“Schumann soaked into my life not too fast. It might have been the over intertwining of inner voices…it might have been the broad spectrum of his emotions that needed time to mature and grow within myself….. I did not fall in love with him at first sight as I did with Chopin. Processing his music at times felt heavy. It was like a map in which I had to discover the evolvement of my own searching. The inner struggles, the layers of his wandering spirit embedded in his music either subtle or obvious way (with his own marking) brought me deeper into the cave of my own inner world. To understand him and to ultimately empathize with him required integrity and effort. Nevertheless, contrary to this weight, the duality of Florestan and Eusebius and many between them lift off the certain seriousness in my approach to his music. His music evokes the lightness of the existence. Perhaps the distance which enabled him to observe the alter egos within himself is the humor to his music. I learned to love him in time more than any other composers, most firmly, closely and freely to my heart.“ (Klara Min)

Hamburger Ratsmusik: an ensemble with a 500-year-old history. This contrast prompts a creative dialogue between tradition and the present day, about Early Music and vivid interpretation. The origins of Hamburg‘s “municipal music” go back to the 16th century. Under the motto “in praise of God and for the pleasure, delight and edification of Hamburg”, the city created an elite ensemble of eight city musicians, which was to be the equal of the princely court ensembles (Hofkapellen) to be found elsewhere. The Ratsmusik attained early excellence in the 17th and 18th centuries under such eminent musicians as William Brade, Johann Schop, Georg Philipp Telemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Revived in 1991 by gambist Simone Eckert, the ensemble now performs in Germany, many European countries, the USA and China. More than 30 albums (largely with world premiere recordings of Early Music) and recordings for all German public radio stations and Austrian broadcaster ORF document its rediscoveries of music from the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras. The ensemble received the Echo Klassik award in 2006 and 2010, and was awarded the 2016 RITTER Prize by the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation in Hamburg. The musicians will be responding to renewed invitations to China in 2021. Hamburger Ratsmusik is the Ensemble in Residence in the Komponisten-Quartier museum complex in Hamburg.

The composing career of Simon Bainbridge (born in London in 1952) is spanned by the four chamber works in this album, all of them cast as single narrative spans. The First String Quartet, written when its composer was not yet twenty, blends lyricism and pointillism, rather as if it were recasting abstract poetry in sound; and the recent Second offers a kaleidoscopic tableau of color and nervous energy inspired by visual art. In his Cheltenham Fragments, as the title suggests, Bainbridge uses mosaic technique to build up textures and thematic outlines. And the long lines of the virtuosic Clarinet Quintet generate fleetfooted whirlwinds as they unfold. Linda Merrick and the Kreutzer Quartet worked closely with the composer on the preparation of these recordings.

East West explores musical landscapes from the European and American parts of the globe, resulting in a kind of travel journal that begins in Eastern Europe and then travels westward Duo Aliada is known for their creative approach to adapting classical repertoire for their own instruments. Polish saxophonist Michal Knot and Serbian accordionist Bogdan Laketic formed the duo in 2013 in Vienna, a city whose rich musical tradition reflects its history as a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe. The following years brought Michal and Bogdan to performances around the world, and into contact with various cultures and musical traditions. This wide range of experiences, beginning all the way back with their childhoods in Eastern Europe, is a major source of inspiration for their music making and for this album.

A vibrant mix of creole heritage. The music of Sakili is from the island Rodrigues, a small volcanic island just east of Mauritius. The island’s European and African influences - waltzes, polka, mazurka, Scottish - all blend harmoniously with the ségadrum rhythms to intertwine the past musical traditions of African slaves with the western world. The three members of Sakili (Francis Prosper, Vallen Pierre Louis and Ricardo Legentil) had their own solo careers and were put together in 2019 by Mauritian artistic director Percy Yip Tong. The purpose of the group’s formation was for a European tour to introduce the rarely heard music of the Rodrigues island.

Indian classical music has certain modes and ragas dedicated to the seasons, which have been explored by many generations of musicians. In accordance with the Indian calendar, spring runs from mid-February to mid-April, and is known as Vasant (or Basant). The festival Holi celebrates spring’s arrival. In this album, Baluji captures the rapture of spring, expressing seasonal feelings of renewal and hope through the subtle nuances of the chosen ragas. He celebrates his mastery of the sitar with wonderful sensitivity and dexterity. There are also some thrilling moments enthused by the distinctive tabla playing of Sukhvinder Singh “Pinky”, with his vivacious renditions of 1relas and 2chakradas. Baluji cannot see the colors of flowers but he has heard their voices, and they sing out through this joyous album – Voice of Flowers.

Maasai Footsteps is a project that reveals the evolution of the Maasai culture and shows the value of their traditions in the world today. To illustrate this development, Anuang’a brings modern choreography to the traditional performance of song and dance. Anuang’a describes it as “a show that travels to the ancient times and connects to the present, while revealing how much of the present-day culture is influenced by the past... This is a show that brings out the beauty of the Maasai culture and the unique rhythm of powerful voices and dance.” Anuang’a explains that the dancers are not professionals, and that he wanted to demonstrate the raw talent that exists in the local villages, those who sing and dance as part of their daily routine. The three clans involved are Purko from Maasai Mara, Loodokilani from Magadi and Kisonko from Amboseli. Each of the three clans bring their own combination of rhythm, voices and movements to traditional Maasai songs. While the groups perform a cappella, the contemporary dance that Anuang’a displays is a tribute to the Maasai community.“Tradition is what makes people who they are. If you lose it, you lose your identity.” – A.F.

The man who as W. D. Munn published papers on that branch of mathematics known as semigroup theory had another side to his personality: Douglas Munn (1929–2008), professor of mathematics at the University of Stirling, was also a fine pianist and a gifted composer. His piano music has its origins in Chopin, Brahms and Bartók but is clearly also inflected by Scottish folksong – much of it has a sense of the hills and the open spaces – and is written by someone with an intimate knowledge of the instrument. The Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane knew Douglas Munn and this album is the fulfillment of an unspoken promise to record his piano music.

Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) wrote a considerable quantity of piano music, but it is generally remembered today only for a single piece, ‘Étincelles’, which Horowitz enjoyed playing. The early works on this first instalment in Ian Hobson’s survey of Moszkowski’s complete music for solo piano reveal a debt to Mendelssohn and Schumann, but the craftsmanship already justifies a later remark of Paderewski’s: ‘After Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique’.

Although Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s first instrument was the piano, even as a child he revealed himself to be a highly gifted violinist. In this domain too he was encouraged by his father Leopold, well-known violin teacher in his own right and author of a violin method widely respected at the time. Even when Wolfgang was already 21, father Leopold reaffirmed his son’s violinistic talent, on 8 October 1777. ‘You don’t realize how good you are on the violin when you put your mind to it, playing with character, conviction and spirit, just as if you were the best violinist in Europe.’ That letter was written in the period between 1773 and 1779, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed numerous works requiring string soloists. From April to December of 1775 alone, the 19-year-old penned 5 violin concertos, in an unbroken process as it were. At that time Mozart was employed as concertmaster by the archbishop’s court in Salzburg, where instrumental music was highly prized. He had, however, previously got to know the Italian tradition and art of the violin in situ, frequenting students of the famous Giuseppe Tartini there, such as Pietro Nardini and Gaetano Pugnani. On several occasions during his three journeys to Italy, he also met the Bohemian composer Josef Myslivecek, who cultivated the violin concerto genre intensively. Synthesizing the influence of Italian masters with that of Joseph Haydn, Johann Christian Bach and French violinists, Mozart composed his own concertos, which sparkle with vitality but are at the same time both intimate and graceful.

The piano music of the Estonian composer Heino Eller (1887–1970), a total of 206 works, is not only the largest part of his output: it is also the largest body of works in Estonian classical music. But most of these pieces are unknown, even though the best of them are original contributions to the piano repertoire of the twentieth century, with Eller’s sensitive lyricism underpinned by gentle humor and an occasional epic tone. This seventh volume brings music from half a century of music, from 1912 to 1961 – mostly miniatures but each of them full of atmosphere and personality.

Ronald Center (1913–73) is sometimes described as ‘the Scottish Bartók’, and his music does indeed capture some of the stark, wild energy of the Scottish landscape in a style of Bartókian asperity. These three string quartets show him, in his northeast corner of Scotland, to have been fully conversant with the quartets being written around the same time by Barber, Britten and Shostakovich, but their direct manner, terse expression, wiry humor and roots in Scottish folk-music ensure that Center is his own man.

The German composer Felix Woyrsch was born in 1860 in Troppau (then the capital of Austrian Silesia and now, as Opava, in the Czech Republic) but became prominent in the musical life of Altona, now part of Hamburg, as organist, choirmaster and teacher; he died there in 1944. Woyrsch’s late-Romantic organ music, with distant roots in Bach’s counterpoint, inhabits a harmonic world somewhere between Brahms and Reger, its dark colors reflecting the upheavals in the times through which he lived.

The four works for symphonic wind band composed by Peter Fischer – born in 1956, across the bay from San Francisco, in Martinez, California – are almost textbook examples of American eclecticism, mixing urban vibrancy with a sense of the timeless outdoors, bringing in flavors from jazz and rock and moving easily between vigorous dance-rhythms and sultry nightscapes. Dance, indeed, lies at the heart of most of this music, which gives the mambo, the tango, the tarantella and the waltz a new and spirited twist amid echoes of Stravinsky, Revueltas and Bernstein. In Fischer's Trumpet Concerto, soloist Jens Lindemann plays trumpet, cornet, and flügelhorn.

These two works present two sharply contrasting sides of Malcolm Arnold: his limitless resources of knockabout fun, and a sense of existential tragedy. But each score presents its own surprises: the jocularity of the Grand Concerto Gastronomique conceals some seriously good (though not seriously serious) music; and the delicately scored Ninth Symphony, written after five years when its composer had, in his own words, ‘been through hell’, irradiates its emotional restraint and elegiac tone with moments of light and warmth.

REVIEW:

Overall, this is a typically excellent disc from Toccata; first rate music receiving effective performances presented in an informative and valuable package. Even the rather sombre, indeed haunted, image of Arnold that stares bleakly from the booklet cover is well-chosen and apt. Given that it is two decades since we have had a new survey of Arnold’s magnificent symphonies, I hope that this will prove to be just the beginning of a new cycle – a warmly welcomed disc.

-- MusicWeb International

The dignified bearing and quiet wisdom of Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950) gained him the sobriquet "the conscience of Russian music," and those qualities are reflected in the unemphatic strength of his music. His orchestral, chamber and instrumental works are regaining the currency they once enjoyed, but his large corpus of songs, many of them understated masterpieces, has yet to attract systematic attention – a situation that this series hopes to remedy. The pairing here of his late Violin Sonata with his last two song-cycles for soprano and piano mirrors the Moscow concert in 1947 when all three were given their first performances.

REVIEW:

This disc can be recommended just for the vocal works. The late Violin Sonata is a bonus, especially in its final revised version – the work underwent two revisions after its 1947 premiere by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin. Just a few years ago, there were no recordings of the piece.

The 28-page booklet contains very well translated informative notes and full song text translations from Russian into English. This outstanding release is highly recommended. For me, it is one of the finest discs of 2021.

-- MusicWeb International

Gary Stroutsos honors the Hopi Tribe with solo improvisations on a reincarnated leena. Featuring the plaintive and haunting sounds of the Hopi long flute, these pieces are inspired by the landscapes of the American Southwest, and the people who have lived there since time immemorial. Songs for Leena is the follow-up album to Öngtupqa. The Hopi Tribe have maintained their flute tradition for thousands of years. Today, it is still actively cultivated with the help of The Hopi Long Flute Preservation Project, of which Gary is an honorable member. Due to his dedication to the instrument, and long-term friendships with cultural practitioners of the tribe, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office invited Gary to join the project – an offer never extended to a non-native before. Profits from this album will go towards The Hopi Long Flute Preservation Project.

The friendship between Mátyás Seiber and Antal Doráti dates back to their youth, when they were the two youngest students in Zoltán Kodály's composition class in Budapest in the 1920s. Doráti was one year younger than Seiber and held him in high esteem from the beginning. In the memoirs, Így láttuk Kodályt [‘Thus We Saw Kodály’], he writes the following: "The two 'best' were Mátyás Seiber and Lajos Bárdos. Matyi [Mátyás] wrote a great string quartet at the time, which has survived. One of our tasks was to write variations on a Handel theme. In response to one of Seiber's slow-tempo variations, Mr Kodály said: 'That's nice'. In our eyes - at least in my eyes - that was the canonization of Matyi."

The 24 Preludes of Adam Gorb (born in Cardiff in 1958 and a feature of musical life in Manchester for over two decades) follow the examples of Chopin and Shostakovich in describing a cycle of fifths – though his descend, whereas Chopin’s and Shostakovich’s go up. Like those earlier exemplars, as also the preludes of Debussy, Rachmaninov and others, Gorb’s are miniature studies of personality and mood – charming, brittle, perky, languorous, bat-flight fast, borderline violent or tender, as required. His Velocity does what it says on the can: it’s a wild, even manic, chase, over rhythmically dislocating ground.