This two-CD set offers all the works that Prokofiev wrote for the violin as solo instrument. One of the most sought-after and acclaimed virtuoso violinists today, James Ehnes is accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda and by the pianist Andrew Armstrong, with whom he has previously made a number of highly acclaimed Chandos recordings. The distinguished Amy Schwartz Moretti joins him in the Sonata for Two Violins.- Chandos

Reviews

Orchestral Choice "... James Ehnes’s particular combination of matchless virtuosity, sweet tone, flowing tempi and interpretative restraint suits all this music down to the ground... the contribution of the BBC Philharmonic is distinguished throughout ... Strongly recommended." David Gutman - Gramophone magazine - October 2013

“Wow. Everything works here. James Ehnes rarely disappoints, and the playing on this beautifully recorded two-disc set is immaculate. It’s not just the musicality, the remarkable ability to give shape and colour to the thorniest solo writing, but his modesty – he’s a player who knows exactly when to step back and let collaborators take the spotlight… Unmissable.” Graham Rickson – theartsdesk.com – 28 September 2013

"... Ehnes and his pianist give performances worthy of the giants (Oistrakh and Richter) for whom their parts were conceived." Hugh Canning - The Sunday Times - 8 September 2013

Classical CD of the Week "... Ehnes is joined by Amy Schwartz Moretti for an electrifying performance of the duo sonata... In their mix of lyricism and sharpe-edged rhythmic and harmonic piquancy. Ehnes and Moretti are absolutely spot on in defining the music’s character. This is playing that truly grabs you by the scruff of the neck and commands attention... For the two concertos Ehnes teams up again with an orchestra and conductor he knows well - the BBC Philharmonic and Gianandrea Noseda - who yield apt, complimentary shades of colouring, both brilliant and pungent, to match Ehnes’s superb artistry." ***** Geoffrey Norris - The Daily Telegraph - 28 September 2013

"... the sound is terrific, and given the excellence of the performance throughout, and the convenience of having all of these works ’under one roof’. as it were, there’s no reason to put off acquiring this set..." Raymond S Tuttle - International Record Review - October 2013

"... Prokofiev wrote tuneful music, rich and rhythmic, and James Ehnes is outstanding in bringing this attractive music to life." Peter Spaull - Liverpool Post - 19 September 2013

Alongside its ongoing much-lauded Copland series, the BBC Philharmonic embarks on a new American journey, this time with its chief guest conductor, John Storgards. Known as ‘the bad boy of music,’ George Antheil began his career with a reputation as an enfant terrible, composing shockingly avant-garde works such as his every popular Ballet mecanique, inspired by the dynamism and dissonances of Stravinsky’s early ballets. Although he is well established on the film music scene, too, it is his symphonic output-sampled here- that today survives in the concert hall. This new series documents the evolution of his musical style, which moved towards a fundamentally tonal and melody-based idiom, Antheil joining the growing ranks of famous US symphonists. The war-inspired Fourth Symphony and ‘joyous’ Fifth clearly represent this compositional shift, breaking with what the composer called the ‘now passe’ modernism. Also here is the premiere recording of the Texas-inspired Over the Plains, memorable for its allusions to cowboy music and offering some unexpectedly dramatic and atmospheric twists along the way.

RESPIGHI Burlesca. Preludio, corale e fuga. Rossiniana. RACHMANINOFF (Orch. Respighi) 5 Études-tableaux • Gianandrea Noseda, cond; BBC PO • CHANDOS 10388 (73:04)


When I played an RAI recording of Respighi’s puppet opera La bella dormente nel bosco on a radio program in Dallas about 30 years ago, we received several enthusiastic calls—none more so than that of an individual who liked the work immensely and had been, until then, unaware that the composer had ever written anything other than a few tone poems and the three Ancient Airs and Dances suites. An extreme case, perhaps, but matters have improved since then for Respighi. There will never be any lack of musical fountains or pines about Rome for anyone to appreciate, but a lot more of the composer’s music has visibility now, and an attentive public. The Preludio, corale e fuga appears occasionally on concert programs, and I’m sure we’ll soon hear that the Burlesca is doing the same.


The Preludio, corale e fuga was composed in 1900, when Respighi was taking lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg. The work was written under the older master’s supervision; and certainly his touch can be heard in some of the harmonic progressions, the characteristic use of the strings and winds (especially the flutes), and the transformation of themes. There’s much of Respighi already present, however, notably in the arresting brass chorale (before it is harmonized and enters an Eastern Orthodox church), and the fugue subject and its chromatic treatment. Above all, the scope of the work and its mix of rigor and fancy point to a young, ambitious composer of considerable promise.


More consistently interesting is the Burlesca , a phantasmagoric piece despite its title, rather than something mock-serious like Strauss’s Burleske . The shape and harmonization of the Burlesca ’s main theme and the piece’s use of pedal points seem to point to Sibelius. As the work was composed in 1906, the possibility of influence cannot be set aside. Still, Sibelius wasn’t given to this kind of filigree work, and it is the subtlety, rather than the overt brilliance of the orchestration, as well as its suitability to the task, that impresses the most.


Rossiniana is nowhere near as well known as La boutique fantasque , but the source is the same: Rossini’s large collection of incidental piano music, nearly all of it composed late in life. It appeared in 1925 and was a success at its premiere, but has been eclipsed through the years by a suite drawn from the ballet. By contrast, while Rossiniana still gets heard on occasion, that can’t be said of the Five études-tableaux . They began life as Rachmaninoff’s ops. 33 and 39 piano collections from 1911 and 1917, respectively. For whatever reason, the composer had no interest in orchestrating a selection of these, so it was left to Serge Koussevitzky to suggest Respighi as a likely candidate. Rachmaninoff agreed; and the results come surprisingly close, not merely in the romantic, fantastical and warlike passages, but in singling out the mordant thread that runs through both “La Foire” and “Le Chaperon rouge et le loup.”


I find the value of these performances to be mixed. Noseda strives above all for clarity, which yields a harvest of welcome orchestral detail from this orchestrally brilliant composer. At times the conductor is too willing to sacrifice momentum and accent, as in the final “Marche” of the Five études-tableaux that frankly, falls flat; yet the concluding “Tarantella” of Rossiniana has all the brio one could desire. The “Marche funèbre” from the Five études-tableaux is colorful but prosaic—too fast and heavy in its tread; but nothing could be lighter or honed more delicately than the filigree work in the Burlesca . Throughout the program, individual soloists are too reticent, but Noseda coaxes a fat, beautiful Russian sound from his sections.


The “Tarantella” to one side, there are certainly better versions of Rossiniana available, though many now fall into the category of historical. Dorati’s old recording with the Royal Philharmonic on Decca 444106 has been re-released under arrangement with ArkivMusic, and is well worth pursuing for its infectious high spirits. Good, too, is Janigro/Vienna SO (Vanguard 41), another vintage release, despite an orchestra that was never within striking distance of the BBC Philharmonic in matters of virtuosity. Dorati and Janigro knew how to bring this music to life. On the evidence of this album, Noseda is still learning.


But in the Burlesca and Preludio, corale e fuga his only competition comes from a slapdash pair of performances featuring Adriano and the Slovak RSO in coarse sound (Naxos 8.557820). So if you want those works, and in excellent sound, too, this disc becomes self-recommending.


FANFARE: Barry Brenesal

Also available: Ginastera: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 / Mena, BBC Philharmonic

This is the second in our three-volume series of Juanjo Mena's idiomatic exploration of Ginastera's orchestra works with the BBC Philharmonic. The series was started to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatest of all Argentinean composers, Vol. 1 - receiving uniformly high praise. This album features a late work, lesser-known, yet rich in surprises, namely the Second Piano Concerto. Here the keen musicality and sweeping virtuosity of Xiayin Wang meet the sumptuous sound of the BBC orchestra. It succeeds her recording of concertos by Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian with the RSNO which was made Editor's Choice by Gramophone. It is coupled with the exotic early ballet Panambi, heard complete with a concluding contribution from the Manchester Chamber Choir.

What pushes this release over the top is the brilliant fiddling of James Ehnes, combined with the incredibly intelligent idea of putting all of Bartók's string concertos together on a single disc. Ehnes, for his part, is just as comfortable on the viola as he is on the violin. He digs into the rustic Hungarian melodies in the finale of the Viola Concerto or the beginning of the Violin Concerto No. 2 with a richly resonant gusto that never turns crude, while at the same time his impeccable intonation gives the slithery chromatics of the First concerto real shape and direction. He's a phenomenal artist, make no mistake. Gianandrea Noseda's accompaniments are very good--bracing and very well paced. As so often from these forces, however, the orchestra is a touch bland--never less than proficient, most of the time a good bit more than that, but also not as arresting and colorful as it could be. Still, as I said, the quality of Ehnes' playing and the value of the program earn this disc a top recommendation. Anything less would be churlish.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Recorded in: New Broadcasting House, Manchester 20,21 March 1996 Producer(s) Ralph Couzens Brian Pidgeon Sound Engineer(s) Don Hartridge

Includes work(s) by Richard Addinsell. Ensemble: B. B. C. Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Rumon Gamba.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was at the forefront of the Impressionist revolution in painting. Together with a small group of like-minded friends, he scandalized the critics by devising a new way of representing the world in all it's bewildering variety of light and shadow. Here, the world of Monet is given a musical perspective with a carefully chosen selection of pieces by the finest composers of his time. We may enjoy here some of the greatest moments in musical and artistic development in the late nineteenth century, as Impressionism was emerging triumphant. On this CD, Monet's incredible foresight and breathtaking depictions of natural beauty are musically complemented by such landmarks as Debussy's graceful Pr�lude � l'apr�s-midi d'un faune and Bizet's daring masterpiece Carmen. 1 CD with full-color, illustrated, explanatory booklet.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ ballet Caroline Mathilde premièred in 1991 and has been highly acclaimed ever since. Its story concerns the tragic marriage of Caroline to Christian VII of Denmark and is cast in a musical language that embraces expressionism, drama, parody, and overt lyricism. The two concert suites chart the young queen’s fall from grace and her eventual banishment into exile. Chat Moss is a richly textured tone poem, while by contrast the Ojai Festival Overture is a lively and extrovert concert piece reflecting Maxwell Davies’ fondness for American landscape and culture. Recorded between 1991-95 and previously released by the now defunct Collins Classics, the Naxos label has been consistently lauded in the musical press for making available once again these and many other recordings by arguably the greatest British composer of the second half of the 20th c., that, in some cases, remain the only recordings of these works.

Recorded in: Liverpool Cathedral 26-27 October 1993 Producer(s) Ralph Couzens Sound Engineer(s) Don Hartridge

On Remembering, the Danish cellist Jakob Kullberg continues his collaborations with two of the foremost Nordic composers: Per Nørgård and Kaija Saariaho. Praised internationally for his performances of the modern cello concerto, Kullberg regards the concerto form as the encounter of an individual soloist with the sound world of a composer. With living composers this approach often results in an unusual degree of collaboration, as the works gathered here bear witness to. Since 1999, Kullberg has enjoyed a close and unique partnership with Nørgård which has resulted in a large number of works. Between, the opening work on the album, hails from a time before this, but Nørgård’s viola concerto Remembering Child in its version for the cello is very much an example of Kullberg’s process. He has not only transferred the concerto to his own instruments, but has also – in consultation with the composer – written his own cadenza as well as added details to the score. Likewise, at a climactic point exactly halfway through Saariaho’s concerto Notes on Light, Kullberg creates an expressive space of his own, with a two-minute cadenza he has composed himself. In this work, as well as in Nørgård’s Between, Kullberg is supported by the BBC Philharmonic, with Sinfonia Varsovia appearing in the closing concerto.

Rumon Gamba leads the BBC Philharmonic in this collection of lesser-known pieces by the British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold.

Born 1921, Arnold was inspired by Louis Armstrong to take up the trumpet at the age of twelve. Following study at the Royal College of Music, in London, he became Principal Trumpet of the London Philharmonic, in 1943 – a post he held (bar one season at the BBC Symphony Orchestra) until he moved to composing full time, in 1948.

Arnold was active in many genres, writing nine symphonies, two operas, five ballets, and more than 100 film scores, including The Bridge on the River Kwai for which he won an Oscar.

This album features music from across his compositional career, from Larch Trees (1943) to the Philharmonic Concerto (1976) – both works written for the London Philharmonic. His Divertimento was written for the newly formed National Youth Orchestra, whilst the BBC commissioned the Commonwealth Christmas Overture for the twenty-fifth anniversary of King George VI’s first Christmas Broadcast, in 1932. The Clarinet Concerto No. 1, expertly performed here by Michael Collins, was written for Frederick (‘Jack’) Thurston who gave the première, in 1949, at the Edinburgh Festival. The album concludes with Philip Lane’s orchestration of The Padstow Lifeboat, originally composed for brass band to celebrate the launch of a new lifeboat in Padstow in 1968.

REVIEW:

What better way to start the New Year than with a bumper disc of Malcolm Arnold at his most entertaining. The program of this recording has been somewhat dictated by music missing from the extensive Chandos catalogue of the composer, so the result is something of a seeming hotch-potch albeit a very engaging one.

Conductor Rumon Gamba and the ever-reliable BBC Philharmonic are old hands at Arnold and this style of repertoire which they play with genuine flair and engagement throughout. While none of the repertoire is new to the catalogue, four of the works are receiving only their second commercial recordings, and, with one exception, all the other recordings of these works are over twenty years old. Furthermore, most of those older recordings appear to be out of print. So even if this new disc were not as fine as it is, it would pretty much have the field to itself.

The most recorded work on this disc is the Clarinet Concerto No. 1 Op.20. The soloist here is Michael Collins, who recorded it as part of the Conifer survey back in 1988. Collins’ playing is simply superb; expressive and humorous, articulate, virtuosic. Conductor Ramon Gamba is most imaginative with his phrasing and attention to dynamics and accentuation.

The Divertimento No. 2 Op.24/75 is a great example of unaffected, unbuttoned Arnold. The flair and brio of this present recording is undeniable and affords great listening pleasure.

Near the other end of Arnold’s compositional career is the Philharmonic Concerto, Op.120 written in 1976. This is Arnold at one of his very darkest times rather desperately trying to make out that everything is just fine while the music tells a different story. Again this new performance is simply excellent – unflinchingly muscular and dynamic with an aggressive edge that seems wholly, if somewhat uncomfortably, appropriate.

The disc ends with a collective sigh of relief – the utterly brilliant Padstow Lifeboat in its orchestral transcription by Phillip Lane. The original Brass Band version is incomparable and utterly “right” but Lane’s orchestration is a delight.

So an uplifting conclusion to a disc guaranteed to raise spirits in the dank winter months with performances and recordings to match or supplant any in the catalogue. Recording dates show sessions split by the pandemic but the sound and playing is superbly consistent. A top-notch Chandos release to start the year right down to the cover photograph of the RNLB James and Catherine Macfarlane – the eponymous Padstow Lifeboat itself. Certainly a disc to show the range and quality of Arnold’s mercurial genius in all its glory.

-- MusicWeb International

Directed by Julian Jarrold, Evelyn Waugh's novel, Brideshead Revisited receives its first cinematic adaptation this summer with a cast which includes Academy-Award winner Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Matthew Goode, Hayley Atwell and Ben Whishaw. The screenplay is written by Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies. Brideshead Revisited follows the memoirs of Charles Ryder and his involvement with the Flyte family who own the Brideshead Estate. It relives the hedonistic days of 1920s Oxford University and tells an evocative story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence with particular focus on Charles's relationship with brother and sister, Sebastian and Julia and their mother, Lady Marchmain. Chandos is delighted to have been given the opportunity to record Adrian Johnston's soundtrack, the first original film score on Chandos Movies. Having won both BAFTA and Emmy Awards for his scores, Adrian Johnston has had an impressive career in television and film to date including Becoming Jane, Kinky Boots, The Mayor of Casterbridge and White Teeth. Adrian Johnston writes of the Brideshead Revisited recording "I was thrilled to have an opportunity to work with Chandos - a label whose philosophy I have always liked, and whose CDs of Philip Lane's fine film score reconstruction I have particularly admired. I know that to release a 'non historical' film score was somewhat of a departure for the label, but I hope that Brideshead Revisited can somehow exist as a Chandos product, and perhaps open up the way for future film music collaborations." The BBC Philharmonic is conducted by Olivier Award winner Terry Davies who has a wide range of credits in film, theatre and TV including Shakespeare in Love, Becoming Jane, House of Mirth and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

On this disc, Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to Dance and Symphonies Nos 1 and 2 are performed by the BBC Philharmonic under its Chief Conductor, Juanjo Mena. Scottish bassonist Karen Geoghegan joins them as the soloist in the Bassoon Concerto

Tying in with the 100-year anniversary in 2013 of the composer’s birth, we here present two such works, performed by the BBC Philharmonic under Edward Gardner with Chandos stars Tasmin Little and Howard Shelley. The Violin Concerto, here performed dazzlingly by Little, is essentially tragic and weighty in tone, perhaps reflecting his growing concern with the escalation of war-related hostilities. Under Shelley’s fingers the Piano Concerto – in a rare recording with the original third movement, “Recitative and Aria” – is generally lighter and brighter, more transparent and simpler in style.

Considered by some to be the ‘Cinderella’ of his symphonies, the Sixth Symphony of Anton Bruckner was composed in 1879 – 81. It may well demonstrate a reaction to the severe criticism of the first Viennese performance, in 1877, of his Third Symphony, which Eduard Hanslick described as a vision of how Beethoven’s Ninth befriends Wagner’s Walküre and ends up being trampled under her horses’ hoofs’. Much the shortest of his mature symphonies, the Sixth also reverts to a more classical form than its predecessors. This recording was made in 2012, during the first season of Juanjo Mena as Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, and just a month before their acclaimed performance of the work at the BBC Proms. Classical Source commented: ‘Mena didn’t miss a trick and the result for the whole symphony was a revelation, and you don’t get many of those. This was a thrilling, delightful performance.’

Paul Frankenburger, (born in Munich on 5 July 1897) was a successful conductor and composer in Bavaria, until he lost his position at the Augsburg Opera due to a financial crisis at the opera house. In 1933, he left Germany and immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. Immediately upon arriving at the new country, he changed his name to Paul Ben- Haim, and within a few years he established himself as a cultural icon, a highly esteemed and influential composer, and the founder of a new musical tradition. Some consider Ben-Haim the national composer of the young state established in 1948, fifteen years after his immigration. The compositions on this album are closely linked to those dramatic years, during which he changed homelands, swapped identities, and, to a large degree, even replaced, or forged, his own unique personal style. Omer Meir Wellber, new chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, makes his Chandos debut with this first album in a series dedicated to exploring the music of Israel.

Born in 1924 in the then Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Gerard Schurmann grew up in England, and after serving in the Royal Air Force during the war, combined his career as a concert pianist with a diplomatic role as Cultural Attache at the Netherlands Embassy. On the recommendation of Alan Rawsthorne, Ealing Studios commissioned Schurmann for the score for the Jack Hawkins police drama ‘The Long Arm’ (released as ‘The Third Key’ in the US). More commissions followed, initially from the burgeoning British 1950s horror scene (represented here by Konga and Horrors of the Black Museum and then from mainstream cinema. ‘The Ceremony,’ directed by and starring Laurence Harvey was followed by ‘Dr. Syn, alias The Scarecrow’ and the WWII action movie ‘Attack on the Iron Coast,’ starring Lloyd Bridges. Rumon Gamba completes this overview with scores from Claretta, a lavish portrayal of the final days of Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci; and finally the 1997 film ‘The Gambler’ in which Sir Michael Gambon vividly portrayed the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

-----

REVIEW:

This is a hugely enjoyable presentation in all respects, one that redresses the imbalance of a composer known for too long as the orchestrator of other people’s music. In these sharply etched performances he can be appreciated in his own right as a key figure in the lexicon of film composers already represented in this fine series.

– Gramophone

The Symphony in C was conceived in Paris in the late 1930s, but completed in America in 1940, and is dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premièred in 1946, the Symphony in Three Movements presents us with movements that also manifest different ways of moving: a march, a slow dance, and a march-jog-race. The Greeting Prelude was written as an eightieth birthday tribute to Pierre Monteux, conductor of the premières of Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring, and was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the very day: 4 April 1955. The other two pieces on the album reflect Stravinsky’s lifelong involvement with ballet. The Divertimento is an orchestral piece extracted by Stravinsky from his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss. The ballet was a homage to Tchaikovsky, based on songs and piano pieces by him, stitched together and orchestrated with Stravinskian cool. The Circus Polka was a commission from Stravinsky’s long-time collaborator George Balanchine, who had been asked by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to create a dance for elephants. The version heard here is the composer’s own orchestral version; the original was scored for circus band and organ by David Raksin, and performed by fifty elephants and fifty female dancers!

REVIEW:

It’s easy to underestimate the depth and breadth of Andrew Davis’s repertoire and indeed his sterling qualities as a conductor – his ebullience, robust sense of rhythm and razor-sharp ears. All of which are much in evidence in this generous compendium of Stravinsky.

-- Gramophone

Ruth Gipps (1921 – 1999) was born in the English seaside resort of Bexhill-on-Sea. Encouraged as a child by an ambitious pianist mother, she appeared locally as a prodigy pianist. She was accepted by the Royal College of Music in 1937, at the age of sixteen, having won the Caird Scholarship. She quickly matured, both as composer and pianist. She studied with Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob, and later the oboe with Leon Goossens. During the Second World War she gained a position as oboist with the City of Birmingham Orchestra and devoted a great deal of her time to composing. Three of the works on this album were composed during the war: the Oboe Concerto, the tone poem Death on the Pale Horse, and the overture Chanticleer (derived from an opera which, sadly, she never completed). The manuscript of the Third Symphony is dated 1 November 1965 and the work was first heard when Gipps introduced it with her London Repertoire Orchestra, on 19 March 1966. Its first professional performance took place on 29 October 1969, Gipps directing the BBC Scottish Orchestra, but it has since gone largely unheard, until now.

REVIEWS:

Each of this foursome, the bulk from the 1940s, offers pungent and individual delights...Throughout the album the BBC Philharmonic plays with bright colours, a sharp attack and swaggering energy – just what this dip into Gipps deserves.

-- BBC Music Magazine

The BBC Philharmonic sound as though they relished communing with the music throughout, and Chandos’s sound is first rate. Warmly recommended.

-- Gramophone

Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018) was one of Russia’s greatest conductors along with Evgeny Mravinsky and Kirill Kondrashin. His close personal and musical relationship with Shostakovich began in the 1950s and continued until the composer’s death in 1975. Rozhdestvensky said at the time, ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of my relations with Dmitri Shostakovich since he opened before me a musical universe like a gigantic magnifying glass reflecting our fragile world’.

Rozhdestvensky conducted the first western premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.4 in Edinburgh in 1962 and after many subsequent performances internationally, it was also the inaugural piece in his tenure as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1979-81). Composed in 1936 but condemned by the Soviet authorities, it did not receive its first performance until 1961 in Moscow. The epic Symphony No.11, given a dramatic performance by the BBC Philharmonic in 1997, is based on revolutionary folksongs relating to the 1905 Russian Revolution, and received the Lenin Prize in 1958. Despite this, questions arose as to whether Shostakovich was denouncing the Soviet regime’s brutal treatment of its opponents in it, specifically the 1956 invasion of Hungary or the Tsarist tyranny and oppression of 1905, to which there are no conclusive answers.

An almost essential purchase for everyone interested in contemporary British music.

After the success of Peter Maxwell Davies's ten 'Naxos' Quartets commissioned by the label (see review of boxed set for details), here come the Symphonies, with the first five re-released by Naxos in 2012 so far.
 
Like the first two and the following two, this recording of Symphony no.3 originally appeared on the now subsumed Collins Classics label in the mid-Nineties (14162). Back then, it was the only work on the disc, the ink still wet on the score of Cross Lane Fair, which came out a year later on the same label (14602), coupled with the much shorter Fifth Symphony.
 
The Third is a sprawling, elemental work, as wind-swept and rain-lashed as Maxwell Davies's home on Orkney, although the tumultuous seascape is perhaps more abstractly represented than in the Second Symphony. Those who know the composer only through the simple, pretty piano piece Farewell to Stromness, or even his most popular orchestral piece, An Orkney Wedding With Sunrise, are in for a surprise!
 
The Malcolm Arnoldish pizzazz, wit and sound effects of An Orkney Wedding are more in evidence in the nine-section Cross Lane Fair, in which Maxwell Davies reanimates childhood fairground visits around his native Salford. Quite what Northumbrian smallpipes and Irish bodhrán players were doing in Salford is never explained, nor how he manages to recall so vividly the sounds and atmosphere of evenings from nearly sixty years previously, when by his own admission a lad of only four or five!
 
Northumbrian smallpipes are like the archetypal Highland bagpipes but smaller, and kept inflated by an underarm bellows rather than a player's necessarily strong lungs. Their harmonica-like tone, as this recording demonstrates, is considerably softer than the bagpipes, and pitting them against an orchestra is an unlikely idea. Maxwell Davies certainly knows how to orchestrate effectively, and the smallpipes and bodhrán do their stuff when the tutti are subdued or even silent, as in the bodhrán solo in the section entitled 'The Juggler' - which, bizarrely, is met by score-directed human cheers and applause.
 
Sound quality in both recordings is very good, especially when their age is taken into consideration.
The booklet notes are detailed with regard to the works themselves, but there is no information at all about the two soloists, nor about the bodhrán or Northumbrian smallpipes - in the latter's case, there are variations of and idiosyncrasies associated with the basic instrument, and a note of enlargement would not have gone amiss.
 
The timing is generous, however, and the performances first-rate. In all, this is an almost essential purchase for everyone interested in contemporary British music.
 
-- Byzantion, MusicWeb International

Kurt Sanderling conducts the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with Carolyn Watkinson and John Mitchinson in works by Schumann and Mahler.

Both Black Pentecost and Stone Litany share a symphonic scale and an Orkney setting. Premièred by Simon Rattle in 1982, Black Pentecost is an impassioned plea against environmental destruction, taking its words from Orcadian author George Mackay Brown’s novel Greenvoe, and cast in the form of a vocal symphony. Chamber-like restraint is matched by tense, dark writing that embraces threnody and cataclysm. Beautifully orchestrated and featuring elaborate melismas from the vocal soloist, Stone Litany, subtitled ‘Runes from a House of the Dead’, evokes the haunted landscape of a Neolithic burial mound plundered by Vikings.

The first Japanese composer to achieve international status, Toru Takemitsu proposed a fusion between Western music and the culture of his country. His music radiates a lyrical intensity that comes as much from his roots in the early modernists Debussy and Alban Berg as from his affinity with the more overtly experimental mid-twentieth-century styles of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Played throughout the world, he is considered one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century. Of the four works gathered here, three feature the guitar. Inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson, Spectral Canticle takes the listener through elusive sonic transformations corresponding to the changing seasons evoked by the poem. To the Edge of Dream has an eerie mood and celebrates the haunting, often sinister paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux. Also inspired by a work of art, Vers, l’arc-en-ciel, Palma, with its refined writing, is close to the spectral composers. Finally, Twill by Twilight for orchestra expresses the moment, just after sunset, when twilight turns into darkness in a delicate and uncluttered pointillism.

REVIEWS:

Clearly all the soloists were prepared for this challenging music-making, as was the BBC Philharmonic. With informative liner notes, one comes away from this recording with an excellent sense of Takemitsu’s writing for guitar and orchestra.

-- American Record Guide

Exceptional accounts here of four of the Japanese composer’s works, with soloists and orchestra alive to the extraordinary coexistence of stillness and threat in Takemitsu’s writing. Startlingly vivid, his sound pictures capture the changing of light, seasons, emotions and memories with unblinking clarity.

-- The Sunday Times (UK)

Edward MacDowell was the most highly regarded American composer of his generation, and the first to acquire a truly international reputation. Born in New York, he briefly studied piano as a teenager at the Paris Conservatoire, but quickly left to explore what he regarded as the more congenial musical environment in Germany. He studied piano and composition in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and then Frankfurt. After graduating in 1880, he remained in Germany for four years, before returning home, first to Boston, for eight years, and then finally to New York where he became Columbia University's first Professor of Music. The various romantic influences that shaped the style of the First Concerto include the music of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Grieg, whilst the technical demands on the soloist reveal MacDowell's prowess as a pianist. MacDowell's enthusiasm for the symphonic poem is reflected here by the inclusion of Lancelot und Elaine and Lamia. The former was inspired by the Arthurian legend as told by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. The work is extremely narrative, and employs Wagnerian Leitmotifs to depict each of the characters. Lamia, written some two years later and based on the poem by John Keats, was neither published nor performed in the composer's lifetime. MacDowell had planned another symphonic poem, based on the French mediaeval tale La Chanson de Roland, but the work was never completed, and the two fragments included here are all that remain. Woodland Sketches, a set of ten piano miniatures, were inspired by the idyllic environment of the MacDowells' farm, in New Hampshire. The first of these - 'To a Wild Rose' - is by far the composer's most famous piece, and made MacDowell a household name in both America and Europe.

If the first three piano concertos have the heft and communicative power of Lloyd's larger middle-period symphonies, the Fourth has a close affinity to the Ninth Symphony, which was completed the previous year. Both pieces exhibit an impish sense of fun, tempered by profound feelings of yearning and regret. George Lloyd approached the piano concerto form with imagination and individuality. His idiomatic solo writing avoids shallow virtuosity and empty rhetoric and there are no mighty tussles between piano and orchestral forces encountered in archetypal large-scale concertante scores. Instead, the composer offers a series of deeply personal attempts to reconcile time-honoured elements of display with symphonic preoccupations of long-range tonality, rhythmic energy and melodic growth. In sum, Lloyd's four piano concertos constitute a compelling and distinctive branch of his creative legacy. � Paul Conway

Lloyd became a symphonist despite himself. When he was in his twenties he seemed destined to be a composer of operas and it is likely that, had the vicissitudes of war not intervened, he would have written music for the stage exclusively. In an article for the June 1939 issue of the Musical Monthly Record, Harry Farjeon wondered why music for Lloyd was ‘not centred in the concert hall but in the theatre’ and quoted the young composer as being ‘interested only in opera’. There are strong traces in the symphonies of what might have been: the intensely lyrical, cantabile nature of the writing, the intermezzo-like movements, the opera buffa qualities of the finales and the feeling for the long line which runs through those supple and sweeping melodies all denote a born opera composer. In the event his operatic aspirations were cruelly cut short and it is to his courageous, life-affirming twelve symphonies that we must look to chart his development, recovery and eventual triumph.

Every five years the Soviet Union celebrated the anniversary of the October 1917 Revolution with large-scale public events, to which the country’s leading artists were expected to contribute. Mieczyslaw Weinberg, like his friend Shostakovich, enjoyed mixed fortunes with his efforts. The symphonic poem Dawn (Zarya), Op. 60, dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, seems to have remained unperformed during his lifetime, despite its ideologically irreproachable content. Its première was finally given in the BBC studios in Manchester, on 15 May 2019, by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds.

When Shostakovich died, on 9 August 1975, it had been five years since Weinberg composed his last symphony. To commemorate his friend and mentor (whom he regarded as the greatest symphonist of his age) Weinberg decided on a full-scale, four movement, non-programmatic work as his personal tribute. Symphony No. 12, written between December 1975 and February 1976 is the longest of Weinberg’s purely instrumental symphonies. Kirill Kondrashin was due to conduct the première, but his last-minute insistence on large-scale cuts and changes to the score was taken by Weinberg as a great insult, and ended their relationship. The first performance was finally given as a radio broadcast on 13 October 1979, (probably) by the USSR TV and Radio Symphony Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich.

Without question born a little too late in a century of huge upheavals, Pierre Sancan has almost completely disappeared from our memories. He nevertheless occupied a place at the heart of the history of French music in the second half of the twentieth century: composer, pianist, teacher, and an extremely endearing personality, as one will discover on this disc.

This program of the Piano concerto, orchestral works, works for solo piano, and the flute Sonatine (played by Adam Walker) serves as a personal tribute to Sancan from both pianist and conductor, and will hopefully help to raise awareness of this gifted composer.