release, Eclogue - British Chamber Music, which Gramophone praised for it's "unfailingly sympathetic music-making throughout," this new release is Quiet Summer Evening - British Concertante Music, drawing on the rich tradition of light classical music. The programme opens with Rhapsody for Clarinet & Strings by Geoffrey Bush. He was initially taught by John Ireland and, on his advice, studied composition and classics at Balliol College, Oxford, emerging with degrees in both subjects in 1946. Bush's hauntingly beautiful rhapsody features the sought-after clarinettist Peter Cigleris, whose growing discography includes three previous releases with SOMM. He is also the soloist in 5 Pieces for Clarinet & String Orchestra by Clive Jenkins, CEOL's associate composer. Jenkins was born in Plymouth, and he shows his roots in many of his compositions-including these pieces, each of which has a name connected with Plymouth. Another work by Jenkins included here is Fantasy for Horn & Strings, featuring Alexei Watkins, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, where he was awarded the Dennis Brain Prize. Watkins is also featured in Orion (Serenade for Horn & Strings) by prize-winning conductor-composer Andy Meyers, as well as Lullaby, an expressive and programmatic piece by composer and BBC Radio 3 producer Luke Whitlock. Bassoonist Sarah Watts is a multi-instrumentalist who has become well known worldwide as a prolific composer of colourful and inspiring music. Here, she performs her composition Everywhere Is Somewhere Else. Additionally, she is the soloist for the contemplative Sunday Afternoon by notable arranger, conductor, and composer Nigel Brooks, excerpted from the broadcast series Stars on Sunday, and also A Little Waltz by the prolific mid-twentieth-century composer, arranger, and master orchestrator Gordon Jacob. Other pieces by composers from former generations include Canto popolare, extracted from Edward Elgar's concert overture In the South; Lennox Berkeley's single-movement Andantino, which he adapted from his Festival Anthem; and one of Frederick Delius's earliest surviving compositions, Romance. The soloist for Berkeley's Andantino and Delius's Romance is cellist Michael Mace, who pursues a wide and varied musical career as performer and teacher. Peter Fisher is the violinist for Elgar's Canto popolare and the appealing Vers le Sud (Towards the South) by Terence Higgins who, notwithstanding his early promise, decided against a full-time professional musical career and-like composers Wilfrid Josephs and Alan Rawsthorne-qualified as a dentist. Fisher also plays the CD's title piece, Quiet Summer Evening, a contemplative piece by composer-pianist Don Shearman, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career in light music.

The works of the late Romantic composer Felix Woyrsch stand as eloquent defenses of the creative successor. Perhaps it is precisely this too often disparaged generation of "late-born" artists who laid the groundwork for the great masters. By absorbing earlier achievements and reshaping them to serve their own expressive aims, they laid the foundation for later greatness. The Silesian-born Woyrsch, who established himself permanently in Altona-then still independent of Hamburg-demonstrated that even diametrically opposed models could be reconciled. He succeeded in bringing together Wagner, Bruckner, and Brahms almost imperceptibly, without sacrificing his own artistic identity. On the contrary, the cycle of six symphonies, now completed with the present release, emerges as a distinctive artistic statement-made all the more impressive by the fact that Woyrsch remained genuinely receptive to the developments of modernism.