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 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’ 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 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 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 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”.

A priceless document.

“Vaughan Williams may not have been a great technical conductor, but he knew how his music should sound”. The words are those of RVW’s friend and biographer, the distinguished critic, Michael Kennedy. I suggest that anyone hearing this revelatory CD would be bound to agree with that verdict.

Because Vaughan Williams was not thought to be a great conductor he was rarely invited to record his own music. This is in stark contrast to, say, Elgar, Walton or Britten, all of whom recorded their own music extensively. Yet the evidence of that boiling, incandescent recording of his Fourth Symphony that RVW set down with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 11 October 1937 shows that he was a vivid communicator of his own works (Dutton CDAX 8011). That’s long been a prized part of my own collection, as has the recording of Dona Nobis Pacem, in an earlier transfer, but I never thought we’d uncover a recording of him conducting what is perhaps his finest symphony.

This performance of the Fifth comes from the 1952 Henry Wood Promenade concerts at which all six of the symphonies that RVW had written to date were played in honour of his forthcoming eightieth birthday. It’s worth remembering that the symphony had been premièred at the Proms just nine years earlier, also under the composer’s baton. According to Alan Sanders’ very interesting note the broadcast was recorded off-air onto a long-playing acetate disc by an engineer named Eric Spain. The results are quite remarkable. To be sure, there is some surface noise but it is never intrusive and a remarkable amount of detail and perspective has been captured. There seems to have been no attempt made to edit out the audience noise between movements and this adds to the sense that we are eavesdropping on an event. However, no applause is retained at the end and while I usually like to hear some applause at the end of a live recording – a minority view, I suspect – on this occasion I don’t mind.

As to the performance, well it’s a very fine one. There are a few orchestral fluffs but nothing too serious. Vaughan Williams gives a reading that is direct and unfussy but one that also conveys admirably the wonderful poetry of this radiant symphony. The first movement proceeds serenely yet it has a quiet inner strength. When the music quickens (at 5:11) RVW obtains lightness from the strings but the melody in the wind and brass has a hint of darkness. When the climax of the movement arrives (8:10) it has an unforced majesty.

Much of the music of the second movement is characterised by what I’d term a rugged, rustic lightness. In places it suggests to me the ‘Rude Mechanicals’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There are some occasional frailties in the playing but generally speaking the BBCSO responds well, giving a delightful account of the piece. At the very end the music dissolves up into the ether.

How moving it is to hear Vaughan Williams direct the glorious slow movement, containing as it does so much music from Pilgrim’s Progress, the visionary work that had occupied him for so many years. He achieves a real hushed intensity at the very start and there’s a lovely cor anglais solo. This ravishing movement shows Vaughan Williams’s lyrical gifts at their peak. Everything about this reading seems so right and he builds up to a glowing climax before allowing the music to die away in peaceful tranquillity.

The finale is a joyful movement and it comes across as such in its creator’s hands. There’s a real sense of hope in this music, despite its genesis in the dark days of war and RVW puts that across effortlessly. The gentle benediction of the coda is handled sensitively and with satisfying simplicity. The composer said of his Fourth symphony that it was what he “meant” and I think that’s true also of this deeply satisfying performance of the Fifth.

It used to be thought by some commentators, mistakenly but understandably, that the Fourth symphony was a depiction of the gathering political storms in Europe in the 1930s. In fact the cantata Dona Nobis Pacem is, surely, a much more direct artistic response to those menacing times and it’s amazing to find that Vaughan Williams, having produced such a searing work in the run-up to the Second World War, then penned a pacific work like the Fifth symphony while the conflict was at its height.

The performance of Dona Nobis Pacem presented here was given just a month after the work received its first performance from the Huddersfield Choral Society under Albert Coates. When Vaughan Williams came to broadcast it for the BBC he had the services of the same two soloists who had taken part in the première. This performance has appeared on CD before (Pearl GEMM CD9342) but this present release is claimed as its first authorised release. Presumably the source for this Somm issue is the BBC itself for Alan Sanders comments that this “is one of the Corporation’s few pre-war music recordings to have survived”. The Pearl booklet states that the source for their issue is “a private acetate transcription”.

I can state unequivocally that an A/B comparison shows that this Somm transfer completely supersedes the Pearl effort. The Somm disc is brighter, clearer and has an almost visceral impact compared with the Pearl. Not only that, the new transfer reports much more detail in both the loud and soft passages. Indeed, following with a vocal score I was amazed at how much inner detail is revealed – for example in the third section where the choir divides into eight parts, singing quietly and unaccompanied (cue 14 in the vocal score). It is simply staggering how vividly this recording speaks to us more than seventy years after it was made.

And the performance is vivid too. In the first movement Renée Flynn’s voice is caught with real presence – as is the case throughout the performance – and she sings marvellously. When the orchestra and chorus enter Vaughan Williams obtains some impassioned results. The second movement is a setting of RVW’s beloved Walt Whitman, as are the third and fourth movements. “Beat! beat! drums!” the choir sings. It’s a frenzied movement and Vaughan Williams whips up a real storm. The brass and percussion sound really vivid. The chorus parts are not easy, as I know from personal experience, but the BBC Chorus acquits itself valiantly. They’re rhythmically accurate – no mean feat in itself, especially in unfamiliar music - and the composer inspires them to singing of genuine fervour.

The third movement, ‘Reconciliation’, is at the centre of the work in more ways than one. Roy Henderson is a most dignified and moving soloist. Here there’s further evidence of Vaughan Williams’s conducting skill, for examples of subtle rubato abounds in his account of this movement and this could not have been achieved by someone who didn’t know what they were doing on the podium. It’s a most beautiful movement and the performers rise to great eloquence, none more so than Henderson, especially as he sings of the soldier finding his enemy’s corpse in its coffin. Whitman is, for my taste, somewhat mawkish here but Vaughan Williams in his music and Henderson in his singing transcend that.

The third and final Whitman setting is the celebrated ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’. There’s great cumulative power in the march that forms the basis of much of this movement. Vaughan Williams builds the tension purposefully and with skill and patience. The huge climax at “I hear the great drums pounding” is powerfully achieved as is the potent passage for orchestra alone a few pages later (5:09). The text is portentous at times, as Whitman so often is, but Vaughan Williams’s music has strength and conviction and this enables him to avoid sentimentality.

The fifth movement opens with a masterstroke. Over the sparest of accompaniments the baritone soloist sings lines from the celebrated speech made in the House of Commons by the radical MP, John Bright (1811-1889), in opposition to the Crimean War on 23 February 1855: “The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land.” Here Henderson’s hushed singing is hypnotically powerful. He’s quite chilling without any theatricality and he generates a tremendous atmosphere before the choral outburst, “Dona nobis pacem”. The movement ends on a more hopeful note with a chorus that, to me, anticipates the concluding pages of the Christmas work, Hodie (1954). Despite all the trials and tribulations of the 1930s Vaughan Williams could retain a sense of hope, if not optimism.

Dona Nobis Pacem is in many ways a work of its time but, in the sentiments that it expresses, it’s surely a work for our times also. It’s sincere and impassioned and a very fine piece. I’m surprised and disappointed that it’s not heard more often. It’s both moving and exciting to hear it under the composer’s own direction at a time when it was so new and also at a time when it was so relevant to the events that had moved him to write it. In this excellent new transfer the performance comes vividly to life. As I listened I found myself wondering how many of the performers may subsequently have become victims of the war that was not then far off.

In this year (2008) that marks the fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death I hope there will be many fine performances, broadcasts and recordings to celebrate his life and music. The year has started auspiciously with Tony Palmer’s wonderful new film biography, O Thou Transcendent. However, this superb release from Somm may turn out to be the most invaluable of all the anniversary tributes. It’s a mandatory purchase for all lovers of Vaughan Williams’s music and, frankly, a priceless document.

-- John Quinn, MusicWeb International

These three very different works have been dealt with admirably. A huge sympathy and understanding is evident.



MATHIAS Piano Concertos: No. 1; No. 2. VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Fantasy • Mark Bebbington (pn); George Vass, cond; Ulster O • SOMM SOMMCD 246 (70:42)


An English online reviewer wrote that it is always interesting to hear early works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Interesting yes, because of what came later, but this Fantasy—begun in 1896 and finally completed in 1904—does not hold a great deal of interest for its own sake. Vaughan Williams did not find his true voice as a composer until he incorporated the modality of British folk song into his music. Here we have second-hand Brahms. Additionally, the piano was not Vaughan Williams’s instrument, and the keyboard writing in the Fantasy speaks of application rather than fluency. Even in the highly individual and much more successful Piano Concerto of 1931, the soloist is given full chords and double-octave passages that sound heavy and cumbersome. Much of this Fantasy strives for grandeur, a quality Vaughan Williams achieved in spades in works like the Sea Symphony and Job , but in this case the result seems empty, partly due to an absence of memorable thematic material and the lack of a personal voice. The composer suppressed this piece, along with a good deal of his other early work, and it remained unknown until after his death.


By contrast, the Welsh composer William Mathias (1934–92) seemed to find his voice early: a Celtic lyricism sitting alongside a hard-edged rhythmic vitality that is clearly Stravinskian. Mathias also had an identifiable sound as an orchestrator, often pointing rhythmic passages and climaxes with tuned percussion. His Piano Concerto No. 1 was written in 1955 when the composer was a 20-year-old student. The work greatly impressed Edmund Rubbra, among others. It is a three-movement concerto with buoyant outer movements but a rather stern (perhaps self-consciously modern) central Largo. After several performances Mathias withdrew the concerto, but was reconsidering editing it for publication when he died.


The standout on this disc is Mathias’s Second Piano Concerto of 1961. Clearly influenced by Tippett’s Piano Concerto, but none the worse for that, it combines strength with fluidity. The work is in four movements: a lyrical prelude, a tough allegro molto vivace , a brief lento leading into a multifaceted finale marked allegro alla danza . Tippett is recalled in the glittering high figuration of the piano part, and stentorian brass fanfares making use of the interval of the major second to harden their harmonies—but these are also fingerprints we associate with the mature Mathias. For the record, both these concertos precede other recorded concertos by the composer: those for harp, clarinet, and the third for piano (Lyrita), and the Oboe Concerto (Nimbus).


Mark Bebbington has made several fine discs of little-known English music and this is one of the best. He is sensitive to all the technical and interpretive demands of these highly contrasting composers. George Vass and the Ulster Orchestra provide immaculate support, and the recording is clear and well balanced. Highly recommended.


FANFARE: Phillip Scott


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I first came across Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘Fantasia’ for piano and orchestra whilst carefully studying the 1996 imprint of Michael Kennedy’s invaluable ‘A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams’. It was one of many pieces that were hidden from view and were likely to remain so due to an embargo on works that the composer had withdrawn or laid aside around the end of the Great War. These included The Garden of Prosperine, the Heroic Elegy, the Bucolic Suite and the present Fantasia (Fantasy). They were works that I imagined I would never hear. Fortunately Ursula Vaughan Williams lifted the embargo and in recent years a number of these compositions have been recorded. Each time I have listened to one of these re-discovered pieces I have felt that the musical world has been cheated of a great piece of music for such a long time. This is the case with the present Fantasy. It may not be one of the composer’s masterpieces, but it is certainly a work with which the listener can do business.

This twenty-one minute score was originally begun in October 1896 and was finally completed on 9 February 1902. It was subsequently revised in 1904. Since then it has lain in the British Library. This Fantasy (Kennedy refers to Fantasia) is regarded as a ‘student’ piece by critics, however it must be realised that RVW continued studying until relatively late in life. His sojourn with Ravel was during 1907/08 when the composer was thirty-five years old! The present work was begun when he was 24 years old and finished when he was 32. So it is hardly a neophyte’s ’prentice piece.

For many listeners RVW is not normally associated with the pianoforte. To be true he made use of it in his Double Piano Concerto and in Fantasia on the Old 104 ^th Psalm Tune. Both of these works have their enthusiasts and have been reappraised in recent years. However, there are only a handful of solo piano works, not a few of which are arrangements of other works or are teaching pieces.

The form of the Fantasy is in one movement of six sections with an overall structure of slow-fast-slow. Without perusing the score it is hard to say how idiomatic the solo part is: how well it fits under the pianist’s hands. However the impression is that it has all the hallmarks of a ‘romantic concerto’.

Many listeners will play ‘spot the influence’. And it is not hard to hear all sorts of things going on in this work. Certainly Brahms and Grieg are never too far from the second section. Rob Barnett at MusicWeb International has identified a mood of orthodox chant: I felt that Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition was recalled. Liszt is amongst the exemplars. However, this is no stitching together of other composer’s music. Vaughan Williams has created a valid work that reflects the times in which it was written and possibly the fact that he had studied with Stanford and latterly Max Bruch. Finally, there are moments when the ‘real’ RVW stands revealed and we hear intimations of Job (is it my imagination?) and the later symphonies. It is this, more than anything that makes the Fantasy such an important work to have on disc.

William Mathias has been reasonably well-served with recordings. Just a quick glance at the Arkiv catalogue reveals some 77 discs dedicated to, or featuring music by, the composer. However there are a number of critical works missing from these listings. For example I believe that there is no recording of the Concerto for Orchestra, Litanies and the Holiday Overture. The present CD fills in an important gap with the early Piano Concerto No.1 which dates from 1955 and the Second Concerto from some five years later. Lyrita have already presented the Third Concerto on SRCD325.
Dr Rhiannon Mathias has noted that her father ‘always held a fascination’ for the concerto form. Apart from the piano concertos, there are ‘one each for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, horn, organ, harp and harpsichord’ in the composer’s catalogue as well as a couple of early concertos written when in his teens.

The Piano Concerto No.1 seems to me a very confident and well-wrought work for a nineteen year old student at Aberystwyth University, although it is in no way precocious. Apparently, the work seriously impressed Edmund Rubbra, who was the external examiner. The work was premiered in London on 19 May 1957. After a few more performances it was withdrawn.

The concerto is written three well-balanced movements. The Guardian critic of this present CD rightly points out that this work is ‘angular’ in its effect. However this is not the whole story: the slow movement contains ‘nocturnal’ music that is particularly reflective and beautiful. However, much of the concerto does nod to Bartók and Prokofiev although this is presented with many of the fingerprints that were to dominate much of Mathias music over the next thirty-five years. For example, we hear sharp harmonies and syncopated rhythmic figures and the playing of the main themes together rather than separately. The piano part has been described as ‘exhilarating’ and this mood is well reflected in Mark Bebbington’s interpretation of the work. The score for this recording was prepared and edited by Dr Rhiannon Mathias.

From the ‘cool’ opening bars of the Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 13 we are in a different world to the earlier piece. This is a lyrical work that is suffused with poetry. Much of the opening movement is reflective and perhaps even tentative in its exploration of the two main themes. However there are moments of tension and even angst in these pages.

Mathias has added a ‘scherzo’ in all but name. In fact, it is presented as a ‘danse infernale’ which promotes music of ‘ferocious energy’ that utilises ‘brittle and rhythmically alert’ themes and harmonies. This is in complete contrast to the typically gentle first movement.

The ‘lento’ is the heart of the work and has an improvisatory feel to much of the proceedings. That said there is a structure to this movement that references a theme from the first movement, and gradually leads the music to a ‘nobilmente’ climax before a brief link passage leads to the concluding ‘rondo.’ This is Mathias dance-music at its best: from the initial solo piano statement of the main theme to the concluding riot of sound this music impresses. The composer makes use of themes from earlier movements and this gives the ‘rondo’ a sense of unity and purpose.

This is a work that is difficult to tie down for influences: I have detected Malcolm Arnold and Michael Tippett, but the truth is that this is William Mathias’s own unique sound-world at its best. It is hard to see why this concerto is not so much more popular and regularly played.

The work was commissioned by the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and was duly given its first performance at the 1961 Llandaff Festival.

It almost goes without saying that Mark Bebbington’s playing is superb throughout the entire disc. Bebbington has done so much for British music in recent years, with his cycles of music by John Ireland and Frank Bridge, the Dale and Hurlstone Sonatas and the Ferguson and Bax piano concertos. In the present disc the playing of these three very different works call for a wide range of interpretation and technical styles. These have been dealt with admirably and suggest a huge sympathy towards, and understanding of, these works.

As usual with SOMM recordings, everything is ‘done decently and in order’: the sound reproduction is first, the cover painting by James Hamilton Hay (1874-1916), the sleeve-notes, the background preparation of the scores by Dr Graham Parlett and Dr Rhiannon Mathias. It all adds up to an excellent production.

It seems redundant to say that I recommend this CD! Every RVW enthusiast will demand a copy for the World Premiere Recording of the Fantasy. I guess that fewer listeners will be Mathias fans - however, they ought to be! - but these two works, again premiere recordings, are important additions to the catalogue of British (Welsh) piano concertos. For fans of William Mathias they are essential: for newcomers to his music they are a fine introduction to a great composer who has a style that is largely all his own.

-- John France, MusicWeb International

After his "hope across the Atlantic" for his all-Gershwin disc, Mark Bebbington returns to the English fare for which he is best-known, with the Complete Vaughan Williams Piano Music. This SOMM release contains world premiere recordings, notably the Introduction and Fugue. In this work, and in the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, both written for two-pianos, Bebbington is joined by the gifted young Romanian-Nigerian pianist Rebeca Ormordia. The Tallis Fantasia in its original string version is an evergreen English work, repeatedly topping Classic FM's listener surveys of favorite pieces. Of its two-piano version, Bebbington says: In transcribing the Fantasia for two pianos Vaughan Williams has created a work with leaner textures and clearer polyphony. The premiere recording on this disc is the Introduction and Fugue for two pianost written in 1947, which RVW dedicated to the famous two-piano team Phyllis Sellick and Cyril Smith. Bebbington says: "Vaughan Williams wrote the Introduction and Fugue concurrently with the Sixth Symphony - a work which shocked the musical world with its undisguised brutality and modernism, and this piano work belongs to the same musical aesthetic.

BRIDGE A Fairy Tale Suite. In Autumn. Miniature Pastorals, Set 1. Étude rhapsodique. Graziella. Dramatic Fantasia. 3 Pieces. A Sea Idyll. Miniature Suite. Characteristic Pieces • Mark Bebbington (pn) • SOMM 82 (77:26)


I wonder when Frank Bridge was first led astray by Scriabin, forsaking the Lisztian bravado of the Dramatic Fantasia for the dark, sensuous tendrils of Graziella and the lascivious impressionism of the Characteristic Pieces. Mark Bebbington’s second volume of Bridge piano works stresses the later achievements, from 1917 on, leading up to and away from the big Piano Sonata of 1924. Ravel is a strong presence in the Fairy Tale Suite and elsewhere, but the themes, early and late, are all Bridge, and mostly memorable.


Whatever its roots, whether outrage at the Great War or more personal passions, the best of these miniatures are very good indeed, and demand the very best players. The works, like the Sonata, are simply not well enough known yet, and they need a broader performing tradition. I hope Russian pianists start to pick up on In Autumn, Graziella , and the other late works. Bebbington, like Ashley Wass and Kathryn Stott, has gone far beyond the “mere” technical problems, which are not small, and the competing Bridge cycles complement each other. If you are going to get just one, then I’d go with Wass on Naxos, whose piano I also just prefer in the upper octaves. But Bebbington conveys most of Bridge’s range, and he’s especially good in the mini- Dante Sonata , which is the Fantasia, and in the 1921 Miniature Suite , with its Prokofievisms.


Ideally, I’d like to hear a hypersensitive Slavic Scriabin interpreter have a tilt at Graziella and “Water Nymphs” from the Characteristic Pieces. But all the pianists I’m thinking of are dead. Maybe Tharaud for “Fragrance” and “Bitter Sweet” from the same Ravelian late set. As you’ll gather, the serious competition for Bebbington and Wass is imaginary. The recommendation is real enough, though. Some of the music in this volume is more British and interesting than it is moving, but more than half of it is top-notch. Wass edges it for feel and expressive range, but Bebbington’s runs, trills, graded dynamics, and sweep are no disappointment.


FANFARE: Paul Ingram

Somm Recordings celebrates the sublime choral music of Richard Rodney Bennett – best known to a wider audience for his Academy Award-nominated scores to Murder on the Orient Express and Far from the Madding Crowd – with 11 first recordings and a vivid new recording of his choral masterpiece, The Glory and the Dream. Performed by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, directed by Paul Spicer and with dexterous support from organist Nicholas Morris, The Glory and the Dream features 12 varied and vivacious choral pieces composed over more than 50 years. The album’s striking title work sets Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality to music that conjures childhood rapture and adult fears with the utmost finesse and feeling and features a fearsomely complex and challenging organ accompaniment. Dating from 1961, the earliest pieces here are Two Madrigals in which Bennett treats the rich ornamentations of the 17th century to a wholly modern perspective. The most recent work, One Equal Music – a sinewy, austere anthem with a serene ending – was completed in February 2012, just 10 months before the composer’s death at the age of 76. Bennett’s fascination with the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras is also to be found in the elegiac partsong A Contemplation Upon Flowers, the vocal fanfare This Day and Time, a somber meditation on the finality of life and lasting effulgence of Christ’s eternal being, and the simple but affective carol I wonder as I wander. Other seasonal pieces include the early, plainchant-infused The Sorrows of Mary, the gentle ‘hush song’ Lullaby Baby and late, substantial Remember, O thou man, a fervent and heartfelt prayer ending in quiet contemplation. Previous Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir recordings on SOMM have included admired recordings of choral music by Herbert Howells, Samuel Barber and John Joubert, together with partsongs by Ireland, Delius and Stanford.

The all-female vocal ensemble Papagena makes its debut on SOMM Recordings with The Darkest Midnight, a sublime collection of songs for winter from the Middle Ages to the modern era embracing the secular and the sacred. Described as “a stunning addition to the vocal music scene” and “la crème de la crème in the crowded a cappella space”, Papagena’s three sopranos (Elizabeth Drury, Abbi Temple, Suzie Vango) and two altos (Suzzie Purkis, Sarah Tenant-Flowers) look certain to add to their fast-growing reputation with this beautifully sung compendium. Casting a dark glamour all of its own, the bleakness of winter has prompted some of the most bewitching, brittle and bright songs. Alongside traditional Christmas anthems can be found legendary singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell’s ‘The River’ in an achingly melancholic arrangement and American composer Don Macdonald, whose When the Earth Stands Still is movingly poignant and still, twilit and shining. Celebratory songs marking the Christmas season – the exuberant In dulci Jubilo, burnished, glowing harmonies of Angelus ad virginem, sublimely serene Es ist ein Ros entsprungen and infectious Shchedryk/Hark How the Bells from Ukraine – are heard alongside lilting Irish songs from antiquity and the charming Scottish lullaby Balulalow. Songs from England, Germany, Norway and ‘Toi le coeur de la rose’ from Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges round off a recording that includes first performances of eight arrangements and is marked by sheer beauty of sound.

It seems a paradox that over the years we have gone to such great lengths to become familiar with the music of Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan-Willliams, John Ireland, Frank Bridge, and Arthur Bliss, yet we still know far less of the music of Stanford, their composition teacher at the Royal College of Music! There has been renewed interest in the music of Stanford recently, and with the kind support of the Stanford Society, SOMM now turns the spotlight on Stanford’s Partsongs in the second of a series of recordings with the Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, which has achieved an enviable reputation under the direction of Paul Spicer. The eight Partsongs Op. 119, set to poems by Mary Coleridge, appear on CD as a complete set for the very first time!

Classical Music