The acclaimed English Song Series celebrates the richness and diversity of British composers, performed by leading interpreters of the repertoire. Growing out of an ancient tradition that still echoes in the folk song arrangements of Benjamin Britten, the British art song draws its inspiration from the English poetic language, the nation’s unique land and seascapes, and the suffering and joy of human emotions. From the delightfully light-hearted songs of Liza Lehmann to the abundance of invention and imagery from today’s composers, this collection is a repository of the essence of British musical craftsmanship at its finest.

REVIEWS:

There is so much is here that is central to the genre, and it is all almost uniformly well done. In addition, there is enough here that is less well-known, assuming many collectors will have the main works of, say, Butterworth, Finzi, Vaughan Williams, and others, that even that collector will grow their knowledge and pleasure through acquiring this collection. It is to be hoped that this issue does not signal an end to Naxos’s recordings of this repertoire. There are many other composers and songs that could be added to its catalog. Meanwhile we have this superb anthology of many of the finest English songs from the late Victorians to the present day.

-- MusicWeb International

This superlative set's roster is impressive, with turns from Felicity Lott, Thomas Allen, Susan Bickley, Gerald Finley and even Judi Dench.

– BBC Music Magazine

This set will surely provide many hours of listening pleasure.

-- Gramophone

This is a hugely ambitious and successful project that deserves many hours of attention and appreciation. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

– Opera Now

The present release features works for soprano and piano by Daron Aric Hagen, Johannes Brahms, Jules Massenet, John Duke, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Seymour Barab, Erik Satie, Charles Gounod, Dmitri Shostakovich, Roger Quilter, Robert Franz, Cecile Chaminade, Aaron Copland, Josephine Lang, Florence Price, Ann Rivers Witherspoon, Amy Beach, Camille Saint-Saëns, Leonard Bernstein, and Margaret Bonds.

American soprano Melissa Givens moves and excites audiences and critics alike with a rich, powerful tone, crystalline clarity, and intelligent musical interpretations. Especially noted for her expressiveness and elegance on the stage, she’s been hailed as a singer whose music making is “consistently rewarding” and “a pleasure to hear.” Givens is also an extremely versatile artist, regularly performing repertoire from the Baroque era through music of the 21st century.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Noël Coward's death, celebrated musicians and regular Signum artists Mary Bevan, Nicky Spence and Joseph Middleton join forces for this album of works by Coward and his contemporaries. Featuring songs such as Parisian Pierrot and The Man I Love, the album comprises of a collection of solos, duets and instrumental songs by composers such as Ned Rorem, Liza Lehmann, William Walton, and Benjamin Britten.

Scott Robert Shaw's debut "The English Tenor" takes us on a beautifully performed journey through a who's who of great English composers and their vocal works. The names Ivor Gurney, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and Roger Quilter are synonymous with English Song, and a Golden Age of British music. The wide variety of accompanying instruments and artists, the broad range of text settings and the mix of cornerstone works of the repertoire alongside lesser-known cycles make "The English Tenor" a thrilling debut album.

A product of the English church music tradition, Australian born Scott Robert Shaw has been performing works in this oeuvre since childhood. Whether on the operatic or oratorio stage, as an ensemble singer or soloist, his deep cultural roots to the British music world are laid bare for all to see. This deeply personal album stands as testament to his background, and as a homecoming to his earliest steps as artist.

Beginning his career and training as a boy soprano at the St George’s Cathedral Perth Choir, Scott attended the McDonald College of the Performing Arts in Sydney, studying music and acting in the Stanislawksy/Laban tradition, awarded a full scholarship for Excellence in Performance. He then attended the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and was given the Most Exceptional Contribution to the Arts award from Wesley College, University of Sydney. In London he continued his studies with the English National Opera’s Baylis Programme for young performers and was regularly engaged to perform as a recitalist and operatic tenor in festivals and opera companies in both the United Kingdom and France. He then completed his studies at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague where he studied Early Music and Classical Singing, and now based in Düsseldorf, is regularly engaged as a soloist in The Netherlands and Germany, with a particular focus on Bach oratorios and Evangelist roles in the Passions.

Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies have collaborated on many occasions in the field of Baroque opera and oratorio, but on this occasion they venture into a somewhat different territory. In the company of Joseph Middleton, they have been exploring the Lieder for one and two voices of Mendelssohn and Schumann, combining them with songs and duets by Roger Quilter. And even though the disc actually opens with a set of Purcell songs – repertoire which both singers have previously made their mark in – they are here performed with the piano accompaniments realized by Benjamin Britten, turning them into something quite new and different. ‘Creamy’, ‘luminous’ and ‘supple’ are words that often appear in reviews about both Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies, and in these duets they achieve a marvellous blend as well as the utmost precision. They are aided in this by Joseph Middleton, described in The Telegraph (UK) as an ‘unfailingly sensitive accompanist’.

MY FAVORITE THINGS • Stephen Hough (pn) • NIMBUS 2540 (63:07)


MACDOWELL Hexentanz. CHOPIN (arr. Liszt) The Maiden’s Wish. QUILTER (arr. Hough) Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal. The Fuchsia Tree. DOHNÁNYI Capriccio in f. PADEREWSKI Minuet in G. Nocturne. SCHLOZER Etude in A?. GABRILOVICH Melodie in E. Caprice-Burlesque. RODGERS (arr. Hough) The Sound of Music: My Favorite Things. WOODFORDE-FINDEN (arr. Hough) Kashmiri Love Song. FRIEDMAN Music Box. SAINT-SAËNS (arr. Godowsky) Carnival of the Animals: The Swan. ROSENTHAL Papillons. GODOWSKY Java Suite: The Gardens of Buitenzorg. LEVITZKI Waltz. PALMGREN En route. MOSKOWSKI Morceaux: Siciliano. Caprice espagnole


The superb British pianist Stephen Hough is no stranger to contemporary music. He is a composer himself. And yet this collection of bon-bons is unapologetically old-fashioned, or to put somewhat less pejoratively, quaint. These pieces are of the sort that appeared as encores on solo programs generations ago. Of course, this is not intended as a challenging recital; they don’t all have to be. Many of the works are transcriptions made by concert pianists, such as Liszt, Godowsky, and Hough himself, or original compositions from such giants of the fin de siècle golden age of pianism as Paderewski, Gabrilovich, Rosenthal, Friedman, and Godowsky again, and so there is no little razzle dazzle here. Lots of notes! And yet Hough’s playing is lovely rather than showy, with great finesse, delectably shaped phrases, and a celebration of pretty melodies. Nimbus gives us warm and colorful sound. If this material appeals to you, you are not going to get a better presentation than we have here. A bit of candy now and again won’t kill you.


FANFARE: Peter Burwasser

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).

SOMM RECORDINGS’ acclaimed series of re-mastered recitals by the much loved, fondly remembered contralto Kathleen Ferrier continues with Kathleen Ferrier: 20th Century British Treasures. Featuring recordings made for Decca and the BBC between 1946 and 1953, it includes a previously unpublished recording of Ferrier’s passionate performance of Lennox Berkeley’s Four Poems of St Teresa of Ávila. Sir Thomas Allen, the distinguished interpreter of British song and Trustee of the Kathleen Ferrier Awards, contributes an extensive booklet commentary that brings a lifetime’s experience to bear in an insightful analysis of Ferrier’s dexterous and treasured talent, accented by the distinctive tones of her native Lancashire. The earliest recording, from 1947, is of Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Flower Song’ from The Rape of Lucretia, the latest, from 1953 (both BBC recitals), includes Howard Ferguson’s lovely five-part Discovery, three songs by William Wordsworth and Edmund Rubbra’s Three Psalms, specially written for Ferrier. Pieces by defining proponents of British song including Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter, Frank Bridge and Peter Warlock complete a crucial celebration of Ferrier’s inimitable contribution to the genre. Pianist Julian Jacobson, son of composer Maurice Jacobson, whose melancholy but sensuous The Song of Songs is heard in a 1947 BBC broadcast, also provides a personal poignant note on Ferrier’s championing of his father’s music.

‘This programme reflects a personal journey: I am Belgian, I studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and now I live in France. I wanted to present composers from these three countries, taking as my cornerstone the English song repertory and the English language. It was Britten’s On this Island that started me thinking in this direction. William Walton’s Daphne and Ivor Gurney’s tiny but intensely fresh Spring touch me enormously and form a part of my life experience. Nicolas Krüger and I then chose other songs that we liked, such as Let Beauty awake by Ralph Vaughan Williams . . . I also wanted to give my listeners a chance to hear French or Belgian composers who set English poems to music: Darius Milhaud, Germaine Tailleferre (one of those female composers who deserves to be better known) and Irene Poldowski . . . and to commission a work from the Belgian composer Patrick Leterme, who has often accompanied me. . . But I discovered Queen before I discovered opera. When I heard Freddy Mercury singing You take my breath away at the piano in Hyde Park, I was overwhelmed. I had to include that love song in my recital!’ – Jodie Devos

The second volume of Overtures from the British Isles contains works by Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, John Ansell, Dame Ethel Smyth, Roger Quilter, and more. These rarely heard works were composed between 1890 and 1945. The pieces show the evolution of the British compositional style, particularly in the usage of harmony. These works are performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Rumon Gamba.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Julian Lloyd Webber, one of the world’s most admired cellists, notably expanded his instrument’s repertoire in the concert hall and on disc. In this retrospective of his art he can be heard as soloist, arranger and conductor. He evokes the lyricism of the songs of Frederick Delius and John Ireland with rich expressivity, adapts a selection of music from Monteverdi to Arvo Part for the combination of two cellos, and crafts new and exciting Vivaldi arrangements. His conducting prowess is shown by supremely sensitive performances of English string music.

Review excerpts from select, previously released volumes included in this set:


And the Bridge Is Love

Lloyd Webber, here as (primarily) conductor, offers an impressive disc of English music that demonstrates a richly rewarding affinity for the repertoire.

– Gramophone

Vivaldi: Concertos for Two Cellos

This is undoubtedly a successful disc which will appeal to many listeners. The playing, throughout, is very accomplished and sensitive and very well captured by the engineers.

– MusicWeb International

Includes song(s) by Roger Quilter.

Good original music for two cellos is quite rare to find and over the years arrangements have greatly enriched the classical repertoire. In this recording internationally celebrated cellist Julian Lloyd Webber has taken music from Monteverdi to Arvo Pärt – much of it originally written for two voices – and adapted it to the medium of two cellos and accompanying piano, sometimes including other instrumentation. These unique arrangements, which he performs with his wife Jiaxin Lloyd Webber, allow their cello voices to blend together as they explore music of lyricism, quiet melancholy and tuneful energy.