Until Volume One of his orchestral music was released last year, the English composer-conductor Henry Cotter Nixon (1842–1907) has entirely disappeared from music history. But this series – presenting all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings – reveals him to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Verdi and Brahms. This second volume confirms his ability to handle extended symphonic structures and also presents a Sullivanesque lighter side. Ian Hobson, pianist and conductor, began his international career in 1981 when he won the Leeds International Piano Competition. This is the thirteenth album that he has recorded for Toccata Classics as either pianist or conductor. Paul Mann is a regular guest conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the US, Australia, and the Far East. He is well known for his collaboration with the rock group Deep Purple.

After recent releases devoted to David Hackbridge Johnson and Steve Elcock, Toccata Classics now rescues another British symphonist from oblivion. Rodney Newton (b. 1945) earned his living as an orchestral timpanist and percussionist, becoming known primarily for his works for brass bands. Until now his substantial output for orchestra has remained completely unknown. This first recording of two early symphonies reveals a composer with a strong sense of melody, drama, and color, in the tradition of such earlier British symphonists as Vaughan Williams and Arnold. The tone poem Distant Nebulae, inspired by Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, reflects the vastness of the heavens in music of understated beauty and elegance.

The English composer David Hackbridge Johnson has been, until now, one of the best-kept secrets in music. He has built up a huge catalogue of works completely unknown even within the classical world. learning the orchestra from the inside, as a player, he has developed a confident and powerful language inherited in part from Brian, Copland, Janacek, Rubbra, Sibelius, Simpson, Tippett and other such masters. As these three pieces show, his music is capable of bold strokes of color and gripping dramatic gestures, expressed with a natural sense of symphonic architecture. Amazingly, he had heard almost none of his orchestral pieces before this recording was made in December, 2016. Paul Mann is a regular guest-conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and the Far East. He is well known for his collaboration with the legendary rock group Deep Purple. This is the sixth recording for Toccata Classics.

The first two Toccata Classics volumes of the orchestral music of the English composer David Hackbridge Johnson presented three mighty symphonies, conceived on a large scale and powerful in their utterance. The Fifteenth Symphony, tone-poems and other works offered here show a change in focus: an engagement with the natural world, reflecting the poetry of changing light and shifting winds, with man's impermanent presence dwarfed by the implacable grandeur of nature. Here Paul Mann, a frequent Toccata Classics artist, conducts the orchestra of the very town- Liepaja, on the coast of Latvia- that inspired the Fifteenth Symphony.

The orchestral music of the English composer David Hackbridge Johnson (b. 1963) is one of the most important discoveries to have been made by Toccata Classics. This second volume brings two mighty symphonies: the dark and tragic No. 10 (2013), cast in a single monumental span, and the three-movement No. 13 (2017), a fierce and fiery affirmation of life. They are complemented here by an orchestral ‘motet’ which passes plainchant in kaleidoscopic review. Writing in Gramophone, Guy Rickards said of Hackbridge Johnson’s Ninth Symphony: “what is so astonishing is not his ambition in attempting such large, big-boned structures… but that he possesses the compositional technique to achieve them so completely… This is a profound, complex, and visionary utterance.” Paul Mann, who here leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is a regular guest conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and the Far East. He enjoyed a famous collaboration with the legendary rock group Deep Purple and was a close friend of its keyboardist Jon Lord. He first came to international attention as first prizewinner in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, and as a result was appointed assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. This is his twelfth project with Toccata Classics.

The recording is one of the most important of the 300+ that Toccata Classics has released, in terms both of its extraordinary ‘back-story’ and the quality of the music itself. The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) has been writing music since his teens but, with virtually no contacts in the musical world, told no one what he was doing- and thus has evolved a compelling symphonic style entirely his own. It combines virtuoso orchestral writing with a sense of momentum that has its roots in the Nordic-British tradition of Sibelius, Nielsen, Simpson, Brian and similar figures. His Third Symphony is a vast canvas generating fierce energy and titanic violence, leavened at times by a sardonic sense of humor. Choses renversees par le temps ou la destruction is a dark symphonic triptych where fragile beauty is constantly at threat from the forces of ignorance. The breezy, buoyant Festive Overture has a Waltonian swagger that barrels on with relentless jollity.

DVORÁK: STRING QUARTET AMERICA

Coupling the 1899 Verklärte Nacht with the 1946 String Trio – a late 12-note work – raises the possibility of special pleading: buy the disc for Schoenberg’s reassuringly familiar Romantic composition, and you might be converted to the more difficult one too. As a marketing strategy, that seems reasonable; both performances here could persuade a variety of listeners. You’d expect a big-gestured, strongly characterised reading with Walter Trampler and Yo-Yo Ma augmenting the Juilliard Quartet in Verklärte Nacht; and though these players sometimes take a larger-than-life approach to the score’s dynamic markings, the results never struck me as inappropriate. This 1991 performance is real chamber music; if the case notes hadn’t revealed that Trampler and Ma play second viola and second cello respectively, I wouldn’t have been sure who were the guests. Like many leading string players, at least one musician adds some irritating breathing noises to the quite close-miked recording. The 1985 recording of the trio benefits from the continuing vitality and real musicality, as well as experience, of three of the Juilliard Quartet’s members. There is much to enjoy as well as simply admire here.

-- Keith Potter, BBC Music Magazine

For more than two decades, Polansky, who the Village Voice called “the heir apparent to the Cowell/Nancarrow/Tenney genius experimentalist mantle,” has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run the sonic gamut from wildly boisterous to serenely introverted. This disc collects thirteen of these canons with widely varying instrumentations that include marimbas, gamelan, electric guitars, children's voices, computer, choir, and chamber ensemble. Performances by and collaborations with William Winant, Jody Diamond, Daniel Goode, Nathan Davis, Nick Didkovsky, and others. The Wire magazine wrote about this CD, “An unashamedly tactile approach to musical material, forging an oblique angle to tradition… cool and elegant…. [I]t’s a mark of his resourceful mind that he can adapt the basic rules into a series of such complex and varied works.... Polansky’s canons show the extreme liberties that can be born from such exacting discipline.” International Record Review commented, “The music of Larry Polansky is as much fun to listen to as it is to think or get serious about…the results are dazzling as each canon defines its individual properties and unique sound world.... The transformations are ubiquitous and compelling…. With so much on offer, this is one of the best discs Cold Blue music has issued.” And ClassicalNet wrote, “Larry Polansky is the modern dean of the mensuration canon…. These canons are clever, mysterious, and comical—part theory of relativity, part Rube Goldberg.”

The English composer-conductor Henry Cotter Nixon (1842–1907) had entirely disappeared from music history until this series – presenting all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings – revealed him to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber, Brahms and Sullivan. This third and final volume mixes music for the concert hall and the stage and adds the Coronation March for Edward VII that turned out to be Nixon’s last composition. Most of the pieces here were left incomplete, but thanks to Paul Mann’s orchestrations they now confirm Nixon’s position as one of the superior tunesmiths of Victorian England.

This new release from The Choir of Chapel Royal features Christmas carols both old and new. These songs were recorded in St. James’s Palace, London, and the stunning acoustics can be heard in each track. Huw Williams currently serves as Director of Music at Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St. James’s Palace. He also directs Cantemus Chamber Choir and Stroud Choral Society, and is on the faculty at Eton College.

This second volume of orchestral music by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) brings works from across his career. A suite drawn from an early Festspiel – a community pageant – opens with a march of Elgarian swagger and continues with a mix of charm and substance. Flury was a gifted violinist, and his Third Violin Concerto, written at the height of the Second World War, is virtuosic and lyrical in equal measure, its unashamed Romanticism perhaps an escape from troubled times. The four late Caprices for violin and orchestra form a concertante serenade in all but name; and one of his very last pieces was a dark and moving tribute to a musician friend, the slow movement of a suite he did not live to finish.

The Choir of Westminster School blends the ancient and modern in this festive collection of choral works, drawing on Advent and Christmas music by composers including Judith Weir, James MacMillan, John Tavener, Roxanna Panufnik and Ralph Vaughan Williams. With a national reputation for excellence, the Choir of Westminster school gives annual concerts at the Barbican and performs regularly at venues including Westminster Abbey, St John's Smith Square and the Houses of Parliament. Under the direction of Timothy Garrard, Director of Music, the Choir rehearses regularly throughout the week in preparation for twice-weekly services in Westminster Abbey and evensongs in the School Chapel.

The Russian-born Mischa Spoliansky (1898—1985) became one of the major names in cabaret in 1920s Berlin and then, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, in London, he became one of the best-known composers of film scores. He also wrote a handful of orchestral works, which have remained unknown until now. His Boogie is a witty, tongue-in-cheek piece of orchestral jazz, and the Overture to My Husband and I, one of his stage shows, has a Mozartian sparkle and wit. But it is his only Symphony, an epic statement composed over a period of nearly three decades, that constitutes his real achievement as an orchestral composer – the fourth of its five movements apparently offering Spoliansky’s own musical commentary on the Holocaust.

REVIEW:

Some may recognize Spoliansky’s name as the composer for a host of British films from the 1930s onwards, including Sanders of the River, The Ghost Goes West, King Solomon's Mines, The Happiest Days of Your Life , Saint Joan and North West Frontier. That he wrote this marvelous symphony during his ‘time off’ is quite something – tuneful, richly orchestrated, cleverly planned and gloriously uplifting, it remains one of the biggest surprises I have come across for a long time.

-- MusicWeb International

CAMINHO DE CASA

The second CD with Paul Hindemith’s string quartets - superbly interpreted by the renowned Juilliard String Quartet - has just been released. Samuel Rhodes writes in the liner notes of the CD: "My group, the Juilliard String Quartet, has been fascinated by the Hindemith quartets for some time. We are challenged by the depth of the musical content, the overflowing vitality, and the sophistication of compositional technique that exist in these works." German Record Critics' Award for the complete recording of Hindemith's string quartets by the Juilliard String Quartet! The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award!

The recording of Paul Hindemith's string quartets by the world-famous Juilliard String Quartet - with founder-member Robert Mann (who left the ensemble after the 1996/97 season) as first violinist - has been completed. The third CD is now available. The CD contains a real "jewel": Hindemith's first quartet op. 2 which remained totally unknown unless it was published in 1994; whereas his fourth quartet op. 22 - performed 127 times just by Hindemith's ensemble in the 1920s, the Amar Quartet - is by far the most popular piece in it's repertoire! German Record Critics' Award for the complete recording of Hindemith's string quartets by the Juilliard String Quartet! The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award!