SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce Entente Musicale, a celebration of Anglo-French music from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that sees violinist Clare Howick and pianist Simon Callaghan return to the label following their well-received collection of British Violin Sonatas. Perhaps no composer embodied the new spirit of comradeship and collaboration between England and France more enthusiastically than the Bradford-born, Paris-domiciled Frederick Delius. His Sonata in B major offers a becoming portrait of the then 30-year-old composer; youthfully dramatic with a growing virtuosity and vigor that makes it seem, as Robert Matthew-Walker notes in his erudite booklet notes, like the “extended and manifestly symphonic composition” it is. Composed at the same age, John Ireland’s breakthrough First Violin Sonata combines Edwardian elegance with a hint of French Impressionism gleaned from Debussy – whose late, last Violin Sonata in G minor is a work of profoundly-expressed emotions – and Ravel, whose Pièce en forme de habanera is hauntingly memorable. While resident in Paris in the early years of the last century, Cyril Scott enjoyed cordial relations with Ravel and Debussy, who particularly admired his music. His Valse Caprice and arrangement of Cherry Ripe infuse well-mannered salon pieces with lithe French elegance. Similarly so, Arnold Bax’s ever-popular picture-postcard Mediterranean in its vivacious arrangement by Jascha Heifetz.

SOMM RECORDINGS is delighted to announce Elgar from America, Volume II: the first commercial release of three historic performances from 1940s’ New York featuring legendary Elgarian interpreters including violinist Yehudi Menuhin and conductors Malcolm Sargent and Arturo Toscanini at the helm of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The results offer a fascinating transatlantic perspective on a titan of British music while revealing his musical legacy in a country he visited annually from 1905-07 and again in 1911. The featured recordings date from the first half of the 1940s and have been restored and remastered by the multi-award-winning audio restoration engineer Lani Spahr, who also provides informative booklet notes. Menuhin, long associated with Elgar since his 1932 recording of the Violin Concerto, is heard here in a 1945 performance of the work, abbreviated to fit radio constraints of time. It is conducted by Sargent who also leads an account of Cockaigne (In London Town) Concert-Overture from the same year. Toscanini’s 1940 performance of the Introduction and Allegro for Strings marks the only time he conducted it with the NBC SO, joined here by Mischa Mischakoff and Edwin Bachmann violins, Carlton Cooley viola, Frank Miller cello. Elgar from America, Volume I (ARIADNE 5005) was hailed by Classical Music Daily as “a fine start to this historic cycle” while MusicWeb International called it “a model of one of the things the album should be doing: filling the medium to capacity with engaging and/or controversial interpretations that one cannot simply over-hear... Essential listening.”

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce the first commercial release of Composers at the Savile Club, pianist Alexander Karpeyev’s vivid and varied recital celebrating the 150th anniversary of the venerable London club. Devised by Karpeyev and Jeremy Barlow (who will celebrate his 60th year as a Savile member in 2020 and also provides informative booklet notes) the recital includes music for solo piano by 11 leading Savile members to chart the development of British music from late romanticism to modernism – and back again. Sam Pierce and Bradley Jones perform the two celebratory trumpet fanfares, by former Savilian Malcolm Arnold – his Savile Centenary Fanfare – and current Savile member, Julian Anderson – Fanfare: SC–GH composed for the sesquicentennial anniversary – that frame Karpeyev’s recital. Among British luminaries featured are the composer-knights Edward Elgar (the lyrically atmospheric In Smyrna), William Walton (Façade’s delightful, dancing ‘Popular Song’), Malcolm Arnold (Variations on a Ukrainian Folk Song his most substantial work for solo piano) and Hubert Parry (the delicately antique Hands Across the Centuries Prelude). Other notable names include Roger Quilter, Herbert Howells, Arthur Benjamin, William Alwyn and Henry Balfour Gardiner. Two Irish dances by Dubliner Charles Villiers Stanford, the Romanian-born Francis Chagrin’s Suite Roumaine and three Musical Portraits by American Virgil Thomson complete a fascinating portrait of the Savile Club’s rich musical heritage. Located in London’s Mayfair, the Savile Club was founded in 1868, its motto – “Sodalitas Convivium” – translating as “good fellowship and conviviality”. The Savile’s informality has attracted a host of distinguished names from the arts and sciences, including composers not featured on this recording Sir Arthur Bliss, William Lloyd Webber and Bernard Hermann and 17 Nobel Prize winners, among them poets Rudyard Kipling and WB Yeats, and physicists Ernest Rutherford and John Cockcroft.

SOMM RECORDINGS is pleased to announce the return of pianist Michael Dussek to explore the music of his ancestor Jan Ladislav Dussek and it's relationship to one of the piano repertoire's most illustrious champions, Fryderyk Chopin. This fascinating recital reveals Dussek - a colorful character and favorite of Marie Antoinette whose talents took him throughout Europe and Russia - as "revolutionary in his approach to both composition and pianism" and makes a persuasive argument for Dussek's influence on Chopin. In his informative booklet notes, Michael Dussek makes the case for his namesake's music being the product of a composer "very much ahead of his time in the development of a Romantic piano style" (Grove Music). The disc's centerpiece is the Op.35 Piano Sonatas (Nos.11-13), the B-flat major Sonata a crucible of ideas accommodating the rustic lyricism of his native Bohemia, a contrapuntal sophistication that would find full flowering in his later Messe Solennelle, and an anticipation of what would become a Chopin signature. The G major Sonata boasts melodic expressiveness, virtuoso passagework, a harmonic boldness that Schubert would later more fully exploit and a Rondo finale that out-Haydns Haydn. The Sonata in C minor strikingly blends Beethoven, Chopin and a joyful village dance to conclude a "gloriously innovative triptych". Completing the album are two pinnacles of the piano repertoire: Chopin's exquisite Nocturne, Op.15 No.2, and the lyrical, rapturously intense Ballade No.1 in G minor. Michael Dussek's previous SOMM recordings include volumes of chamber music by Frank Bridge and Jacques Ibert with the Bridge Quartet. MusicWeb International hailed the earlier recording as "vivacious, subtle and faithful to [Bridge's] mercurial muse", adding: "Michael Dussek is a doyen among the pianists who have made themselves familiar with this repertoire". BBC Music Magazine described the Ibert as "suave Gallic chamber music beautifully played".

SOMM Recordings throws new, invigorating light on the Chamber Music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, performed by the Eusebius Quartet and pianist Alasdair Beatson. Hailed by musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky as “the very last breath of the romantic spirit of Vienna”, Korngold’s stellar beginnings in Europe’s concert halls and opera houses were later overshadowed by his success in America where his soaring symphonic signature forged the template for the Hollywood soundtrack. But, as Korngold authority Brendan G Carroll notes in his informative booklet essay, the composer’s “relatively small body of chamber works... is no less impressive and actually offers a succinct distillation of his style and voice, often to considerably profound effect.”

The earliest work here is the string quartet arrangement of the suite drawn from his 1920 incidental music to Shakespeare’s Viel Lärmen um Nichts (Much Ado About Nothing). Its glowing Intermezzo is heard in the world premiere recording of Tom Poster’s sumptuous new arrangement. The following year’s Op.15 Piano Quintet was composed shortly after Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), and, Carroll notes, “its flamboyant, heroic melodic style owes much to the residual influence of that epic score”. The Op.26 Second String Quartet from 1933 “is one of the most intensely ‘Viennese’ works Korngold ever wrote.” The jolly, bubbling humor of its opening gives way to a rich, expansive Larghetto before concluding with a spirited hymn to that most Viennese of dance forms, the waltz.

Praised as “excellent” by The Sunday Times, the Eusebius Quartet was formed in 2016 and is making its debut on SOMM Recordings. Alasdair Beatson’s previous SOMM releases include his enthusiastically reviewed recording debut, coupling Schumann, Grieg, Brahms and Berg (SOMMCD 086), and a Mendelssohn recital (SOMMCD 104) hailed by Classic FM for its “highly sensitive playing of rare insight”.

SOMM celebrates Christmas this year with Carols from Chelsea, a delicious offering from the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea under their Director, William Vann. The Royal Hospital, founded in 1682 by Charles II, is the home of the iconic Chelsea Pensioners, who are all retired soldiers of the British Army. The Chapel Choir sings for the Sunday morning Matins service in the Royal Hospital's Wren Chapel during the year, but in December provides the music for carol services and other Christmas-themed events almost every day. This recording showcases some of the Choir's most cherished carol repertoire, alongside solo organ music performed by the Royal Hospital's Organ Scholar, James Orford, and a very special performance with Chelsea Pensioner and George Hatton. Many of the Royal Hospital's carol services begin wtih Franz Gruber's spine-tingling carol Stille Nacht, an especially moving carol to hear in the original German, given it's celebrated performance in the trenches on Christmas Day, 1914. Once in Royal David's City is the first of three carols that are usually sung with the full congregation, opening with the famous solo that captures the mood of Christmas like nothing else.

SOMM Recordings is thrilled to announce the release of Mosaic featuring the label debut of the A4 Brass Quartet. Formed in 2013 at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, the quartet comprises principal players from some of the UK’s top brass bands, including Black Dyke, Foden’s and Brighouse & Rastrick. Its unique blend of instruments – cornet (Jamie Smith), tenor horn (Jonathan Bates), baritone horn (Mike Cavanagh) and euphonium (Chris Robertson) – creates a unique sound that stands out from the standard brass quartet. An exciting kaleidoscope of new music and bespoke arrangements for the ensemble’s distinctive line-up, Mosaic makes a bold claim for the vibrancy and variety of contemporary brass music. Its aim, the quartet says, “is to take the listener on a journey in which they are never quite certain what lies around the corner”. First recordings include Bramwell Tovey’s Street Songs, inspired by photographs of 19th-century Salvation Army bands, three movements from Christian Overhead’s vibrant portraiture in music, 5 Miniatures (both composed for A4 Brass), an arrangement by Jonathan Bates of José Serebrier’s vivacious Cuarteto, Bates’s own virtuosic Toccata 2, and Daniel Hall’s visceral take on a notorious Hollywood murder dubbed The Black Dahlia, which won the A4 Brass Quartet’s inaugural composition competition in 2018.Lighter fare is provided by Elgar’s perennially popular Salut d’Amour, the ebullient Overture to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and three more arrangements by Bates: Percy Grainger’s dancing Molly on the Shore, the lovelorn jazz standard, Autumn Leaves, and Kentaro Sato’s tribute to victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Tsuna’ngari (‘connection’).Euphonium player Chris Robertson provides striking arrangements of Bruckner’s beloved motet Locus iste, and Bartók’s Six Romanian Folk Dances that exploit the quartet’s distinctively individual signature.

SOMM Recordings pays tribute to the remarkable flourishing of British Violin Sonatas in the 20th century with a collection of music for violin and piano by six key figures of the modern chamber music renaissance in Britain. Making her debut on SOMM, violinist Clare Howick’s championing of this repertoire prompted iClassical to declare “the record-buying public owe [her] a debt of gratitude”. She is accompanied by pianist Simon Callaghan. From the middle of the century, and commissioned for Yehudi Menuhin, William Walton’s Violin Sonata is unique in the composer’s oeuvre with its almost constant sense of nervous uncertainty. Composed the same year (1948), Kenneth Leighton’s youthful First Violin Sonata is the product, as Robert Matthew-Walker comments in his authoritative booklet notes, of “a deep-thinking musician of whom everything he was to write, from his earliest compositions onwards, is genuinely felt and unaffectedly original”. William Alwyn’s beautifully proportioned Sonatina (1933) receives only its second appearance on album here. Composed the following year, Alan Rawsthorne’s Pierrette: Valse Caprice is best remembered from its quotation in the composer’s soundtrack for the 1947 film Uncle Silas. The contrasted Elegy and Toccata from Lennox Berkeley’s 1951 Op.33 reveal a master craftsman in miniature, while three pieces by Gordon Jacob – Little Dancer (1959), Caprice (1969) and Elegy (1972) – all make their first appearances on album here. Somm gratefully acknowledges the support of the William Alwyn Foundation, the Lennox Berkeley Society, the Delius Trust, the Rawsthorne Trust and the RVW Trust in making this recording.

SOMM Recordings announces the launch of a major six-volume series of Franz Xaver Scharwenka’s transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies featuring the label debut of the Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman Piano Duo. Formed in 2010, the Duo began their in-concert exploration of Scharwenka’s four-hand Beethoven transcriptions in 2015 and now bring that experience to disc for the first time. Volume 1 includes the premiere recording of Scharwenka’s piano duet transcription of Symphony No.3, the ever-popular Eroica, and Debussy’s two-piano arrangement of Robert Schumann’s Six Studies in Canonic Form. As Robert Matthew-Walker’s booklet notes reveal, Scharwenka had a direct line to Beethoven, having been taught by Franz Kullak, who was tutored by Carl Czerny whose own teacher, in turn, had been Beethoven himself. A composer of no mean stature in his own right, Scharwenka’s transcriptions were once widely admired, making masterpiece symphonies available to every home with a piano. Possessing, says Matthew-Walker, “significant qualities which are often overlooked today”, his Eroica transcription receives ardent, eloquently persuasive championing by Schoeman and Uys. Scharwenka wasn’t alone in exploiting new developments in piano technology. Robert Schumann’s Six Studies in Canonic Form made use of the then novel ‘pedal-piano’ (a standard piano with an additional bass pedal-board) even as he was looking back stylistically towards his idol, Bach. Debussy’s arrangement for two pianos adroitly accommodates Schumann’s original to “rescue this fine music from the obscurity of the pedal-piano repertoire.” 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 throughout the world. Her multi-prize-winning South African compatriot Ben Schoeman also has a busy international profile and is currently a senior lecturer in piano and musicology at the University of Pretoria.

Emma Johnson & Friends – the ensemble led by the outstanding clarinetist and one of the UK’s best-selling classical artists – returns to SOMM Recordings for an entertaining programme of chamber music led by Beethoven’s magisterial Septet. The group’s second release for SOMM follows 2016’s well-received coupling of Schubert and Crusell, when MusicWeb International noted: “With an hour and a quarter of delightful music in first-rate performances, this album is a winner”. Composed in 1800, Beethoven’s Septet is one of the cornerstones of the chamber repertoire. Caught on the cusp between the Classical era and fast-emerging Romanticism, as Robert Matthew-Walker’s booklet essay notes, “it abounds in felicitous light fancy and delicious invention... standing apart as a work of unquestionable independence of expression, already looking towards the initial decades of the new century”. The Septet was the first work to pair clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass, its six movements “filled with sunny gaiety” (Matthew-Walker again) and realized here with exquisite delicacy and definition by Johnson in the company of the Carducci String Quartet, Peter Francombe (horn), Philip Gibbon (bassoon) and Christ West (double bass). For clarinet and string quartet, the Introduction, Theme and Variations, originally thought to have been Carl Maria Weber’s but now ascribed to Joseph Kuffner, boasts an “inherent musicality and the beauty and cut of its themes and their treatment demonstrate quite clearly that this beautiful piece is well worth the attention of all lovers of music from the early Romantic period”. Two delightfully playful and poetic arrangements by Emma Johnson of Johann Strauss II’s Fruhlingsstimmen and Perpetuum Mobile provide surprising encores to a recording of chamber music at its most elegant and eloquent.

SOMM RECORDINGS’Belle Époque 1886 celebrates a golden age of French chamber music, uniquely coupling Cello Sonatas by César Franck and Benjamin Godard. Franck’s A major and Godard’s D minor Sonatas were both composed in 1886 when French composers were replacing Austro-German dominance with a native, vernacular style. Making their debuts on SOMM are cellist Corinne Morris and pianist Petr Limonov. Of Anglo-French heritage, Morris continues to reveal herself a formidable musician. She made a triumphant comeback after a shoulder injury forced her to withdraw from the concert platform for more than five years. She has been hailed by Mstislav Rostropovich as “‘Corinotchka’, my colleague” while Paul Tortelier wrote “My warmest wishes are for Corinne and her art”. With a burgeoning profile at the keyboard and conductor’s podium, Russian-British pianist Petr Limonov has been described as “an extremely multi-faceted, phenomenal musician who has an endless array of abilities” (Classical Music magazine). Franck’s Cello Sonata – an arrangement by cellist Jules Delsart of his Violin Sonata, originally composed for violinist Eugène Ysaÿe’s wedding and the only alternative version sanctioned by the composer – is notable for the lyrical, singing quality of its cello writing while boasting complex harmonies and sophisticated thematic devices throughout. A prolific composer, versatile musician and close associate of Franck’s, Godard’s Cello Sonata, says Gavin Dixon in his booklet notes, “demonstrates an innate knowledge of the instrument, especially of the varied expressive potential of its different ranges”. It is shot through with vivid coloring of the cello’s voice in shifting registers and Godard’s penchant for the operatic.

Somm Recordings is proud to announce a landmark recording for lovers of British music featuring 23 first recordings of piano pieces by Sir Granville Bantock, one of the most influential British composers of his age. Performed by Maria Marchant, Bantock Rediscovered is being issued to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Bantock’s birth in 1868. This is a major release supported by a full-page advert in Gramophone magazine and is sure to attract considerable attention for its treasure-trove of music newly rescued from neglect and the new light it sheds on a revered composer. Composed between 1894 and 1938, these immensely varied, beautifully crafted works illustrate fascinating aspects of Bantock’s artistry and music. The carefully chosen, exquisitely played programme reveals the breadth, delicacy and deliberateness of what Robert Matthew-Walker describes in his booklet notes as Bantock’s “always clever structuring and drily eloquent style”. Among the gems to be discovered here are Memories of Sapphire, three beautiful lyrical tone poems recalling a visit to North Carolina and dedicated to the composer’s mother; the richly impressionistic Barcarolle showing Bantock’s piano writing at its finest; the late, lively Parade March and the striking piano transcription of the symphonic overture Saul, with its early hints of the orientalism that would later prove so significant to Bantock’s music. Demonstrating Bantock’s deft ability to borrow from traditional music, the Two Scottish Pieces offer up a vivacious quickstep and reel. Heard in their entirety, the Twelve Piano Pieces carry themselves with a ‘light music’ gloss but reveal deeper feelings and more sophisticated meaning in the hands of a master composer.

Considering how well William Alwyn’s music has fared on disc, perhaps it’s surprising that his Tenth through Thirteenth string quartets from the 1930s have not been recorded until now. After all, Alwyn always wrote effectively and beautifully for the genre.

While the Tenth’s four movements depict a sea voyage, somehow programmatic elements like the first movement’s gently rocking ostinatos, the second movement’s scampering violin lines depicting birds in flight, and the finale’s stormy, angular tuttis never sound clichéd (sound clip). The Eleventh’s first movement opens with a terse yet enigmatic motto theme that eventually generates robust and animated counterpoint. The second movement’s obsessive repeated pattern and muted sonorities fuse delicacy and backbone, while the finale’s spacious rising and falling lines gradually build to an intense fortissimo.

The Twelfth is a one-movement fantasia that embraces more dissonant and freewheeling ideas, while the Thirteenth is harmonically and melodically more conservative, and lushly scored; notice, for example, the second movement’s blend of busy pizzicatos and whirling trills and the first movement’s frequent octave doublings and double stops.

In the case of recorded premieres such as these, critics tend to focus on the music more than the performances. However, one must credit the Tippett Quartet for giving vibrant and communicative voice to Alwyn’s wide expressive range and marvelous deployment of string textures among all four instruments, together with Somm’s warm, well blended engineering. Recommended.

– ClassicsToday (Jed Distler)

SOMM RECORDINGS’ acclaimed series of re-mastered recitals by the much loved, fondly remembered contralto Kathleen Ferrier continues with Kathleen Ferrier: 20th Century British Treasures. Featuring recordings made for Decca and the BBC between 1946 and 1953, it includes a previously unpublished recording of Ferrier’s passionate performance of Lennox Berkeley’s Four Poems of St Teresa of Ávila. Sir Thomas Allen, the distinguished interpreter of British song and Trustee of the Kathleen Ferrier Awards, contributes an extensive booklet commentary that brings a lifetime’s experience to bear in an insightful analysis of Ferrier’s dexterous and treasured talent, accented by the distinctive tones of her native Lancashire. The earliest recording, from 1947, is of Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Flower Song’ from The Rape of Lucretia, the latest, from 1953 (both BBC recitals), includes Howard Ferguson’s lovely five-part Discovery, three songs by William Wordsworth and Edmund Rubbra’s Three Psalms, specially written for Ferrier. Pieces by defining proponents of British song including Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter, Frank Bridge and Peter Warlock complete a crucial celebration of Ferrier’s inimitable contribution to the genre. Pianist Julian Jacobson, son of composer Maurice Jacobson, whose melancholy but sensuous The Song of Songs is heard in a 1947 BBC broadcast, also provides a personal poignant note on Ferrier’s championing of his father’s music.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the bi-centenary of Giovanni Bottesini, a legendary double bass player and pioneering composer for the instrument, with First Recordings of his String Quintets Nos.2 (E minor) and No.3 (A major), performed by double bass virtuoso Leon Bosch and I Musicanti. A passionate, articulate champion for the double bass, Bottesini brought the instrument out of the orchestra and into the spotlight. His own prowess on the double bass and his music for it has seen him described as “the Paganini of the double bass”. Making its first appearance on album, the C minor Second String Quintet adopts the string quartet-with-second cello scoring employed by Schubert and Boccherini to create a work of rhythmic vitality, color and contrasting moods. Also receiving its premiere recording, the intricately designed Third String Quintet, in A major, employs the two-viola instrumentation preferred by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Beethoven and is, as Toby Deller observes in his booklet notes, “the more lyrically Romantic work of the three on this recording, with four sharply characterized movements”. Scored for string quartet and double bass, Bottesini’s Naples-composed First String Quintet, dedicated to Mercadante and familiarly known as the Gran Quintetto in C minor, completes the program. It seamlessly marries a venerable and inherited Italian instrumental tradition with the bel canto poetry of Italian romantic opera. Making their debuts on SOMM are double bassist Leon Bosch – of whom The Strad has said, he “demonstrates a natural affinity” with Bottesini; “his performances combine sonorous, lyrical, exquisitely nuanced playing with a remarkable command of the instrument’s bravura potential” – and the “flexible line-up of super-talented hand-picked performers” (Planet Hugill) he founded in 2013, I Musicanti.