Percy Grainger was one of the great “originals” of 20th century music. Australian-born, he studied with his mother while a boy and later went to Germany where his career as a virtuoso pianist began. As a composer he was largely self-taught and strongly influenced by the folk music of Great Britain and Ireland, Many of his “miniatures”-such titles as Country Gardens, Handel in the Strand and Molly on the Shore-established his composing credentials very early on. But Grainger was also an inveterate innovator and experimenter in music, and the kaleidoscopic aspects of his compositional creativity-evident in highly imaginative works often with unprecedented rhythms, harmonies and scoring-are fully represented in the programme heard on this recording. The music was digitally recorded with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in February 1989, at the acoustically excellent South Melbourne Town Hall.

This new release is the latest title in The American Bandmasters Association’s Commemorative Recording Series, and focuses on the legacy of John R. Bourgeois. Colonel John R. Bourgeois, USMC (Ret), was the 25th Director of “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band. His acclaimed career spanned nine presidential administrations from Presidents Eisenhower to Clinton. A native of Louisiana, Colonel Bourgeois is a graduate of Loyola University in New Orleans. He joined the Marine Corps in 1956 and entered The President’s Own in 1958 as a French Hornist and arranger. Named Director in 1979, Colonel Bourgeois was promoted to his present rank in 1983. He retired from active duty on July 11, 1996. As director of The President’s Own, Bourgeois was Music Adviser to the White House. He selected the musical program and directed the band in its traditional place of honor at the US Capitol for four presidential inaugurations, a Marine Band tradition dating back to 1801. He regularly conducted the Marine Band and the Marine Chamber Orchestra at the White House, appearing there more frequently than any other musician in the nation.

Ravel's status as one of the most popular composers of all time rests to a large extent on the phenomenal success of Bolero. Yet there is much more to this endlessly intriguing man's work than the "seventeen minutes of orchestral tissue without music": childhood fantasy, Spain, the Orient, American jazz, the theater, clockwork toys and all the things mechanical, preoccupied Maurice Ravel throughout his life, and echoes of each can be found in all corners of his music.

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.

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.

The final volume of Percy Grainger’s complete music for wind band once again respects his precise instrumental demands in pieces that span the breadth of his career, from his first large work in the genre, ‘The Lads of Wamphray March,’ to ‘The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart,’ his largest such work and one of his last. Also to be heard are ‘A Lincolnshire Posy,’ one of the genre’s most famous and beautiful works; ‘The Immovable Do,’ which contains “the most long-held pedal note in all music”; and the revolutionary ‘Hill-Song No. 1,’ which Grainger considered the greatest of all his compositions. All of the scores in this series follow, to the letter, Grainger’s specific instructions as to the instrumentation. The Royal Norwegian Navy Band have starred for Naxos before, not least on some Sousa albums. Bjarte Engeset has been music director of the Tromso Symphony Orchestra and The Norwegian Wind Ensemble, artistic director of Northern Norway’s Northern Lights Festival and Opera Nord, as well as permanent guest conductor of the Flemish Radio orchestra. His discography includes more than 30 best-selling recordings, including an eight-album set of Grieg’s complete orchestral works on Naxos.

Percy Grainger admired the expressive intensity of the wind band and considered it a more suitable medium for the transcription of early music- such as the Bach and Ferrabosco pieces heard here- than the symphony orchestra. In this second volume of his music for wind ensemble there are further examples from the 23 ‘Chosen Gems for Winds,’ full of his unique elastic scoring, as well as two versions of the ‘Irish Tune from County Derry,’ one of his most beloved works, and a world premiere recording of Grainger’s arrangement of his friend Herman Sandby’s lovely ‘Intermezzo.’

Percy Grainger called the saxophone ‘the world’s finest wind-tone tool, the most voice-like’, and wrote for it a series of fascinating but hitherto little-explored works. These arrangements are special in that, unusually, Grainger largely abandoned his idea of ‘elastic scoring’ and noted specific instrumental configurations. The selections include the music of J.S. Bach, British and Norwegian folksongs, old polyphonic instrumental and vocal music, as well as two original compositions, each indelibly stamped with Grainger’s experiences as pianist, folk-song collector, and proponent of early music.

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).