This album, featuring several of the UK’s most accomplished performers, explores the Macedonian composer’s search for ‘chroma’ (color) in both harmonic and formal structures, traditional and experimental sonorities and in a need for deeply dedicated performances of physical directness. The composer’s challenging quest has produced a program of works with interweaving strands of expression, some of which were written during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.Mihailo Trandafilovski is a performer-composer in the mold of Telemann, Bartók, Joachim and Liszt. Like them, it is quite impossible to separate his compositional and instrumental imaginations, and he exhibits a swirling yet sold inter-dependence between the energies of each. His contribution to the violin is extraordinary; his violin-piano duos (sonatas in all but name), concerti, violin duos, chamber works and pedagogical works are gifts for audiences and players alike. Previous recordings of his works have attracted glowing reviews around the world.

Pamela Harrison belongs to a generation of women composers whose star shone brightly in the aftermath of the second world war but who subsequently faded into obscurity as the establishment turned towards the Continental avant-garde. Here, the Gould Piano Trio, with clarinettist and project curator Robert Plane, are joined by friends and colleagues in this survey of her work. The Violin Sonatina of 1949 is the earliest work of Harrison’s to feature on this album of world premiere recordings, and this compelling programme also features the thematically linked Clarinet Quintet and Piano Trio, along with the Clarinet Sonata. The short work for clarinet and piano, Drifting Away, is inspired by the W.B. Yeats line ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters’.

Stevens manages to blend the often dominating clarinet with subtle warmth and colour with the strings, giving the Clarinet Quintet a distinctive character of its own. An important strand in Stevens’ compositional output since 2007 has been writing music for relatively neglected instruments such as the tuba, the piccolo and the bassoon, and this strand was strengthened in the autumn of 2015 when he wrote a collection of six pieces for double bass and piano, to which Chasing Shadows and Obsession belong.

The Fantasy Trio (2009) is a relatively rare instance of a substantial chamber work combining the classical guitar with mainstream orchestral instruments. The Romantic Fantasy for flute (doubling piccolo), B flat clarinet, string quartet and harp (2010), is written for the same forces as Ravel’s ground-breaking Introduction and Allegro. The Romantic Fantasy is an ambitious work in one movement, an unbroken span of twenty three minutes’ music. British composer Robin Stevens (b. 1958) is a great talent who is being discovered by the global music community, due in part to the critical acclaim given to the 3 previous Divine Art albums of his music. His varied, stimulating and expressive work arises from many influences – from the music of the Romantic era, to mathematics, his faith and inspiration of his teachers, and he is now producing substantial works for varied instrumental groupings, which are modernist and original, but yet immediately accessible.

Paying homage to the past to dialogue with the present is the ambitious motive of the project. A metamorphosis that aims to transcend tradition towards contemporary perspectives and potential, projecting the notes into an eclectic universe where there is no lack of research, continuity and emulation of the past. The composer Daniele Sardone and the Re-Imagine Duo, formed by Dario Doronzo at the Flugelhorn and Pietro Gallo at the Piano, offer a wide-ranging repertoire that embraces new sound explorations in which classicism and modernity blend. A tribute to tradition expressed in the freshness of a current idiom, a continuous and consolidated dialogue between sounds, colors, stories, cultures, synergistically confluent in a new music that finds the cornerstone of its knowledge in its reinterpretation. The new compositions, like metaphors, are not simple rhetorical artifices but an unprecedented paraphrase of the classical world. The musical ideas of the famous baroque composers are reinterpreted but not betrayed, thanks to the ability to rethink the different musical structures by updating them, breaking them down and re-composing them as in a game of mirrors and references, in a completely new guise that enhances their profound meaning. The sacredness of the classical tradition and its mitigated magniloquence finds echoes of intimacy, illuminated by a courageous artistic experimentation. The linear amplitude of time moves between flash-backs and flash-forwards that transport the notes into a surreal dimension, in a Baudelairian doctrine of correspondences that creates a new and poetic artistic statute. The project is enhanced by the guest appearance of Gabriele Mirabassi on clarinet.

Next to the quintets of Brahms and Mozart, the clarinet quintet by Max Reger is one of the "war horses" for each clarinet player. Reger had a very prominent female composer student, Johanna Senfter, who was only discovered in the early 21st century. In a WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING her Clarinet Quintet shows, what a talent and professionality she developped.

The years 1900-1914 were perhaps the most thrilling period in European music history: the cradle of what we now call musical Modernism. This was the time when the great “avant-garde schools” took shape: in Paris, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and particularly in Vienna. Music branched out into a multitude of aesthetics, styles, and genres, as we can see in in the variety of terms that attempt to describe art in that period: Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, Neo-Classicism, Foklorism, Late Romanticism, Symbolism, and others. Our program selection for this album focuses on two works written in Vienna in 1913 – the “summer of the century”, as author Florian Illies calls a pivotal year that put an end to the long 19th century and introduced the somber 20th century. The two works are Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano op. 5 and Egon Kornauth’s Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. 1913 was the year of several “scandalous” premieres: Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Berg’s Altenberglieder, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and others that were less scandalous: Debussy’s Images pour Orchestre, Max Reger’s Isle of the Dead, Sibelius’s Luonnotar, de Falla’s La vida breve, and Richard Strauss‘s Festliches Präludium.

Joseph Suder was an excellent pianist. In his works the piano remained an expressive instrument and did not become (as has been the case in the works of many other twentieth century composers) a sort of a percussion instrument. In these piano pieces, works representing a cross section of his compositional output from 1911 to 1951, Suder is concerned with extending the expressive range oft he piano. Elements of very different character can be found here: dance and lyrical-serious song or humor and onomatopoeia. Although Suder proceeds from the precedents of the tradition like the dance types of the baroque, the Romantic scherzo, or the Song without Words, he transforms the tradition into something new by compressing form and expression in these short pieces and thus penetrating to what is essential.