Solo Motions is a deeply personal solo guitar album from Phil Sargent, presenting the instrument as a complete musical voice through unaccompanied performance. Recorded entirely without accompaniment, the album explores counterpoint, harmony, and improvisation with a focus on clarity, space, and emotional presence. Drawing inspiration from Bach's contrapuntal writing alongside modern harmonic language, Sargent reimagines jazz standards and original material through layered voices and inner motion. Influences from modern jazz and classical traditions are woven seamlessly into performances that balance structure with spontaneity. The album includes one original composition, "Kelita," alongside fresh interpretations of well-known repertoire, all shaped by a reflective and intimate approach to solo playing. Rather than emphasizing virtuosity for it's own sake, Solo Motions invites focused listening and rewards repeated engagement, highlighting nuance, restraint, and the expressive power of a single instrument. Solo Motions offers a quiet, immersive listening experience that captures stillness within motion and depth within simplicity.
From 78 to stereo, this is Sir Malcolm Sargent's Decca legacy reissued complete, including several recordings new to CD. Sargent's broad repertoire and warm rapport with audiences made him easy to underestimate. Yet Schnabel and Toscanini, among other celebrated foreign musicians, held him in the highest regard. This new Eloquence collection of the conductor's Decca recordings should help modern listeners to understand and share Schnabel's admiration. In his booklet essay, David Patmore tells the story of Sargent's early career as an organist and rapid rise as a conductor in his 20s, leading the Ballets russes, Wagner's Mastersingers and a popular series of children's concerts. Having made records since the 1920s, he was an experienced conductor in the studio by the time he began recording for Decca, directly after the war. These 78-era sessions included symphonies by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert as well as overtures by Rossini and Suppe, several of them never reissued until now. They reveal what a direct and unmannered interpreter Sargent could be in canon repertoire, coaching orchestras to achieve the highest technical standards. He was always a dynamic conductor of English music: his Decca recordings of Holst's Planets, Elgar's Enigma Variations and Coronation Marches have lost none of their rhythmic drive and intensity. Sargent's concerto sessions with Sir Clifford Curzon (in Rawsthorne), Max Rostal (Bartok), Ida Haendel (Mendelssohn) and Ruggero Ricci (Tchaikovsky and Dvorak) bear out his reputation as a sympathetic accompanist. 'Messiah and Mikado' was how the conductor summed up his strengths in the eyes of the wider public: the box includes rare 1946 recordings of Handel arias and choruses featuring Kathleen Ferrier, as well as a live 1949 recording of Sargent accompanying her in his own orchestration of Brahms' Four Serious Songs. Having comprehensively covered the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan for HMV, Sargent remade both Yeoman of the Guard and Princess Ida for Decca in 1964-65. These records movingly document the final chapter in the conductor's career-long affinity with G&S, now leading the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and first-rate casts which include Elizabeth Harwood and Donald Adams in the principal roles of both works. Sargent was a conductor for all seasons, and this Eloquence box takes the measure of him.
SOMM RECORDINGS is delighted to announce Elgar from America, Volume II: the first commercial release of three historic performances from 1940s’ New York featuring legendary Elgarian interpreters including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and conductors Malcolm Sargent and Arturo Toscanini at the helm of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The results offer a fascinating transatlantic perspective on a titan of British music while revealing his musical legacy in a country he visited annually from 1905-07 and again in 1911. The featured recordings date from the first half of the 1940s and have been restored and remastered by the multi-award-winning audio restoration engineer Lani Spahr, who also provides informative booklet notes. Menuhin, long associated with Elgar since his 1932 recording of the Violin Concerto, is heard here in a 1945 performance of the work, abbreviated to fit radio constraints of time. It is conducted by Sargent who also leads an account of Cockaigne (In London Town) Concert-Overture from the same year. Toscanini’s 1940 performance of the Introduction and Allegro for Strings marks the only time he conducted it with the NBC SO, joined here by Mischa Mischakoff and Edwin Bachmann violins, Carlton Cooley viola, Frank Miller cello. Elgar from America, Volume I (ARIADNE 5005) was hailed by Classical Music Daily as “a fine start to this historic cycle” while MusicWeb International called it “a model of one of the things the album should be doing: filling the medium to capacity with engaging and/or controversial interpretations that one cannot simply over-hear... Essential listening.”
This release has been sourced from the Richard Itter archive of 'live' recordings. The collection is very important for collectors because it has never been released before onto the market. Following the archive's launch in October 2017 with releases featuring Beecham, Bohm, Cantelli, Karajan, du Pre, Klemperer and Rostropovich, it has received universal praise from both the classical media and record collectors for the excellent sound and performances. Robert Casadesus was a renowned 20th century French pianist and composer who knew and worked with Ravel. He was especially known for his celebrated performances of the Mozart Concertos accompanied on record by George Szell- the Gramophone called it 'exquisite Mozart playing,' as well as his recordings of Ravel, Faure and Debussy. He recorded Beethoven's First, Fourth, and Fifth Concertos, the latter two multiple times, though these were all made in the studio. He also extensively recorded the Beethoven Violin Sonatas with Zino Francescatti, who also appears in ICA Classics' Pierre Monteaux set.
With the advent of stereo recordings in the late 1950s, many important soloists, including Jascha Heifetz, began remaking many of their favorite compositions in stereo that they'd previously recorded only in mono. Between 1961-62, as heard on this Idis CD, Heifetz came back to the studio to re-make three of his most famous pieces he'd previously recorded in mono during the '40s and '50s: Bruch's Concerto no. 1 and the Scottish Fantasy, and Vieuxtemps's Concerto No 5. The CD concludes with Tchaikovsky's Serenade Mélancolique op. 26, in a mono recording from 1954.
