In this album two Swiss musicians - the cellist Andreas Graf and pianist Evelyne Grandy - transform what is essentially a song recital into a programme of lyrical miniatures for cello and piano. They thread their own arrangements of melodies by five fellow Swiss composers through some unfamiliar versions of well-known tunes, casting some long-standing favourites in new light and setting them alongside new delicacies.

Classical music in Australia is barely two centuries old, and many of it's riches remain as good as unknown, both at home and abroad. This album of chamber music featuring the horn - itself a largely unfamiliar genre - charts the evolution of Australian music in microcosm, from Romanticism via modernism to a sound suggesting the open space of the outback. This repertoire is as good as unknown at home and further afield, though all of it has personality and presence, and should prove of interest to the international horn-playing community and to audiences more generally.

The Rieger organ recently installed in the Musiikkitalo (Music Center) in Helsinki is the largest modern concert-hall organ in the world. In it's first-ever solo recording Jan Lehtola puts the instrument through it's paces. His unusual programme consists of nine sets of variations on Christmas melodies by four French composers, one Franco-Lebanese and an Englishman using what is probably the only well-known Ukrainian tune. The meeting of old and new in these variations shows off the splendours of the new instrument, the virtuosic writing ranging from gossamer delicacy and sumptuous harmonies to statements of colossal power.

In 1719 the aristocratic Schwarzenberg family inherited the huge castle of Ceský Krumlov in south-western Bohemia, reviving it's distinguished but dormant musical tradition with a new ensemble of two oboes, two cors anglais, two bassoons and two horns, active from 1771 onwards. These musicians soon provided the foundation for a wave of chamber music featuring double-reed woodwind instruments that flourished as the instruments improved. It reached it's peak of popularity in Vienna in the last two decades of the century, but has remained largely unknown since then. This series unites past and present by combining some of the scores researched in the Ceský Krumlov archives (including a 1799 handwritten copy of Beethoven's 1794 C major oboe trio, which suggests it was a Schwarzenberg commission) with works composed more recently - mainly by oboe-playing composers.

Most guitar recitals emphasise the vigorous Spanish and Latin American heritage of the instrument. This album takes a different approach, travelling round the fringes of Europe, with music from Albania, Estonia, France, Serbia, Greece and the British Isles, these largely lyrical works chosen because they were inspired by issues and events that underline the dignity of the human condition. They allude to a surprisingly wide range of subjects: peace-time reconciliation, love and loss, ethnic identity, personal courage, environmental degradation and bittersweet recollections of childhood - in music for calm reflection.

In the days before recorded sound, people usually learned their orchestral music at home, playing it in piaIn the days before recorded sound, people usually learned their orchestral music at home, playing it in piano transcriptions for two or four hands. Two German-Jewish composers took that idea a stage further: Ignaz Moscheles, protege of Beethoven, wrote a symphony for four hands at a single keyboard, and Ferdinand Hiller, friend of Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt, went a step further, following Moscheles' symphony without an orchestra with an opera without singers - both works bold genre-busters well before the term had even been invented. No transcriptions for two or four hands. Two German-Jewish composers took that idea a stage further: Ignaz Moscheles, protege of Beethoven, wrote a symphony for four hands at a single keyboard, and Ferdinand Hiller, friend of Berlioz, Chopin and Liszt, went a step further, following Moscheles' symphony without an orchestra with an opera without singers - both works bold genre-busters well before the term had even been invented.

The music of Douglas Gordon Weiland - born, like Elgar, in Worcestershire, in 1954 - is one of the better-kept secrets of British musical life: very little of his substantial catalogue of orchestral, chamber and choral works has been recorded. This first volume in a projected series reveals a composer with an individual musical language, an angular lyricism informed by echoes of Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Frank Martin, it's quieter moments having something of the autumn elegance of late Brahms and it's more propulsive passages the energy and rough humour of Nielsen and Robert Simpson. Weiland was himself a professional violinist for some years, moreover, and he writes for the instrument with deep understanding.

The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it unperformed for a century or more. This fourth volume presents his only symphony, a strikingly assured work for a composer in his late teens. Unsurprisingly, it owes a good deal to Schumann in it's dancing rhythms, heraldic bearing and orchestral colours - and the Scherzo might almost be by Mendelssohn on holiday in Poland. The 'Six Episodes' - charming, ingratiating and energising by turn - are all that remain of the lost full-length ballet Laurin. They were saved because Moszkowski excerpted them for concert performance, thereby creating a 'Dance Suite' in all but name.

In 1776, during a spell in Italy early in his career, the Ukrainian composer Dmytro Bortniansky (1751-1825) wrote Creonte, an opera seria based on Sophocles' tragedy Antigone and poised, like early Mozart, on the cusp between Baroque and Classical styles. Although a success in it's day, Creonte then vanished for 250 years, until it was discovered by chance in a Portuguese library. It may have been hidden there because it's tale of love versus power ends with a surprising democratic twist - a daring move in those autocratic times. Since it is the first surviving opera by a Ukrainian composer, it's revival in Kyiv in 2024 became a gesture of defiance, a symbol of national importance underlining the continued vigour of Ukrainian culture even in wartime. This remarkable recording then followed, made in sessions between Russian bombing, black-outs and power cuts - itself a testimony to Ukrainian national resilience.

Between 1972 and 2018 the Ukrainian composer Yevhen Stankovych - born in 1942 and now the senior figure in Ukrainian music - produced a series of seventeen Chamber Symphonies, many of them doubling as concertos. This substantial body of music has remained largely unheard until now, even inside Ukraine, and should prove a major discovery for audiences everywhere. These works cover a kaleidoscopic range of moods - lyrical, rhythmically propulsive, bashfully hesitant, buoyantly assertive, elegiac, optimistic - expressed in a direct language with it's distant roots in the mild modernism of Berg, Britten, Janacek, Shostakovich and like composers. Stankovych's achievement is unparalleled in the history of music not simply because of the sheer number of his Chamber Symphonies - they also contain some of the finest music of the past half-century.

Georgy Sviridov (1915–98) has been hailed as the most important composer of choral music of the 20th c. He saw himself as part of the thousand-year continuum of Russian culture, giving its resonance full expression in the monumental choral cycle Hymns and Prayers, written 1987-97; he completed it only weeks before he died. Extraordinarily beautiful and profoundly moving, Hymns and Prayers is perhaps the most important Russian choral composition since the liturgies of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. The Credo Chamber Choir, based in Kyiv, Ukraine, was founded in April 2002.

Classical Music

The music of London-born William Wordsworth (1908–88) – a great-great-grandson of the poet’s brother Christopher – lies downstream from that of Vaughan Williams and Sibelius; like that of his contemporary Edmund Rubbra, Wordsworth’s music unfolds spontaneously, as a natural process, with a sense of grandeur perhaps enhanced by his move to the Scottish Highlands in 1961. Three of the four works recorded here display the sober dignity of the instinctive symphonist; the Variations on a Scottish Theme reveal a sly sense of humor behind the serious countenance. John Gibbons has conducted most of the major British orchestras. He has been Principal Conductor of Worthing Symphony Orchestra- the professional orchestra of West Sussex- with which he has given many world premieres of neglected works. He studied music at Queens’ College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, winning numerous awards as conductor, pianist and accompanist. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, vice chairman of the British Music Society, and choral director at Clifton Cathedral. His own music has been performed in various abbeys and cathedrals as well as on the South Bank, London.

Classical Music

Classical Music

The piano works of the Czech-born composer Antoine Recha - friend of Haydn and Beethoven, teacher of Berlioz, Liszt and Franck - are one of hte best-kept secrets in music. He was an important influence on composers of the next generation but, apart from an innovative set of fugues, his piano works have remained almost unknown since his own day. Encompassing Baroque practices as well as looking forward to the twentieth century, they are full o fharmonic and other surprises that show this liveliest of minds at work. The massive variation-set on a simple French gavotte recorded here for the first time reveals a composer who tempers his learning with a vivid sense of humor. Henrik Lowenmark is the world authority on the piano music of Reicha. He was born in Gothenburg and educated at the university there but has long since lived in Stockholm. Since his graduation he has been active as freelance musician in a multitude of contexts: solo, chamber, accompaniment and song-coaching. In 2006, he finished his master's thesis, The Piano Music of Anton Reicha, at the University of Gothenburg.

The American composer Richard Moriarty (born in Boston in 1946) spent his professional life as a pathologist, taking up composition upon his retirement as a student of Adolphus Hailstork and Richard Danielpour. His deeply felt orchestral song-cycle We That Wait, using poems from the American Civil War written by women, and the expansive, exuberant Missa Adsum! Celebrating Women, are both grand statements in a proud American tradition of Neo-Romanticism, accessible, direct and sincere. Of the premiere performance, one reviewer wrote: “Adsum-Celebrating Women was a tour de force, whose title comes from the Roman rite of ordination when candidates are called by name and answer “Adsum- Present!” It was sung with passion and beauty…” (M.D. Ridge)

Like Brahms and Reger, Hans Gal expressed some of his last musical thoughts in the form of a Clarinet Quintet, this one written when it's composer was 87 years old. In these three scores, Gal produced some of the loveliest music in the clarinet repertoire. Creating a family affair, the album was produced by Hans Gal's grandson, Simon Fox-Gal.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, born in Warsaw in 1919, became a close friend of Shostakovich in Moscow, after fleeing eastwards before the invading Nazis in 1939. His style has much in common with Shostakovich’s: fluent contrapuntal skill, a keen feeling for melody, often inflected with Jewish cantilena, and an acute sense of drama which combines a natural narrative manner with an extraordinary ability to create atmosphere. Since his death in 1996, his vast output – which includes 26 symphonies, seven operas and seventeen string quartets – has enjoyed increasing recognition as some of the most individual and compelling music to have been composed in the twentieth century. This recording pairs an early orchestral work, the suite Polish Tunes of 1950, with the last full orchestral symphony he was to complete, dedicated to the memory of those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto.

REVIEW:

It’s truly incredible that works as excellent as these are being recorded for the first time. …[Polish Tunes, Op. 47, No. 2:] there is no shortage of appealing folk-inspired melodies in this fresh and uplifting music. …Symphony No. 21, Op. 152 is titled ‘Kaddish’ referring to the Jewish prayer service for the dead. …Bold and unsettling, almost sinister in character, the Allegro molto section has a swirling, driving momentum. The brass playing is especially striking in writing of a conspicuously martial quality with heavy and relentless percussion. …A fascinating feature that noticeably softens the emotional tension is the inclusion of a wordless soprano at 2:45-7:51 and 10:34-11:06 here performed by Siberian Veronika Bartenyeva. This was my first experience of hearing the Siberian Symphony Orchestra (Omsk Philharmonic) who under the reliable baton of principal conductor Dmitry Vasilyev excel in this wonderful and inexplicably neglected music. The Symphony makes compelling listening with Vasilyev’s unfailing instinct producing assured orchestral playing of striking directness. The engineers provide clear sound with a natural and realistic balance. This important release from Toccata Classics comprising first recordings of Weinberg’s orchestral music has exceptional appeal.”

-- MusicWeb International

Classical Music

Until Volume One of his orchestral music was released last year, the English composer-conductor Henry Cotter Nixon (1842–1907) has entirely disappeared from music history. But this series – presenting all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings – reveals him to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Verdi and Brahms. This second volume confirms his ability to handle extended symphonic structures and also presents a Sullivanesque lighter side. Ian Hobson, pianist and conductor, began his international career in 1981 when he won the Leeds International Piano Competition. This is the thirteenth album that he has recorded for Toccata Classics as either pianist or conductor. Paul Mann is a regular guest conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the US, Australia, and the Far East. He is well known for his collaboration with the rock group Deep Purple.

Classical Music

Comparable to the likes of Prokofiev, Shoenberg, Bartok and Shostakovich, the piano concertos of Ernst Krenek (1900-1991) are important contributions to twentieth century piano repertoire. The first three piano concertos, featured here, were written between 1923 and 1946. Krenek displays an impressive use of twelve-tone technique. Pianist Mikhail Korzhev is active as an orchestral soloist, solo recitalist, and chamber musician. He has been a faculty member at Beverly Hills International Music Festival since 2008.