SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the label debuts of two exciting young Slovenian soloists – flautist Boris Bizjak and violinist Lana Trotovšek – and 2015 Wigmore Hall String Quartet Competition winners, the Piatti Quartet. They come together for revelatory performances of six pieces for flute, violin and string quartet elements by Frank Anton Hoffmeister, all receiving their first recordings. Now overshadowed by his illustrious contemporaries, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven (music by all whom, including the Diabelli Variations, he published), Hoffmeister was himself a prolific composer in every form. Although the flute is often placed centre-stage in these six works, all demonstrate Hoffmeister’s eloquently proportioned, life-enhancing and integrated feeling for chamber music. The two most substantial works here are a taut, dramatically urgent Quartet for flute, violin, viola and cello in C minor, and an E-flat major Quintet for flute, violin, two violas and cello of Mozartian mien and mood. With echoes of Gluck, Mozart and Haydn, two Trios for flute, violin and cello (in B-flat major and D major) and a Duetto in G major for flute and violin offer superbly expressive examples of Hoffmeister’s music at its most effusive and engagingly virtuosic. Hailed in his native Slovenia for his “musicality [and] captivating performance”, London-based Boris Bizjak has won several international flute competitions and is in growing demand around the world. Lana Trotovšek, praised by The Washington Post for her “clean, refined tone with musical sense of phrasing and impeccable intonation”, is also a Professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. The Piatti Quartet – Nathaniel Anderson-Frank and Michael Trainor (violins), Tetsuumi Nagata (viola), Jessie Ann Richardson (cello) – have gained growing recognition for their “ferociously fine form” (BBC Music) and playing of “absolute authority and conviction” (Gramophone).

Somm Recordings is delighted to present a revelatory collection of orchestral songs by Sir Edward Elgar performed by two of today’s most exciting young singers – mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge and baritone Henk Neven – accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth. The Hills of Dreamland takes its title from a line in Elgar’s well-known setting, beautifully still and beseeching, of Arthur L Salmon’s Pleading. Historically the least regarded part of Elgar’s output, his songs contain a treasure-trove of vocal gems and here receive performances of insight, imagination and emotional directness. The Op.59 Song Cycle is an exemplary case in point, by turns quietly radiant, touchingly nostalgic and achingly melancholic. Two settings of poems by Elgar’s wife – the richly orchestrated The Wind at Dawn and celebratory The King’s Way– show Elgar at his most evocative and ebullient. Sombre and powerful, The Pipes of Pan boasts colorful imagery and driving rhythmic energy, The River and The Torch wholly Elgarian in their wonderful sonorities. A first recording of the orchestral version of the marching song Follow the Colours shows Elgar at his most patriotic. The complete incidental music for a 1901 staging of WB Yeats’ Grania and Diarmid offers a rare opportunity to experience the full gamut of Elgar’s moving and dramatic evocation of a timeless tale of love in the ancient Irish myth. A bonus album of recordings made under the auspices of the Elgar Society showcases soprano Nathalie de Montmollin and pianist Barry Collett in a collection of piano-accompanied songs. It includes first recordings of the piano version of ‘Winter’ from The Mill Wheel and the world-weary tread of Muleteer’s Serenade, setting words from Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

The promise of rebirth and rejuvenation is celebrated by SOMM Recordings’ Songs of Renewal, a collection of choral works – including three first recordings – by seven living British composers performed by Bath Camerata under musical director Benjamin Goodson. Joining the ensemble are soprano Elizabeth Cragg and composer-pianist Huw Watkins, whose Shakespeare setting The Phoenix and the Turtle (2014) moves puissantly from monotone chanting to solemn chorale for an allegorical poem mourning the passing of ideal love. Commissioned by Bath Camerata to mark its 30th anniversary in 2017, the disc’s title track is a three-movement choral suite by Will Todd reflecting his interest in jazz music and featuring lyrics by the composer and former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. The earliest work, Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year (2000), is a rich and varied tribute to the composer’s late mother cast in seven sections and setting an eclectic array of texts by William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Nashe and others. To words by E.E. Cummings, Judith Weir’s a blue true dream of a sky (2003) is, says English music specialist Jeremy Dibble in his booklet notes, “a revelation of the divine”. Cecilia McDowall’s Standing as I do before God is a moving centennial tribute to the British nurse Edith Cavell executed by the German army in 1915. Two pieces by long-time SOMM collaborator, composer-baritone Roderick Williams, complete the disc. The setting of George Herbert’s Eucharistic poem Love bade me welcome (2007) is, in Jeremy Dibble’s words, “an harmonically sumptuous, largely homophonic narrative” that speaks of atonement and redemption. Commissioned by Bath Camerata in 2018, Everyone Sang sets a familiar text by First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon in a poignant and powerful riposte to the futility of war that holds out the curative promise that “the singing will never be done”.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce 17 world premiere recordings of Songs by Hamilton Harty in a ravishing recital by one of today’s most exciting young partnerships – mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge and pianist Christopher Glynn. Although best known today as a composer of orchestral music, Hamilton Harty was also one of the most accomplished accompanists of his generation, forming especially notable partnerships with the sopranos Agnes Nicholls and Elsie Swinton. It prompted, in turn, his increasing activity as an accomplished song writer. The 23 featured songs include settings that speak eloquently of Harty’s abiding engagement with his Irish heritage and point, in the technical demands made of vocalist and pianist alike, to his innate understanding of the song form in all its concentrated, emotional power. Favourite Harty songs such as Sea Wrack, The Blue Hills of Antrim and My Lagan Love are heard alongside settings of Walt Whitman (By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame), Thomas Campion (Come, O Come, My Heart’s Delight) and two texts by the composer himself (My Thoughts of You and Adieu, Sweet Amaryllis). Also included are two early, unpublished works for solo piano – Idyll and Arlequin and Columbine. Five songs are heard in new editions created from original manuscripts by British music authority Jeremy Dibble who also provides informative booklet notes.

SOMM Recordings announces an important new recording of two classic English song cycles by Sir Arthur Somervell – Maud and A Shropshire Lad – from the acclaimed partnership of baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Susie Allan. Hailed as “the English Schumann” for his mastery of song setting, song cycles in particular, Somervell’s music is marked by a distinctive blend of lyricism and harmony that makes itself indelibly felt in these two seminal works of the English song repertoire. His first cycle, Maud, setting 13 poems from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s dark monodrama, was first performed in 1899 at the height of a fashion for recitals of songs sung in English. An intense, impassioned portrayal of infatuation, it is marked by remarkably eloquent and revealing relationships between voice and text, and voice and piano. Composed in 1904, the 10 poems from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad portray a young man wistfully contemplating nature, life and love at the age of 20 before following him through a life full of incident, the horror of the First World War and growing self-awareness. It prompted from Somervell texturally rich and varied music shot through with an aching lyricism all the more powerful and potent for its folk song-like simplicity and directness. Completing the recital are the enchanting, ever-popular lullaby Shepherd’s Cradle Song and wistful tale of childhood sweethearts with texts by Edgar Allan Poe, A Kingdom by the Sea. British music authority Jeremy Dibble provides informative booklet notes and Roderick Williams a revealing take on Somervell’s music from a singer’s perspective.

Making an impressive solo debut on SOMM this month is the young, fast-rising pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen. No stranger to SOMM, she joined two of today’s finest pianists – Valerie Tryon and Peter Donohoe – in Mozart’s dazzling Piano Concerto for Three Pianos, K242 in 2018. Mishka studied with Joan Havill, Richard Goode and Imogen Cooper and was mentored by Sir András Schiff, who presented her in recitals throughout Europe and in New York for his acclaimed Building Bridges series. This superbly realised recital includes Variations by Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, and first recordings of two new works, specially commissioned by Mishka for this recording, by Nico Muhly and Vijay Iyer. A single theme from Robert Schumann’s Bunte Blätter is the prompt for completely different, sometimes opposing, sets of musical mutations, the result as exciting as it is intriguing. A birthday gift for her husband, Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann are “an outpouring of generosity and love” that inspired Brahms’s Op.9 Variations (Op.9), which Rushdie Momen describes in her booklet notes as “one of his most intimate and personal expressions”. The “burst of harmonic and rhythmic invention” that are Robert Schumann’s Op.5 Impromptus, and Mendelssohn’s “concise, rigorously constructed” Variations sérieuses were both modelled on Beethoven’s Eroica Variations. Completing a recital brilliantly illustrating Rushdie Momen’s conviction that “the possibilities of the variation form seem infinite” are two world premiere recordings: Nico Muhly’s Small Variations – “a five-minute chorale with an explosion halfway through it” – and Vijay Iyer’s Hallucination Party, a “fever dream” packed with surprises. A Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate, Mishka Rushdie Momen is also a committed chamber musician who has partnered Steven Isserlis, Midori and members of the Endellion, Belcea and Artemis String Quartets.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the World Premiere recording of Charles Villiers Stanford’s opera The Travelling Companion. The live recording features Julien Van Mellaerts in the title role and a cast that includes David Horton (John), Kate Valentine (The Princess), Pauls Putnins (The King), Ian Beadle (The Wizard) and Felix Kemp (The Herald) with Toby Purser conducting the New Sussex Opera Orchestra and Chorus. First staged in 1925 and the last of Stanford’s nine completed operas, The Travelling Companion is based on a fantasy-laced story by Hans Christian Andersen with a libretto by Henry Newbolt (whose Songs of the Sea and Songs of the Fleet Stanford had previously set). It finds the composer at his most economic but expressive – a last, remarkable demonstration of his brilliance as an orchestrator. The result, says Stanford biographer Jeremy Dibble in his authoritative booklet notes, “seems like an antidote to the heavier textures of Wagner and Richard Strauss and rivals the fairy-tale operas of the Russians”. Anticipating Puccini’s Turandot, at the heart of The Travelling Companion is a Princess whose suitors must answer an impenetrable riddle to win her hand or die when they fail. There are intimations of Britten’s Peter Grimes, too, in the sophisticated use of the Chorus, leading Jeremy Dibble to observe: “If Stanford’s last opera was given time to establish itself in the repertoire, not only would it provide an entirely new perspective of this highly versatile and imaginative composer, but it might also change our view of our operatic history”. This first recording of The Travelling Companion was recorded live at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden in December, 2018. Previous SOMM recordings of Stanford’s music include two “essential listening” recommendations from Gramophone for String Quartets Nos.3, 4 & 7 (SOMMCD 0185) and from MusicWeb International for Partsongs (SOMMCD 0128).

Lights, Camera, Action! as SOMM Recordings says “Hooray for Hollywood” with its second volume of Great Classic Film Music featuring the Scottish- born maestro Iain Sutherland directing the Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra of Hilversum. The first volume of Great Film Music (Ariadne 5006) was hailed by Classic FM for “bringing together the finest music cinema has to offer” and featured by John Brunning as his ‘Drivetime Discovery’. This second visit to the Golden Age of Hollywood and its unforgettable successors is taken from live and studio recordings from 1988-95 that conjure up all the drama and romance, poetry and playfulness of film music at its most gloriously entertaining. A half century of unforgettable music is captured here, from the swashbuckling romance of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s The Sea Hawk to the sci-fi heroism of Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Next Generation. Cinema icons John Williams (Back to the Future), John Barry (You Only Live Twice), Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia) and Lalo Schifrin (The Eagle Has Landed) are heard alongside the late, great Ennio Morricone’s ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ (The Mission). Love and romance feature among the thrills and spills of Burton Lane’s Finian’s Rainbow, Kurt Weill’s September Song, George Gershwin’s Funny Face, Robert Stolz’s Spring Parade and Cole Porter’s sparkling songs in Evil Under the Sun. Two towering figures of the concert hall are also heard, with Elvira Madigan’s sublime borrowing from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21 and rousing and lyrical themes befitting their Shakespearean settings by William Walton from the Laurence Olivier starring and directed Richard III and Henry V. Iain Sutherland’s previous SOMM releases include the “impressive... fully recommended” (Musical Opinion) Bernstein: Broadway to Hollywood (Ariadne 5002) and In London Town (SOMMCD 0117) with its “sparkling performances of some of the cream of light music” (MusicWeb International).

The Carlock-Combet Duo return to SOMM RECORDINGS with a trio of ravishing Romantic Violin Sonatas by Schubert, Robert Schumann and Grieg. Formed in 2014, the Philadelphia-based Carlock-Combet Duo – Sandra Carlock and Guillaume Combet – has quickly established a reputation for “imaginative and intelligent programming performed with style, panache and polish” (MusicWeb International). The 20-year-old Schubert’s genial and outward-looking Violin Sonata in A major (D574) explores the expressive range of the violin to the full and is, says Robert Matthew-Walker in his informative booklet notes, “a masterpiece of the late Classical era worthy to stand with the finest examples of Beethoven”. The violinist Joseph Joachim considered Schumann’s Op.121 Violin Sonata in D minor to be “one of the finest compositions of our times in respect of its marvelous unity of feeling and thematic significance. It overflows with noble passion, almost harsh and bitter in expression, and the last movement reminds one of the sea with glorious waves of sound”. Grieg’s Third Violin Sonata in C minor (Op.45) was his last completed chamber work. Beginning and ending with passionately dramatic statements, it frames a central, nobly lyrical theme memorably shared by both instruments.

History is re-claimed with two significant archive recordings, newly restored and re-mastered, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra of a master British symphonist in his early prime on Somm Céleste. The first recorded appearance of Edmund Rubbra conducting the wartime premiere of his own Fourth Symphony (taken from an off-air recording of the live broadcast) is coupled with a live 1954 BBC radio broadcast – considered “quite stupendous” by the composer – of the Second Symphony conducted by the work’s dedicatee, Sir Adrian Boult. The Second Symphony boasts a language that is utterly original, the entirety of its four-movement arc spun out from the long-breathed noble theme at its opening. So enamoured of the Second was Boult he later chose it as one of his Desert Island Discs when he appeared on the iconic BBC Radio 4 programme. Recently conscripted, Rubbra was dressed in full military uniform when he conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony during the 1942 Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. At once epic and intimate, powerful and poetic, it has, claims his one-time pupil Robert Layton “one of the most beautiful openings not just in Rubbra but in all English music” and a stirring finale of triumphant dimensions that has been likened to Bruckner. Rubbra’s own introduction to the symphony – first broadcast by BBC Radio five days before its premiere in This Week at the Proms – offers a revealing glimpse into the heart of a mighty and moving symphony.

Peter Donohoe’s compelling journey through the complete Prokofiev and subsequently the complete Scriabin Piano Sonatas for SOMM has led him almost irresistibly to the piano music of Stravinsky whose exuberance and many technical challenges he seems to relish. He begins with three movements from Petrushka for solo piano, drawn directly from the ballet by the composer ten years after the completion of the orchestral score. Stravinsky’s goal (together with the jazz-like Piano-Rag-Music) was to encourage pianist Arthur Rubinstein to play his music. His intention was to make the arrangement not only technically challenging but also musically satisfying. Such are its demands however, that even the composer himself only played it once, confessing that he lacked the technique. This set also includes Stravinsky’s early, charmingly delicate F-sharp minor Sonata which he completed in 1904 but it was only published in 1973. The Piano Sonata of 1924, also included here, was composed during his neo-classical period and pays tribute to the 18th century containing characteristic splashes of baroque brilliance as well as latent romanticism. 1940’s Tango, originally conceived as a song, was composed soon after Stravinsky emigrated to the United States.

Volume 4 of Peter Donohoe’s acclaimed survey of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas on SOMM Recordings focuses on the composer’s adoption of the newly emerging pianoforte and his bold exploitation of its more sophisticated voicing. Sonatas Nos.1 in C major (K279) and 5 in G major (K283) were composed as a set of six “difficult” sonatas by the 18-year-old prodigy in 1774. Containing hints of the mature genius to come, the Scarlatti-accented outer movements of the First Sonata frame a seductively perfumed, sensuously realized central passage of precocious sophistication. Sonata No.5 moves from grace to complexity to echo CPE Bach before ending in a breathless, left-hand accented contradanse celebrating the growing freedom and fluidity of Mozart’s piano writing. More emotionally conflicted, Sonata No.12 in F major (K332) was composed in the wake of Mozart’s failed search for employment in Paris, his mother’s death and a moment of spiritual despair. Two miniatures complete the volume: the mysterious and engrossing late Minuet in D major (K355) and the austere and searching Allegro in G minor (K312). Christopher Morley returns as author of the series’ authoritative and illuminating booklet notes. SOMM’s Mozart Piano Sonatas survey has attracted superlative reviews. Volume 1 (SOMMCD 0191) received the accolades of MusicWeb International’s Recording of the Year and BBC Music Magazine’s Recording of the Month which declared: “It was high time someone blew the cobwebs off this still under-appreciated repertoire, and Donohoe is clearly the person to do it”. Volume 2 (SOMMCD 0198) was also a MusicWeb International Recording of the Year. Musical Opinion described Donohoe as “an ideal interpreter”, adding “no finer accounts of these still neglected masterpieces will have been offered to the public”. Of Volume 3 (SOMMCD 0613), ClassicalMusicDaily said: “This is a recording full of joy… the collection as a whole deserves to be celebrated”.

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce the return of the acclaimed partnership of pianist Clélia Iruzun and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jac van Steen with two colorful late-19th-century Romantic Piano Concertos from Brazil and France: Henrique Oswald’s G minor Piano Concerto, Op.10 and the Fifth Piano Concerto in F major (Op.103) by Camille Saint-Saëns. Iruzun’s Brazilian compatriot Henrique Oswald shared a long friendship with Camille Saint-Saëns based on mutual admiration for each other as composers and pianists. They occasionally performed together some of Saint-Saëns’ music for two pianos in public recitals. Saint-Saëns’ exotic Fifth Piano Concerto, the Egyptian, was composed during a North African holiday in 1896. Combining complex piano writing with a deft lightness of touch, it boasts a lyrical main theme (described by Saint-Saëns as “a Nubian love song”), hypnotic echoes of the gamelan and a finale bursting with virtuosity. Oswald’s Piano Concerto was composed in Italy a decade before Saint-Saëns’ Egyptian. With bravura passages recalling Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto, its richly Romantic vein carries allusions to Fauré while brimming with Oswald’s intriguing native Brazilian rhythms. Like Oswald, Alberto Nepomuceno was a Brazilian who studied in Europe, later succeeding him in a prestigious teaching position in Rio de Janeiro. Modelled on Grieg’s Suite from Holberg’s Time, his Suite Antiga (Suite in the Old Style) combines Baroque style and Romantic attitude with a bewitching savoir faire.

SOMM Recordings launches a revealing three-volume survey of One Hundred Years of British Song with tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson. Compiled to reflect the rich variety of British song, Volume 1 throws a spotlight on composers who made a considerable contribution to the song repertoire but whose success in other genres often led to their songs being overlooked. All four featured composers – Gustav Holst, Rebecca Clarke, Ivor Gurney and Frank Bridge – were born in the late 1800s and lived through the horrors of the First World War and the extraordinary social, cultural and political upheaval that followed. Two songs by Holst – the liturgically-accented A Vigil of Pentecost and folk- infused The Ballad of Hunting Knowe – receive first recordings. Songs from Holst’s Twelve Humbert Wolfe Songs are also heard alongside Clarke’s macabre setting of AE Housman’s Eight O’Clock and John Masefield’s The Seal Man, which Williamson describes in his informative booklet notes as “one of the most thrilling English songs in the repertoire”. Also featured are Ivor Gurney’s powerful and poignant Snow and Sleep and his affecting treatment of WB Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens together with Four Songs by Frank Bridge including three romantically heightened settings of Rabindranath Tagore and the deeply moving, lullaby-like Journey’s End to a text by Humbert Wolfe.

SOMM Recordings announces the return of pianist Cordelia Williams with Nightlight, a compelling exploration of the contrariness of night, its turmoil, terror and tenderness, and the longing for light. Inspired by Williams’ experience mothering her two infant children in the isolating dead of night while the world around her slept, Nightlight is dedicated, she says, “to the many people who... feel alone in the darkness. To those who experience despair or sublime melancholy during the hours before the dawn, who are searching for solace, peace or impossible hope. To anyone lost who is waiting to be found by the light”. Spanning four centuries, from Thomas Tomkins’ exquisitely melancholic A Sad Pavanfor these Distracted Times to jazz virtuoso Bill Evans’ hypnotic, fantasy-laced Peace Piece, the recital moves from sleep-inducing nightfall – Mozart’s D minor Fantasia, K.397 – to waking hopes for the new dawn in what Williams describes as the “shimmering hope, glory just beyond the horizon” of Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn).The becalmed and tempest-driven waters of the ocean in Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No.2 (Sonata-Fantasy) prove a perfect metaphor for the stilled and turbulent currents of the night. Plunging into night’s darkest, most disturbed places, the dislocations of Schubert’s late Sonata in C minor, D958, are salved by two soothingly nocturne-like Liszt Consolations. “The music recorded here,” says Williams, “sees our loneliness and darkness, recognizes and validates those unutterable feelings, and reaches out a hand of consolation.” Piano winner of the 2006 BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition, Cordelia Williams’ previous SOMM releases include her acclaimed coupling of Bach and Arvo Pärt (SOMMCD 0186) hailed by International Piano as “a magnificently stimulating concept, brilliantly recognized” and well-received recitals of Schubert (SOMMCD 0127) and Schumann (SOMMCD 0150).