Fan favorite “Airs & Dances” is finally available physically! Enjoy our Altissimo! compilation featuring traditional Scottish and Irish music by the United States Military bands including the United States Air Force’s premier Celtic and folk ensemble Celtic Aire.

SOMM Recordings is proud to announce a recital disc from cellist Adrian Bradbury and pianist Andrew West titled The Pre-Raphaelite Cello – at once ground-breaking and celebratory, and rich with first recordings. The curiosity piqued by the album’s unusual name will be amply rewarded with the fascinating story of the artistic threads this programme weaves together and their relevance to important commemorations being observed this year.

The idea was conceived and devised by pianist Oliver Davies (1938–2020)*, and the recording is dedicated to his memory. It is a tribute to the renowned British cellist Beatrice Harrison and her association with the composers of The Frankfurt Gang whose music she championed. And the occasion of this tribute is the 100th anniversary of the Nightingale Broadcast, one of the earliest ever made by the BBC from a remote location: on 19 May 1924 Beatrice sat and played her cello in the garden of “Foyle Riding” (the family home at Oxted), duetting with the local nightingales before a microphone that carried them over the airwaves to more than a million listeners and enchanted a nation.

The composers in Beatrice’s circle included a multi-year cohort of anglophone composition students under Iwan Knorr at Frankfurt before the turn of the 20th century. Englishmen Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott and the Australian Percy Grainger belonged to this Frankfurt Gang, who remained close friends after their student days in Germany and who adopted the Pre-Raphaelite banner from the like-minded brotherhood of English painters and poets, distinguishing themselves musically from other British composers through a focus on emotion rather than musical architecture. They were among the composers inspired by Beatrice’s musicianship, and their works on this album were arranged for her or played and loved by her. These are prefaced on the programme by cello-piano pieces from Iwan Knorr (the composition professor who unites the Gang) and Hugo Becker (Beatrice’s cello teacher from the age of 15).

The saxophone section of the U.S. Navy Band is spectacular in Waypoints. These musicians represent a convergence of extraordinary talent, which stands out in composer David DeBoor’s “Concerto After Dvorak” (Tracks 7-9). Waypoints also features works by Torke, Grainger, Zwilich, Sousa, and Barber.

Significant new additions to the recorded catalogue of this most broad-minded of Danish conductors, working in the last two years of his life and featuring several composers of his own time who were writing in their own post-Nielsen styles. Hardly less novel is the wartime recording of Coates’s Knightsbridge March, never reissued since first appearing on 78s. Several other light-orchestral classics are complemented by spontaneous-sounding live Tchaikovsky in the hands of a little-known French violinist.