SOMM Recordings celebrates the centenary of Leonard Bernstein's birth in style with a remarkable 1993 live broadcast recording - never before issued and newly mastered - with the Hannover Philharmonie conducted by Iain Sutherland. Five of Bernstein's era-defining works for Broadway and Hollywood revel in his inexhaustible gift for memorable melodies, his vivid sense of drama, infectious playfulness and captivating sense of poetry. The effervescent Overture to Bernstein's 1956 re-telling of Voltaire's Candide has long been a concert hall favorite. Brilliant, uplifting and thrillingly orchestrated, it brims with memorable tunes threaded together with masterful aplomb. The Symphonic Suite drawn from his score for Elia Kazan's Oscar-laden 1954 lm On the Waterfront is a heavyweight exercise in evocative and atmospheric music, it's muscle and menace transformed into a final, redemptive hymn to individual freedom. A decade earlier, Bernstein's first extended theatre music - for Jerome Robbins' ballet Fancy Free - made brilliant use of a symphony orchestra's resources with stylish infusions of jazz-based and Latin-influenced concert music. On the Town pays tribute to the city that never sleeps in an exuberant tale of three sailors finding love on 24-hour shore-leave in New York. It's Two Dance Episodes borrow themes from Fancy Free to exhilarating effect. Bernstein's theatre masterpiece West Side Story transformed the American musical overnight in 1957. With it's great trajectory from C major to E at and back again, it carries itself with operatic immediacy. The Symphonic Dances drawn from the score exalt in the power of an orchestra in full, forceful flow.

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce a musical journey around the four nations of the United Kingdom with Folk Songs of the British Isles. Celebrating the “living, breathing heritage of British and Irish folksong down the ages”, the 27-track recital features soprano Janis Kelly, mezzos Yvonne Howard and Maria Jagusz, tenors Nicky Spence and Wynne Evans, baritone Mark Llewelyn Evans, jazz doyenne Elaine Delmar and actor- singer Kevin Whately. Fiona Kelly (flute), Jean Kelly (harp) and pianists Michael Pollock and John Wilson provide instrumental contributions with singer Caroline McCausland accompanying herself on guitar.

Much-loved songs include She Moved Through the Fair, The Last Rose of Summer, The Foggy, Foggy Dew and Down by the Salley Gardens. Local colour is provided by songs such as Blaydon Races, Skye Boat Song, Sosban Fach and The Oak and the Ash while the entirely new Song for Gwyn (words by Christopher Morley, music by John Wilson) tributes Gwyn Williams, former Principal Viola with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which he joined in 1965 and where he played for conductors Hugo Rignold, Louis Frémaux and Sir Simon Rattle. Royalties will be donated to the Gwyn Williams Bursary Fund which supports young violists at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and endows three viola chairs in the CBSO Youth Orchestra.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the label return of the chamber choir Londinium and director Andrew Griffiths with Every Living Creature, a recital of choral music by Kenneth Leighton on the 35th anniversary of his death featuring five premiere recordings. The album unearths a number of significant works by this important British composer, including the extraordinary, eight-movement Laudes Animantium, a 25-minute work for double choir, soloists and children’s chorus, as well as a superb setting of John Donne’s Nativitie and the charming Three Carols (1948). Also featured are the partsong London Town and three more sacred works: Lord, When the Sense of Thy Sweet Grace, An evening hymn and A Hymn to the Trinity.

Five of the pieces are heard on disc for the first time; the remaining four have been recorded only once before. Londinium is joined by soloists Rebecca Lea and Nina Bennet (sopranos), Ciara Hendrick (mezzo-soprano), Nick Pritchard (tenor) and, in the finale of Laudes Animantium, the choir of Finchley Children’s Music Group.

In his insightful booklet notes, Griffiths writes: “It is rare to find a choral singer who does not enjoy performing Leighton’s works. His music is rooted in rigorous part-writing and counterpoint, and alive with invigorating rhythm, motivic interplay and piquant dissonance, underlaid with a deeply lyrical instinct and an exquisite sensitivity to the meaning and colour of text”.

SOMM Recordings announces Volume 3 of the Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman Piano Duo’s ground-breaking series exploring Franz Xaver Scharwenka’s arrangements of Beethoven Symphonies. A composer of no mean stature in his own right, Scharwenka’s transcriptions were once widely admired, his treatments of Beethoven’s symphonies a high-watermark of the genre. Volume 1 (SOMMCD 0637) met with universal acclaim; Gramophone praising the “mastery” of the performances, BBC Music finding it “utterly beguiling”, and MusicWeb International declaring “I was blown away by this magnificent recording”. Of Volume 2 (SOMMCD 0650), Gramophone hailed it as “a thoroughly rewarding, often revelatory view of this over-played and over- recorded masterpiece [Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony]”. BBC Music Magazine said: “In terms both of precise co-ordination and engaging interplay, the performances are state-of-the-art”.

Volume 3 couples perhaps the least known of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, No. 2 in D major, and the extraordinary scale and innovation of No. 7 in A major. As Robert Matthew-Walker points out in his informative booklet notes, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Second Symphony, composed during a period of crippling self-doubt and encroaching deafness, is that it is “so positive and full of life, tingling with vitality and energy”. Of the Seventh Symphony, he writes, “Beethoven poses further challenges to his interpreters – technical as well as musical … Nothing like this had ever been expressed in music before.”

Born in Cape Town and a Royal Academy of Music Associate, Tessa Uys has an impressive reputation as a concert and broadcasting performer, appearing at major venues around the world. Her multi-prize-winning South African compatriot Ben Schoeman has a busy international profile and is currently a senior lecturer in piano and musicology at the University of Pretoria. First playing as a London-based Duo in 2010, their admired explorations of Scharwenka’s four-hand Beethoven transcriptions on the concert platform began in 2015.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the first release on disc of three works by Richard Strauss conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra captured live in London’s Royal Festival Hall. In a meeting of kindred spirits and musical minds, Beecham and Strauss enjoyed a long and mutually admiring relationship over nearly four decades. Thomas Beecham Conducts Richard Strauss follows SOMM’s acclaimed Thomas Beecham Conducts Sibelius and again features recordings newly restored and remastered by Lani Spahr. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1946 by Beecham to inject new energy and new ideas into British orchestral life. A decade later, this disc shows them at their finest.

Completely new to the catalogue is the six-part Suite taken from Strauss’s incidental music to Le bourgeois gentilhomme, the erotic ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ from Salome, and the only known recording of Beecham conducting Macbeth. Completing the disc are two signature tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, recorded live in early 1955 and newly re-mastered from an earlier SOMM release (SOMM-BEECHAM 31). The disc has been curated by Jon Tolansky, who provides insightful and authoritative booklet notes. MusicWeb International hailed Thomas Beecham Conducts Sibelius (ARIADNE 5013) as “a major addition to [Beecham’s] discography” and “a most important release”. Audiophile Audition’s five-star review declared it “heartily recommended”, while BBC Music Magazine described it as “a blazing performance”. SOMM’s ground-breaking The Beecham Collection spans 24 volumes, many of them with the RPO. It includes the partnership’s coupling of Sibelius’s Fourth and Sixth Symphonies (SOMM-BEECHAM 18) and their earliest known recordings, dating from 1946, featuring Wagner, Mendelssohn, Mozart’s Symphony No.40 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Moura Lympany the soloist (SOMM-BEECHAM 19).

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 announces a double-disc set of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord brilliantly performed by two virtuosos of their instruments, Adrian Butterfield (violin) and Silas Wollston (harpsichord).

The selection of eight sonatas includes six works for violin and obbligato harpsichord (BWV 1014-1019), likely composed between 1720 and 1723 during Bach’s final years in Cöthen, and the later Violin Sonatas in G major (BWV 1021) from 1732, and early (though belatedly catalogued) E minor (BWV 1023) from around 1709. Bonus tracks include three alternative movements composed for the BWV 1019 Sonata in G major that illustrate the development of Bach’s thinking in relation to sonata form and intimate musical expression. These intricately designed sonatas also serve to reveal Bach’s innovative way of employing the harpsichord’s singing voice as an equal to the violin and are surely precursors to the rich sonata tradition that emerged in the 19th century.

Butterfield and Wollston’s erudite booklet notes place the sonatas within the context of Bach’s own musical inheritance and influences while arguing for their abiding appeal: “More than 300 years after their composition, they still sound excellent, give much joy and continue to tug at the listener’s heartstrings”.

Making his SOMM debut, Silas Wollston is partnered by Adrian Butterfield, whose previous releases for the label feature him alongside London Handel Players colleagues in Handel’s Complete Sonatas & Works for Violin and Continuo with Katherine Sharman (cello) and Laurence Cummings (harpsichord), described by Early Music Review as “required listening” (SOMMCD 068); the Seven Trio Sonatas, Op.5, judged “assured and surprisingly lyrical” by Gramophone (SOMMCD 044); and Geminiani’s Complete Sonatas, Op.1 (SOMMCD 248-2), featuring performances that International Record Review declared “want for nothing in terms of technical brilliance and musical integrity”.

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 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 delighted to announce the label debut of composer-conductor Nimrod Borenstein with first recordings of three works showcasing the piano in separate guises: his Piano Concerto, piano quintet Light and Darkness, and Shirim for solo piano. Borenstein himself conducts pianist Clélia Iruzun and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in his Piano Concerto, while Iruzun is joined by I Musicanti on Light and Darkness, and is the soloist for Shirim. For Borenstein, who also provides booklet notes, the disc is a dual celebration: “of the piano, an instrument I love”, and of “musical friendship”, recognizing his long creative partnership with Iruzun.The three-movement Piano Concerto – his Op.91 and first for the instrument, building on discoveries from his continuing series of Chopin- influenced solo Études – was composed for Iruzun and premiered in Brazil in July 2022. It reflects Borenstein’s concept of “the concerto as an heroic form”, a notion informing its “very fast, virtuosic and full of energy” finale. 2021’s Shirim (Op.94) takes its title from the Hebrew word for “poems” or “songs”. Cast in 18 variegated miniatures, “each being a world in themselves”, they are, says Borenstein tributing Mendelssohn, “my own songs without words”. Light and Darkness (2018, Op.80), “begins and ends with pure light, but is full of melancholy, and contains sections of great despair”. Nimrod Borenstein’s music has been performed by some of the world’s most prestigious soloists, chamber ensembles and orchestras. Several of his 90-plus pieces are available on acclaimed recordings. In demand as a conductor, he is currently working with orchestras in the UK, Germany and Israel.

SOMM Recordings marks the anniversaries of the birth and death of the late-Renaissance, early-Baroque master Girolamo Frescobaldi with a revelatory new recording of his celebrated collection of liturgical organ music, Fiori musicali. Making their label debuts are acclaimed organist Richard Lester, who also provides authoritative booklet notes, and a baritone quartet drawn from The Greenwood Consort. Although the history of the Organ Mass dates to the early 15th century, Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali of 1635, the feted composer’s last work comprising three Masses, represents a highwater-mark of the genre and “a final flowering and significant celebration of his musical genius and creativity”. The first, In Dominicis infra annum (Orbis factor), composed for Sunday Mass, begins in declamatory style and transitions to a buoyant, playfully expressive conclusion. The Mass for the Apostles, Missa: In Festis Duplicibus I (Cunctipotens Genitor Deus), is marked by striking dynamic and textural contrasts. The third Mass, to mark Feasts of the Virgin Mary, In Festis Beata Mariae Virginis I (Cum jubilo), shows Frescobaldi daringly borrowing popular folk tunes to underline the connection between the secular and the sacred. Richard Lester’s five-decades-spanning career began with harpsichord studies with George Malcom and saw him hailed by The Telegraph as “one of our leading players”. He has recorded more than 80 albums of harpsichord and organ music and is the author of Girolamo Frescobaldi: A Variety of Inventions. Led by baritone Mark Bennett, Devon-based The Greenwood Consort is a flexible ensemble of singers and instrumentalists committed to performing to communities with limited access to live music, who focus on historically informed performance of Baroque and pre-Baroque music.

SOMM Recordings’ acclaimed survey of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas by Peter Donohoe reaches its end with Volume 6 featuring four works illustrating the composer’s endless fascination and creative invention with the piano.

Mozart described the Piano Sonata No.16 (K.545) as “a little piano sonata for beginners”. It is so much more than that. As Christopher Morley says in his authoritative booklet notes: “Sounding deceptively simple... the opening movement even so probes the player’s technique with a searching spotlight with scales demanding clarity and fluidity, sequences shared between both hands requiring equality of balance, and an absolute steadiness of pulse”. The early Piano Sonata No.4 (K.282), says Morley, reveals the likely influence of CPE Bach, a “rococo/galant bridge between Baroque and Classical approaches”. This revealing six-volume survey concludes with the “awesome pairing” of the improvisatory K.475 Fantasia and Piano Sonata No.14 (K.457), “the Fantasia, which encapsulates so much over so short a span... puts the pragmatic resourcefulness of the sonatas themselves into such telling perspective”.

SOMM’s Mozart Piano Sonatas cycle has attracted superlative reviews. Volume 1 (SOMMCD 0191) received the accolades of BBC Music Magazine’s Recording of the Month and MusicWeb International’s Recording of the Year. Volume 2 (SOMMCD 0198) was also a MusicWeb International Recording of the Year, with Musical Opinion describing Peter Donohoe as “an ideal interpreter”, adding “no finer accounts of these still neglected masterpieces will have been offered to the public”. Volume 3 (SOMMCD 0613) was hailed by ClassicalMusicDaily as “a recording full of joy... the collection as a whole deserves to be celebrated”; Volume 4 (SOMMCD 0629) praised by BBC Music Magazine as “an insightful survey”, adding “Mozart would have approved”.

SOMM RECORDINGS announces the release of I Vow to Thee, My Country, believed to be the first recording to feature all of Gustav Holst’s sacred choral music, by the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea directed by William Vann, with organist Joshua Ryan and Richard Horne on tubular and bass bells. A prolific composer best known for his orchestral spectacular The Planets, Holst was an expressive and sincere composer and arranger of religious music despite his professed agnosticism. Included are his only setting of the Anglican Service for Evening Prayer, Nunc Dimittis, and his substantial Two Psalms and Four Festival Choruses, whose inspirations range from the Bible, Byzantine liturgy, 16th-century sources (not least Bach), and Welsh hymns. The 12 other featured songs see Holst setting an impressive array of centuries-spanning texts, and include the striking eight-part setting of Ave Maria for unaccompanied female voices, the ecstatic Not Unto Us, O Lord, premiered by the Royal Hospital Chelsea and William Vann in 2020, and the disc’s anthemic title song, its melody borrowed from The Planets’ ‘Jupiter’. I Vow to Thee, My Country is sponsored by The Holst Society, who also commissioned four new arrangements making their debut on album by Iain Farrington, and includes extensive, authoritative notes by Andrew Neill.

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.