Through the Reeds is a collection of woodwind concerti from American composer Walter Ross. A lifelong musician and composer, Ross has historically worked most closely with instruments in the woodwind family; the four concerti on this album, all of which feature woodwind solo, highlight his preference for the family and his keep ability to compose works for oboe, bassoon, and flute.

For centuries, babies and children all over the world have been rocked to sleep with a song to calm them. Whether parents sing or play, or press play, they know that music so often soothes with success. Composers have written lullabies for different reasons—sometimes as standalone songs or pieces and sometimes as part of a larger work. Here is a variety of restful tracks to foster the sweet dreams of all!

Frank Sinatra dubbed Robert Farnon ‘The Guv’nor’ in 1962 when the two men first came together in London to work on an album. This summed up Farnon’s reputation as being synonymous with the highest standards of craftsmanship across the widest spectrum of music-making, earning him four Ivor Novello awards and the Order of Canada. His fame was established with BBC wartime radio broadcasts and the ubiquitous Portrait of a Flirt. Further success came with TV themes such as the stirring Colditz March and the impressionistic beauty of such gems as À la claire fontaine. The performances on this acclaimed recording are given with ‘warmth, polish and a remarkable naturalness of idiomatic feeling’ (The Penguin Guide).

Review:

These 17 short pieces are drawn from among the elite of British style light music. Their dates are mostly scattered throughout the 1940s with outliers in the 1950s and 1970s. They were written by a Toronto-born man who was a prince among light music practitioners. He never lacked for work even when the genre began to stagger.

There are plenty of familiar moments including the Westminster chimes in the slippery-gliding polished Westminster Waltz and the unaccustomed gauntness of the Colditz March written later on for BBCTV’s successful Colditz series. Manhattan Playboy has a few Gershwin twists and twirls and streetcar references among Farnon’s usual broad bow-wave melodies. For all his faculty for commercial sheen he never lost touch with his gentle high summer pastoral side, as in Lake of the Woods, How Beautiful is Night, Pictures in the Fire, À la claire Fontaine and In a Calm. Each adds some contrast in what would otherwise have been a little unremitting. The 1946 State Occasion is a foray into Sovereign pomp and circumstance, much as Haydn Wood’s contemporary marches as well as the Empire March by Montague Phillips. Gateway to the West is among the most satisfying of his pieces and reeks of a confident sunny travelogue of the 1940s cinema ‘shorts’.

The collection launches with the well-practised exhilarations of Portrait of a Flirt. Farnon returns to the theme sometimes in comedic garb. Peanut Polka and Jumping Bean both recall the cinema sing-a-longs when a ball would bounce from word to word on screen to encourage the audience to sing and keep time.

This is good and true to style with a nice mix of moods.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

Allied to his melodic gifts, early experiences as a sound and balance engineer equipped Trevor Duncan with a profound understanding of instrumental color. During the 1950s he composed music that became instantly recognizable in the light music tradition. The Girl from Corsica was heard almost daily on British radio and the theme tune for the BBC TV series Dr Finlay’s Casebook remains one of his most celebrated works (it’s part of A Little Suite, heard here in full). Duncan was an inspiration for other composers, and was capable of sensuous romance, breezy scene setting, delicate tone poems and irresistible glamour.

Review:

The meticulous craft and polish that characterizes the composer’s music is on ample display in this collection, to say nothing of his ability to produce high-quality music according to very specific demands and timeframes.

The essence of what makes Duncan’s music so loveable can be heard in his tripartite scores Children in the Park from 1954 and A Little Suite from 1959. Their external breeziness belies their sophistication of orchestration and form. The central “Lullaby” movement of the latter work, for example, is a masterclass in miniature on how to subtly play with instrumental color: harp and celesta (with the latter instrument enjoying a brief, but gorgeous solo) limn a winsomely pastoral melody to telling effect as it is passed from plummy clarinets to sleek strings and back. What sounds straightforward on paper is utterly magical in performance.

Similar exquisite calibrations of instrumental color are heard in the well-known “20th Century Express,” “High Heels,” and “The Girl From Corsica,” each of the latter two also carrying beguiling hints of David Rose’s “Holiday for Strings” and Hugo Winterhalter’s hit version of “Song of the Barefoot Contessa” respectively. Duncan’s personal touches in harmony and instrumental color, however, ensure that neither sound derivative.

As the popularity of light music withered against the rise of rock in the 1960s, Duncan turned increasingly to works that were more introspective and serious, yet no less touched by his unique sparkle. A preview of this stylistic turn is heard in his St. Boniface Down (An Idyll) from 1956, the longest single work on this album. It opens with chant-like figure on horns and cellos, followed by a descending five-note response in the woodwinds (based on a verse by Paul Verlaine) that is repeated a number of times, which then leads into an eerie passage for solo horn and celesta that almost sounds as if it were right out of Shostakovich. The atmosphere sketched is one of endless grays, an evocative aural depiction of resignation. Little surprise, then, that Duncan was inspired by his unhappiness that resulted from an unrequited infatuation.

The latest work on this collection is the “Serenade (In the Style of Schubert),” one of the movements from his 1967 Maestro Variations. Although the accompaniment somewhat recalls the Austrian composer’s “An die Musik,” it does not really sound much like him otherwise. (In fact, the music reminded me more of Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse!) It is, nevertheless, an enjoyable and tuneful movement that makes one eager to hear the rest of the work it is extracted from.

While the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra sometimes sound a trifle flat-footed in their other recordings in this series (e.g. the Ronald Binge volume), here they sound relaxed, playing with dapper phrasing and timing under the direction of Andrew Penny. The production by Murray Khouri and Hubert Geschwandtner is satisfyingly full and deep. The excellent liner notes are by David Ades, whose death in 2015 robbed the world of a veritable walking encyclopedia of light and easy-listening music.

At the Naxos price, this collection of Duncan’s music is too good to pass up.

--MusicWeb International (Néstor Castiglione)

Classical Music

Spells, a new retrospective collection highlighting the music of poet and composer Juli Nunlist, marks a touching journey through the earnest, romantic, and dramatic sounds of the late artist's compositional language. The album's works demonstrate Nunlist's appreciation for tradition and grandeur, and are driven by her remarkable gift for melody and clear fascination with instrumental texture. Nunlist's literary background seems to inform the potency of the album's vocal works, including the intimate a cappella choral arrangement on the title track, a choral setting of six poems by the English poet Kathleen Raine; and the epic Six Chansons from Prières dans l'arches, for vocal soloists and orchestra. Though these pieces feature contrasting instrumentations, they both display the composer's effortless text setting and brilliantly sensitive orchestration. In each, her compelling writing brings the given text to life, and activates the nuance of its narrative and symbolism with intricate vocal an dinstrumental arrangements. To this end, Spells uses subtle melodic, harmonic, and textural recurrences to convey an enveloping and somewhat cyclical form. The Six Chansons, on the other hand, build vast sonic wonderlands, imaged through Nunlist's incredible command of orchestral space and density. Each of the Chansons pairs vocalists and a large instrumental ensemble, with some of the work's most compelling moments arising from these unique and highly exposed pairings, such as solo mezzo-soprano and celeste. The album's romantic centerpiece arrives with Nunlist's String Quartet, a piece which hearkens back to the genre's seminal nineteenth century masterpiece with its captivating melodies and gripping subversions of functional harmony. Moreover, in a structural sense. Nunlist's String Quartet is one of the most impressive works on Spells, especially in its dramatic closing movement. In the final moments of this piece, the music refuses to repose, and, on the strength of a new theme, the quartet gains energy and determination. This surprising turn in the work's formal trajectory is unquestionably meaningful, and seems to demonstrate a fearless quality in Nunlist's compositional perspective.

How to depict scenes of battle in music is a task that has long fascinated composers. From the dawning of the Renaissance the first successful programmatic works appeared from Susato, Dowland and Biber. But it was the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that witnessed a true flourishing, when composers utilized the full resources of contemporary symphonism to evoke the tumult of battle. Later the medium of film, notably those produced in Hollywood, brought with it colorful and gripping scores.

What if there hadn't been a Mozart? Although this is an intriguing question for classical music lovers to debate and scholars to ponder, the fact is we'd be paying far more serious--and deserved--attention to Haydn, and beyond that we'd be stuck with the mediocre, very much of-its-time work of composers such as Antonio Salieri. Given all the discussion, much of it sheer nonsense, regarding the Mozart/Salieri rivalry, just a brief listen to any of these 12 overtures tells you what you already know: the monster talent/genius of Mozart had not a whit to fear from the competent Italian technician who was most widely respected for his pedagogical skills (Beethoven, Czerny, Schubert). Of course, the reality of the time and place dictated certain conditions of privilege and position, conferred by circumstances more political than artistically meritorious. Salieri undoubtedly was highly regarded and enjoyed a prominent position in Viennese musical circles, and he was talented, especially in the creation of a certain style of opera that audiences of the time literally ate up. Indeed, in the works on this program Salieri shows a certain dramatic flair, as in the opening of La Grotta di Trofonio--but with a few strokes of the pen, à la Don Giovanni, Mozart wiped out Salieri's best efforts in this genre. This takes nothing away from the very steady and polished musicians of the Slovak Radio Symphony, nor from Michael Dittrich's committed direction. Together they make the most of the music's considerable rhythmic energy, pleasant melodies, and frequent mood shifts typical of the style.

--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Along with Suchon and Cikker, Alexander Moyzes was one of the leading Slovak composers of his generation. His compositional style was inspired by the folk music and beautiful landscapes of his native land, but also took account of contemporary trends in European music after the First World War. These early symphonies, infused with Moyzes’ masterful orchestration and control of counterpoint, signify a new period in 20th century Slovak music. This album is a reissue of a previous release from 2000 that was part of the Marco Polo complete Moyzes symphonic cycle. Fanfare wrote of the original release: “A [release] no collection of 20th century symphony can do without. Bring on the remaining 10!” ClassicsToday.com wrote: “Moyzes’ music is engaging, well crafted, and beautifully orchestrated- qualities clearly understood and successfully conveyed by Ladislav Slovak and his Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The tour visits the Tin Soldier Museum at Kulmbach, the National Army Museum, the Wellington Memorial, and St. Paul's Cathedral in London, and the Bavarian Army Museum at Ingolstadt, with it's relics of the Thirty Years War and of conflicts with the Ottoma Empire. The tour brings Beethoven's musical celebration of Wellington's victorious campaign in Spain, Liszt's Battle of the Huns and a Georgian war march by Ippolitov-Ivanov. The tour ends with two military works by Rimsky-Korsakov, King Dodon on the Battlefield, from his last opera, The Golden Cockerel, and the Massacre at Kerzhenets from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.

Alexander Moyzes, one of the leading Slovakian composers of his generation, created a nationally inspired style that also assimilated trends aligning his music with contemporaries such as Shostakovich. The Eleventh Symphony builds on the success of the Tenth, intensifying it's emotional impact and developing sophisticated cycles of transformation and variation. Simpler and more concise than preceding works, the Twelfth Symphony was Moyzes' final orchestral statement and his 'diary in music.' He said it 'also seeks to express my attitude to life... We have to take life as it is, with all it's digressions, demands, and haste.' The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra was established in 1929 as the first professional symphony orchestra in Slovakia. The orchestra is currently led by conductor Mario Kosik.

Johann Strauss II the ‘Waltz King’ was the most famous and enduringly successful of 19th c. light music composers, captivating not only Vienna but the whole of Europe and America with his tuneful dances and marches. Of these dances none was more of a ‘snapshot’ of contemporary musical life than the quadrille. Its six distinct sections invited the use of musical highlights from the latest theatre hits, and Strauss the Younger was at the forefront of those writing quadrilles using the themes of others, from Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl to Offenbach’s Orpheus, and his own operetta masterpiece Die Fledermaus.

A Musical Journey - Crimea / Russia / Uzbekistan

Alexander Moyzes was among the leading Slovak composers of his generation, drawing inspiration from the traditions and landscape of his own country while absorbing a number of wider contemporary trends. His Symphony No. 3, or Little Symphony is derived from an earlier Wind Quintet, while Symphony No. 4, with its occasional suggestions of Mahler and Sibelius, combines protest at the injustice of war with the past history of the Slovaks. The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra was established in 1929 as the first professional symphony orchestra in Slovakia. The orchestra is currently led by conductor Mario Kosik. It has made a large number of recordings for labels including Opus, Supraphon, Naxos and Marco Polo. In addition to regular season concerts, which feature works by Slovak composers, many of them as premieres, the orchestra has performed at concerts abroad, visiting Austria and Hungary, and touring in Europe, Japan, and Korea.

Alexander Moyzes was one of the most significant figures in modern Slovak music, synthesizing the national musical style inherited from his teacher Vitezslav Novak with wider European contemporary trends. Both of these symphonies were written in a happy period of the composer’s life- before his musical oeuvre was overshadowed by conflict. The eloquent and sprightly Fifth Symphony is a celebration of ‘the heritage of my dear father,’ who was also a talented musician and an important figure in Alexander’s development as a composer. The Sixth Symphony is notable for its clarity and symmetry, from the simple theme of its opening to the brilliant contrapuntal fugato in its closing movement. This is Volume 3 in a series of reissues from the Marco Polo label. These releases remain as the only easily accessible reference, and with recordings and performances that still sound fresh and invigorating. Of the original release, MusicWeb International commented: “There are definite folk inflections, all incisively propelled by the late Ladislav Slovak and his orchestra who presumably know these symphonies better than anyone.”

The Vieuxtemps violin concertos offer a feast for violinists (and listeners) who are attuned to their special charms and have an affinity for Romantic concertos. Misha Keylin scores on both counts. He's a Russian-born, Juilliard-trained American whose traversal of these works for Naxos is capped by this installment of the final three. The Fifth is the most popular of them all, with splendid recordings by Heifetz and Grumiaux, and Keylin's is right up there with them, and better engineered too. He's somewhere between Heifetz's supercharged virtuosity and Grumiaux's slightly understated elegance, combining both of those essential qualities. The Fifth is an oddly constructed work in three movements, the first being three times longer than the other two. While Keylin excels in that dramatic first movement, the sheer poetry of his Adagio and the brilliant tonal qualities he demonstrates in the fiery brief last movement make his performance especially memorable.


The Sixth and Seventh concertos date from Vieuxtemps' last year, 1881, but there are few valedictory qualities to be found in them. The Sixth is a delightful confection pervaded by a light-hearted spirit and teeming with fetching melodies. The longest movement is the first, an Allegro moderato from which drama is largely excluded, the soloist given the requisite virtuoso fiddling duties but within a lyrical context. Keylin's relaxed phrasing and his rich but sugar-free tone make the most of the beauties of the Pastorale, and he's alive to the rhythmic subtleties that make the Siciliano movement so enticing. The Seventh Concerto is made of sterner virtuoso stuff, as in the coda to the first movement, where Keylin never makes anything approaching a strained or ugly sound, and he sails through the final Allegro vivo without appearing to break a sweat. Throughout the disc, Keylin's technical facility is allied to real feeling for the music, without which these works can strain interest.


It's not just a one-man show, either. Both conductors and orchestras provide first-rate support (Yuasa and the Arnhem Philharmonic in the Seventh and Mogrelia and the Slovak Radio band in the other two), and the engineering captures the performances with admirable realism. At the Naxos price, this is a steal. [9/6/2003]
--Dan Davis, ClassicsToday.com

With orchestral works at the core of his output, the supreme melodic gift that distinguishes the music of Eric Coates earned him a reputation as the ‘uncrowned king of light music’. It was the London Suite that made Coates a household name, with the Cockney exuberance of its third movement, Knightsbridge, capturing the nation’s imagination as a BBC theme tune, as did the rousing march Calling All Workers. Cinderella and The Selfish Giant were inspired by his son’s bedtime stories, the latter absorbing the jazzy dance rhythms of the day. The Dambusters March was one of Coates’ last pieces, and remains one of the most iconic movie themes ever written.

The places visited include St Petersburg, Peter the Great's new westward-looking capital, and the traditional capital, Moscow. In Ukraine we see Odessa with the famous Potemkin Steps and something of the surrounding countryside of a region that for long offered holiday resorts to those living in Moscow or St Petersburg.

Eric Coates was a master of refined and beautiful melodies, making him a household name during the golden years of British light music in the first half of the 20th century. The Four Ways Suite takes us to all four points of the compass, including exotic China and the jazz rhythms of America, while Springtime evokes both sweeping optimism and soulful memories of a lost age. The virtuoso Saxo-Rhapsody is one of the era’s major saxophone works, and Sleepy Lagoon remains famous as the signature tune to BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs. High Flight March was to be Coates’ last composition. Since 1992, conductor Andrew Penny has made over 50 recordings for the Naxos and Marco Polo labels. Much of the repertoire is British music and includes symphonies by Arnold and Havergal Brian, film music by Vaughan Williams and Walton, theatre music by Sullivan and Holbrooke, and light music by Coates and Arnold. Penny has been on the instrumental music staff at Hymers College since 1977 and is the longest serving musical director of the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra. He was awarded the MBE for services to music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2014.

Frederic Curzon started his career as a virtuoso organist, touring countless British theatres and concert venues. From 1938 he devoted himself to composition, creating a catalogue of works that is truly astonishing for its size and scope. This recording reveals Curzon’s fascination with Spain, and also features orchestral showpieces and evocations of cultured gentility, from the swagger of The Boulevardier to the wistful nostalgia of Simonetta. The Robin Hood Suite represents Curzon at the height of his melodic inspiration. As one affectionate obituary stated, ‘he was a classic among English light music composers’.

Acknowledged by Sir Arthur Sullivan as his musical heir, Edward German enjoyed huge acclaim during his lifetime. His dances are ‘charged with the fragrant essence of the greenwood’ and the Overture to Nell Gwyn, with its richly English themes, explains Elgar’s liking for German’s music. The gloriously romanticized Gipsy Suite pays subtle homage to Dvořák; the dances from Henry VIII were responsible for his early celebrity; and Tom Jones (on 8.660270-71) and Merrie England were two of his greatest stage successes. Conductor Adrian Leaper is a prominent conductor in Naxos’ roster and in addition to those light music discs he has also recorded formidable recordings of Elgar and Wieniawski (8.572952), and Havergal Brian (8.572014), among many others.

Classical Music

ELGAR: Enigma Variations / Pomp and Circumstance Marches Nos

PROKOFIEV: Orchestral Suites

STRAUSS II, J.: Edition - Vol. 50

STRAUSS II, J.: Edition - Vol. 51

RUBINSTEIN: Piano Concerto No. 5 / Caprice Russe

Ga Da Mei Lin

QUILTER: Where the Rainbow Ends / Country Pieces

Joseph Holbrooke was one of the great hopes of British music in the early years of the century; but by the time of his death in 1958 his music was seldom performed. A recent CD of historical recordings (Symposium, 4/93) gave a hint of what we might have been missing- but this new collection provides a far better chance to judge the justice or otherwise of the composer's neglect.

Holbrooke gained much inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings inspired three of the works here. Like Poe, Holbrooke enjoyed conflict and confrontation, and the prevailing tone of the music here is of dark brooding. Holbrooke was uniformly praised for the mastery of his orchestration and the boldness of his harmonies; but his penchant for huge forces and unusual orchestral instruments (including concertinas and sarrusophones) meant he was not always taken seriously (as anyone who has read Beecham's A Mingled Chime will know). It was with The Raven in 1900 that Holbrooke first made his mark, and one cannot but be impressed with what a young man of 21 did with the orchestra. Perhaps, though, it is the orchestral prelude to his cantata The Bells that most grabs the attention. From the Ravelian opening to the grand climax in which massed bells ring out it is impressive stuff. Can we expect a Holbrooke revival? I somehow doubt it; but Marco Polo earn the warmest gratitude for giving us the opportunity to judge for ourselves. Purchasers of their Bantock and Brian recordings will not want to miss out on this rewarding collection.

-- Gramophone [11/1993]