SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the label debut of pianist- composer Eric McElroy with Tongues of Fire, a collection of 21 songs, all in premiere recordings, performed with acclaimed tenor James Gilchrist.

American-born, Oxford, England-based, McElroy has composed extensively for piano, voice, choir, orchestra and various chamber ensembles, and has a growing reputation for his song settings of contemporary poets. Tongues of Fire features four song-cycles and a single song by living and 20th-century poets.

Six of Robert Graves’ early war poems form ‘A Dead Man’s Embers’. As McElroy comments in his erudite booklet notes, the songs are “about death, exploring as they do our schizophrenic feelings of terror and awe towards the subject”.

The much-lauded American poet W.S. Merwin provides the source for ‘After the Voices’, six songs with an “undercurrent of displacement, nostalgia, and identity” that gloss the poet’s conviction that “poetry is about what cannot be said”. Setting five poems by Gregory Leadbetter, The Fetch, says McElroy, is “a song-cycle about the uncanny... a confrontation between experience and language”.

The disc’s title, Tongues of Fire, is taken from three settings by Grevel Lindop, whose work McElroy asserts, “exemplifies the Erotic Sublime [and] conveys truths about love and desire that are, in the profoundest sense, universal”.

Completing the disc is Alice Oswald’s A Short Story of Falling, which “expresses in couplets the enormous range of water’s manifestations and powers … evoking both the grace and wild force of waterscapes that exist above, below, around, and within ourselves … a poem that is full of joy”.

James Gilchrist’s previous SOMM recordings include three admired volumes of One Hundred Years of British Song (SOMMCD 0621; 0636; 0646), two volumes of Parry’s English Lyrics (SOMMCD 257; 270), and Penelope Thwaites’ From Five Continents (SOMMCD 0612), to which, theclassicalreview said, “Gilchrist brings authority throughout”.

SOMM RECORDINGS continues its acclaimed Vaughan Williams Live series celebrating the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth with Volume 4 featuring his signature Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, the Concerto for Two Pianos and Eighth Symphony in recordings conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos and Sir John Barbirolli. The Tallis Fantasia is a live recording from Carnegie Hall in 1943 with Mitropoulos, a committed advocate for Vaughan Williams’ music, conducting the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra. They are also heard in the Concerto for Two Pianos, again from Carnegie Hall in 1952, when the soloists were Arthur Whittemore and Jack Lowe, who forged a widely popular and critically acclaimed piano duo partnership in America in the middle of the last century. Recorded in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1964, the Symphony No.8 is blazingly conducted by its dedicatee, Sir John Barbirolli, leading the Hallé Orchestra.

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Classical Changes, a second disc by the Art Deco Trio which treats favourite classical pieces to delightful and often dazzling jazz-accented re-workings in variegated arrangements by Iain Farrington. Comprising three remarkable instrumentalists – Peter Sparks clarinet, Kyle Horch saxophone, Iain Farrington piano – the Art Deco Trio is a virtuosic powerhouse in performance and made its acclaimed label debut with Gershwinicity (SOMMCD 0631) in 2021. Also featuring five African-American Spirituals and three sea shanties, Classical Change takes the early-20th-century fashion for “Jazzing the Classics” at face value with a collection of 20 first recordings of scintillating new arrangements, translating the works’ “original sober environment into one that was more intoxicated”, as Farrington tellingly comments in his booklet notes.

Familiar pieces by Beethoven, Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov are respectively refashioned in the, by turns, evocative, exuberant and ecstatic ‘Elise’s Blues’, ‘Hungarian High-Five’ and ‘The Bite of the Flumblebee’. Similar treatment is afforded Bizet (The excitable ‘Jiffy Dance’ and sultry ‘One Night in Seville’), the ceremonial pomp of Handel (‘Arrival Revival’), grandeur of Elgar (‘Saturday in the Park with Elgar’), and grandiosity of Wagner (‘Valerie Takes a Ride’) alongside vivacious re-imaginings of Satie and Vivaldi. The trio of sea shanties in A Sea Shanty Shake-Up and the five-part Lay My Burden Down, drawn from African-American Spirituals, prove pleasingly amenable to Farrington’s jazz-laced re-fashioning of their various messages and moods.Of the Art Deco Trio’s Gershwinicity, BBC Music Magazine declared “What’s not to love? It’s a winning combination and the arrangements are top-notch too. This is a recording that is guaranteed to get you moving”. Fanfare approvingly commented: “Not only are the arrangements superb, but so is the Art Deco Trio’s performance of them … I think it’s a safe bet that any Gershwin aficionado will be as captivated with this disc as I was”.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce – A Bad Night in Los Angeles – a disc of music for solo piano and piano duet by Robert Matthew-Walker, with Mark Bebbington partnered by Rebeca Omordia. Matthew-Walker has been an influential part of the classical recording industry for more than 50 years, running marketing and publicity departments for leading labels CBS and RCA, and as editor of Musical Opinion magazine since 2009. A Bad Night in Los Angeles features first recordings of eight works composed between 1980 and 2021, including the title track – “disco dance music for the piano” – one of Three American Pictures offering vibrant impressions of the City of Angels and New York.The earliest, substantial work, Fantasy-Sonata: Hamlet, Matthew-Walker’s Third Piano Sonata, is “neither programmatic nor a character portrait”, says the composer who describes it as “a metaphysical work”.

The Evening of Memory is a contemplative piece inspired by a comment by the American General Douglas MacArthur, Nocturne and Aubade two contrasting miniatures for left-hand, Battledore, a five-part suite for children. Completing the disc are tributes to other composers: The Fields are White Already “a contemplation for solo piano in memoriam John McCabe”; Fantasy on a Theme from Malcolm Arnold built around the older composer’s name; and Divertimento on a Theme of Mozart “an aphoristic patchwork” for piano duet suggested by the F major Sonata (K.533).

Robert Matthew-Walker took lessons with Darius Milhaud, has produced more than 130 recordings and published many books, subjects ranging from Muhammad Ali and David Bowie to Rachmaninov, Havergal Brian and Grieg.

Mark Bebbington has recorded extensively for SOMM. His previous collaboration with Rebeca Omordia, The Piano Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (SOMMCD 0164), was hailed by MusicWeb International as “spellbinding”. Gramophone declared it “a classy anthology [with an] unremitting logic, sweep and concentration that thrill to the marrow”.

Somm Recordings celebrates the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth with Vaughan Williams Live, Volume 3, featuring signature works conducted by the composer including the 1943 world premiere of his Fifth Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. All performances on this double-album set have been expertly restored and re-mastered by Lani Spahr.

SOMM Recordings announces the launch of a major three-volume series devoted to the rich and varied songs of Stephen Dodgson on the eve of the 10th anniversary of his death in 2013, aged 89. Dodgson was a prolific composer with a notable focus on works for guitar, harpsichord and recorder.

SOMM Recordings announces the exciting label debut of the trio Voice with Hildegard Portraits, marking the tenth anniversary of the canonization of the 12th-century spiritual leader, theologian, mystic, scientist and composer, St. Hildegard of Bingen. Hailed by Gramophone as inheritors of “the slot left by the dissolution of Anonymous 4”, Voice – Emily Burn, Victoria Couper and Clemmie Franks – formed in 2006. Singing together since their early teens in the Oxford Girls’ Choir, and as members of Stevie Wishart’s Sinfonye, they have toured throughout the UK, USA and Europe.

Hildegard Portraits draws on close relationships between Voice and the featured composers. It takes its title from the first recording of Laura Moody’s seven-part setting of Hildegard’s letters forming a portrait, Moody says, of “not so much a saint, seer or symbol, but a woman who lived and loved”. Their collaboration with “friend and mentor” Stevie Wishart continues with first recordings of Aseruz trium vocum and O choruscans lux (choir version), responses to what Voice describe as “the soaring, melismatic lines, the flourishes and ornamentation, and mesmerizing unison sound” of St. Hildegard’s own music, heard to sublime effect in six pieces, including O clarissima mater, O virtus sapientie and Nunc gaudeant. Other exclusive/first recordings include Marcus Davidson’s Musical Harmony and O Boundless Ecclesia, Emily Levy’s compelling blend of folk-inspired melody and Hildegardian ornamentation, How Sweetly You Burn, and Tim Lea Young’s Three Wings: pt.1 (all composed, like Moody’s title work, for Voice). Ivan Moody’s O quam mirabilis exquisitely sets Hildegard’s own text “expressing to perfection awe at the mystery of the Creator God.”

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce a thrilling first collaboration between long-time SOMM stablemates, baritone Roderick Williams and the Coull Quartet, joined by tenor James Gilchrist and soprano Sophie Bevan. With six world premiere recordings, On This Shining Night is a ravishing recital focusing revealingly on a 20th-century phenomenon: works for voice and string quartet. It takes its title from a James Agate setting by Samuel Barber (whose masterly "Dover Beach" is also heard), here in a sublime arrangement by Roderick Williams. Williams also provides arrangements of Barber’s "Sleep Now" and three Frederick Delius pieces from his Seven Songs from the Norwegian: the evocative "Twilight Fancies," vivacious "Young Venevil" and exotic "I-Brasil." They serve, as Robert Matthew-Walker’s erudite booklet notes observe, as companions to 11 songs by Delius’s close friend and associate, Peter Warlock, including the gentle intimacy of "Corpus Christi," the “mini-cantata” "Sorrow’s Lullaby," and unique free-recitative of "My gostly vader."

Composed for Williams and the Coull Quartet, Sally Beamish’s five-part Tree Carols offer striking, variegated settings of poems by Fiona Sampson in their premiere recording. Roderick Williams’ SOMM catalogue include the acclaimed three-volume Twelve Sets of English Lyrics by Hubert Parry (SOMMCD 257, 270, 272), Sally Beamish’s Four Songs from Hafez (Birdsong, SOMMCD 0633), and the classic English song cycles A Shropshire Lad and Maud (SOMMCD 0615), which MusicWeb International declared a “game changer… in terms of our appreciation of Arthur Somervell’s songs”. The Coull Quartet has recorded a wide repertoire for SOMM. Their recording of Nicholas Maw and Benjamin Britten quartets (SOMMCD 065) was a Gramophone Editor’s Choice and a BBC Music Magazine Benchmark Recording. Gramophone declared their recent SOMM release with Clélia Iruzun, Treasures from the New World, featuring piano quintets by Amy Beach and Henrique Oswald (SOMMCD 0609), “a delight”.

SOMM Recordings’ celebration of the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth continues with Volume 2 of Vaughan Williams Live, featuring historic performances by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in new, signature remasterings by Lani Spahr with authoritative booklet notes by Vaughan Williams’ biographer Simon Heffer. Two works featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus include a 1945 BBC radio broadcast of the first performance of the wartime masterpiece Thanksgiving for Victory – with soprano Elsie Suddaby, organist George Thalben-Ball and Valentine Dyall as the speaker – and the rapturous Serenade to Music from the opening night of the BBC’s Third Programme (now Radio 3) in 1946. First performed in 1938 in celebration of Henry Wood’s jubilee as a conductor and originally composed for 16 solo singers, it appears here in its version for orchestra, chorus and four soloists – Isobel Baillie (soprano), Astra Desmond (contralto), Beveridge White (tenor), and Harold Williams (baritone). Its dedicatee, Boult, conducts a performance of Job: A Masque for Dancing in 1946 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra before he made his four studio recordings of the work. Volume 1 of Vaughan Williams Live (SOMM Ariadne 5016) was hailed by All About the Arts as “beautifully remastered [and] sounding like pure gold” and was The Symphonist’s Record of the Week. SOMM’s other Vaughan Williams recordings include the Gramophone Award-winning Symphony No.5 and Dona Nobis Pacem with the LPO/BBCSO (SOMMCD 071), and The Piano Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams by Mark Bebbington and Rebecca Omordia (SOMMCD 0164), described by International Piano as “compelling”.

SOMM Recordings is thrilled to announce Dance!, the debut recording by the Minerva Piano Trio, featuring seminal pieces by Stravinsky and Ravel alongside new work by two British composers, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Richard Birchall, and Pulitzer Prize-winning American, Caroline Shaw. Formed in 2013 and acclaimed for their “immaculate technique... high degree of maturity, concentration, commitment and energy” by Classical Source, the Minerva Piano Trio – pianist Annie Yim, violinist Michal Cwizewicz, and cellist Richard Birchall – has earned glowing plaudits from audiences and critics alike, Arcana FM marking them as “an ensemble which is clearly going places”, Classical Source declaring “how lucky modern-day composers are to have such expert and sympathetic advocates”, The Times praising them for “the most beautiful sounds”. Dance! features two ballet pieces by Stravinsky and Ravel, the former’s Pulcinella Suite arranged by the Minerva’s Richard Birchall, the latter’s Daphnis et Chloé heard in David Knott’s arrangement of three scenes that, says the Trio’s Annie Yim, illustrate “the discovery of love: innocence, awakening, touch, and passion”. Both arrangements are receiving first recordings. Also making their debuts on album are Birchall’s own Contours, described by Caroline Potter in her informative booklet notes as exploring “the notion and elastic meaning of its title in different ways”, and, in Annie Yim’s arrangement, Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray. Rooted in a Chopin Mazurka, it eloquently mimics its artist namesake’s facility for poetically layered voices and images. Completing the recital is Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s My Fallen Angel. Inspired by a short story about the dour, deadening domesticity of married life by the poet Sylvia Plath, Potter likens both composer and piece to Olivier Messiaen, hailing the work’s “logic and appealing sound world of its own” and Frances-Hoad as “a sound-color synesthete who associates specific colors with sounds”.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth with insightful, deeply felt accounts of his String Quartets Nos.1 and 2, coupled with Gustav Holst’s Phantasy Quartet, by the Tippett Quartet.

This major release sheds new light on one of the enduring friendships of 20th-century British music, Vaughan Williams and Holst having first met at the Royal College of Music in 1895. Vaughan Williams’ early interest in chamber music was fired by lessons with Max Bruch and Maurice Ravel, which prompted his String Quartet No.1 in G minor in 1908, later revised in 1922. It reveals Vaughan Williams, as Robert Matthew-Walker’s authoritative booklet notes suggest, “at his subtlest and most varied: lively, intense and rhythmically delightful… Nothing quite like this had appeared in English chamber-music up to that time”. His last but one chamber work, the A minor String Quartet No.2 (dedicated to Jean Stewart, violist of the Menges Quartet who gave its premiere in October 1944) gives prominence to the viola. Colored by wartime experience, it is a work of “turbulence and angst… an unemotional contemplation of bleak vistas” that movingly gives way to consoling serenity. Holst’s attractive Phantasy Quartet from 1917, heard here in Roderick Swanston’s edition commissioned by the Tippett Quartet who gave its first performance on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, is based on four British folk-songs and offers “easy-going charm as well as much playfulness and warmth”.

The release continues the Tippett Quartet’s championing of British chamber music on SOMM, most recently with Dedication which focused on Ruth Gipps’ clarinet-led music (SOMMCD 0641) and was “recommended” by Gramophone. Their coupling of string quartets by William Alwyn and Doreen Carwithen (SOMMCD 0194) merited a five-star BBC Music Magazine review and was praised by The Strad for its “radiant insight and affection… utterly captivating”.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the second volume of Romantic Revolution, a revelatory exploration by pianist Michael Dussek of the musical relationship between his ancestor, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Fryderyk Chopin.

Volume II focuses on music composed during the period 1789 to 1846 spanning the early years of Dussek’s compositional career and the final years of Chopin’s. Dussek’s early Sonata in G minor (Op.10 No.2) from 1789 already shows the Bohemian composer pushing against inherited norms and reaching towards the testing of form and extreme keyboard ranges that would color his music over the next 20 years, combining, as Dussek says in his insightful booklet notes, “virtuosic fingerwork [that] alternates with operatic dialogue”. His Op.70 Sonata in A flat, Le retour à Paris, from 1805 “in every way breaks new ground” to produce “a thrilling tour de force setting new standards in virtuosic piano writing”. The two companion Chopin pieces – the Fantasy in F minor (Op.49) and Polonaise-Fantaisie in A flat (Op.61) – have been chosen “to emphasize the similarities of piano sonority and harmony” between the two composers. Their inclusion points to Dussek’s guiding aim of the series: “simply to demonstrate the influence, in my view undeniable and at least partially unrecognized, of [Jan Ladislav] Dussek on the great Polish composer [Chopin]”.

SOMM Recordings continues its widely acclaimed championing of the music of Charles Villiers Stanford with a captivating collection of his Children’s Songs by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and baritone Gareth Brynmor John, accompanied by pianist Susie Allan. Including numerous first recordings and the first complete album release of his setting of 14-year-old Helen Douglas Adam’s enchanting Songs from the Elfin Pedlar, it throws revealing new light on an important but largely overlooked aspect of Stanford’s output. Stanford, as his biographer and British music authority Jeremy Dibble comments in his authoritative notes, “was very much alive to the importance of children’s participation in music” following the transformative introduction of signing to the school curriculum in 1870. This delightful compendium of songs intended for children reveals the composer to be as acutely sensitive to his eclectic choice of texts as to his intended audience. It features premiere recordings of the early, Robert Louis Stevenson-set A Child’s Garland of Songs (Op.30), the mid-period Four Songs (Op.112) and later Six Songs (Op.175), together with seven other standalone songs, including the simple pastoral message of Summer’s Rain and Winter’s Snow and delightfully capricious Fairy Lures. SOMM’s previous Stanford recordings include his String Quintets (SOMMCD 0623) and complete String Quartets (SOMMCD 0160, 0185, 0607) with the Dante Quartet, praised by Gramophone for their “ardent, alert and thoroughly lived-in performances”, and Partsongs with the Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir led by Paul Spicer (SOMMCD 0128), which Limelight described as “excellent... beautifully sung”. SOMM’s world-premiere recording of The Travelling Companion (SOMMCD 274-2) was hailed “a landmark” by Gramophone, who lauded Songs of Faith, Love and Nonsense (SOMMCD 0627) as “a hugely enjoyable anthology... production values and presentation leave nothing to be desired”.

SOMM Recordings announces a major new release: the first appearance on album of live performances of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Sibelius’ Second Symphonies by the iconic conductor Serge Koussevitzky and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This historic, two-album set includes an exclusive, specially-commissioned documentary about Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra tenure and his LPO guest appearances, featuring interviews with four key players from both orchestras by Jon Tolansky. Tolansky’s revealing hour-long documentary includes wide-ranging musical excerpts and contributions from former BSO players Harry Ellis Dickson (violin), Everett ‘Vic’ Firth (timpani), and Harry Shapiro (sub-principal horn), and erstwhile LPO sub-principal horn Patrick Strevens. The symphonies are heard in performances Koussevitzky conducted with the LPO in London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1950. Both have been expertly restored by Lani Spahr. Noted authority on historical recordings Rob Cowan provides detailed booklet notes on the “individual, flexible, flammable, emotionally candid and utterly spontaneous” Koussevitzky’s stewardship of both orchestras. He describes the Tchaikovsky as “especially unique [in] its unsparing volatility.... The explosive climaxes leave the audience stunned”. Of the Sibelius, he says: “Koussevitzky’s London Second is as comprehensive an overview of the work as we have”.

Lani Spahr’s previous restorations for SOMM include the four-disc Elgar Remastered (SOMMCD 261-4) featuring recordings from the composer’s own collection, hailed by Audiophilia as “a fascinating achievement which will have you wishing for more”. George Szell: The Forgotten Recordings was a Gramophone Editor’s Choice and awarded a Diapason d’Or as “a major discovery”. Jon Tolansky is the founder of the Music Performance Research Centre (now Music Preserved) and a widely admired producer of audio documentaries on classical musicians. For Spahr’s restorations on Beecham Conducts Sibelius, he produced a 30-minute audio documentary. MusicWeb International declared it “an unmissable disc [that] walks straight into a position of eminence in the catalogue”.

SOMM RECORDINGS celebrates the mastery of a 20th-century original with superb new recordings of Kurt Weill’s Violin Concerto and Second Symphony by Tomás Kocsis and the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Jac van Steen. Although Weill found fame in theatre-focused collaborations with Bertolt Brecht that produced the era-defining The Threepenny Opera, the onetime pupil of Ferruccio Busoni straddled the worlds of music-theatre, jazz and the concert hall with music of daring aplomb and dazzling achievement. Dedicated to Joseph Szigeti, his five-movement Violin Concerto of 1924 also pays tribute to the ailing Busoni and sports discernible allusions to Stravinsky, Mahler and the potent popular music of Weimar Berlin’s cabaret clubs. A unique blend, as Robert Matthew-Walker comments in his authoritative booklet notes: “No comparable work had appeared before from any composer”. Composed a decade later, the Second Symphony was premiered by Bruno Walter and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. In three movements, “Weill’s contrapuntal mastery and his equally unselfconscious command of instrumentation present us with genuinely symphonic music, such as a 20th-century Haydn would have appreciated and enjoyed”. Jac van Steen’s previous SOMM releases include acclaimed recordings of Mozart piano concertos with Peter Donohoe, Valerie Tryon and Mishka Rushdie Momen (SOMMCD 278-2), The Deeper the Blue, an intriguing exploration of color and timbre in music featuring Vaughan Williams, Ravel, Dutilleux and Kenneth Hesketh (SOMMCD 275), and the International Classical Music Awards-nominated pairing of concertos by Albeniz and Mignone with Clélia Iruzun (SOMMCD 265). The Ulster Orchestra has released world premiere recordings of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra and two piano concertos by William Matthias with pianist Mark Bebbington (SOMMCD 246).