The music of the Edinburgh composer William Beaton Moonie (1883–1961) is as good as unknown. This first-ever album devoted to his piano music reveals a figure downstream from Schumann, Brahms and Grieg, writing in a conservative Romantic idiom colored by echoes of the folk-music of his native Scotland. Many of these pieces, indeed, are concerned to evoke images of the Scottish countryside or suggest aspects of Scottish history. Scottish pianist Christopher Guild is in demand as a recital artist, concerto soloist and collaborative pianist, with concert engagements taking him across the UK. Performances have included those given at St James’s Piccadilly, the Wigmore Hall and St John’s, Smith Square, as well as numerous recitals for music societies under the auspices of the Countess of Munster Musical Trust. Christopher’s concerto appearances have seen him work with conductors such as Sian Edwards, as well as with numerous non-professional orchestras. He has recorded CDs for Champs Hill Records as a duo pianist, and for Toccata Classics, as a soloist and duo partner.

This is the seventh album in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann's collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 — the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to appear in print. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (recorder, violin, transverse flute or oboe) and basso continuo, and generally take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann's cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity. Bergen Barokk was established by Frode Thorsen and Hans Knut Sveen in 1994 in connection with a concert series supported by the city arts department in Bergen and is today one of the leading early-music ensembles in Norway. The group has performed in concerts and radio broadcasts in Europe, Russia and the USA. Its recordings on Simax Classics, BIS, Bergen Digital Studio, LAWO and Toccata Classics include German, English, Italian and French repertoire.

These two works present two sharply contrasting sides of Malcolm Arnold: his limitless resources of knockabout fun, and a sense of existential tragedy. But each score presents its own surprises: the jocularity of the Grand Concerto Gastronomique conceals some seriously good (though not seriously serious) music; and the delicately scored Ninth Symphony, written after five years when its composer had, in his own words, ‘been through hell’, irradiates its emotional restraint and elegiac tone with moments of light and warmth.

REVIEW:

Overall, this is a typically excellent disc from Toccata; first rate music receiving effective performances presented in an informative and valuable package. Even the rather sombre, indeed haunted, image of Arnold that stares bleakly from the booklet cover is well-chosen and apt. Given that it is two decades since we have had a new survey of Arnold’s magnificent symphonies, I hope that this will prove to be just the beginning of a new cycle – a warmly welcomed disc.

-- MusicWeb International

The tale of Hans Winterberg (1901-91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Jewish Czech man, he settled in Munich after the War as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but with his death his estate disappeared into a legal limbo, emerging only in 2015. This second album of his piano music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Janáček, Ravel, Schoenberg and other early- to mid-twentieth-century masters, animated by a hard-edged, freewheeling energy.

The four works for symphonic wind band composed by Peter Fischer – born in 1956, across the bay from San Francisco, in Martinez, California – are almost textbook examples of American eclecticism, mixing urban vibrancy with a sense of the timeless outdoors, bringing in flavors from jazz and rock and moving easily between vigorous dance-rhythms and sultry nightscapes. Dance, indeed, lies at the heart of most of this music, which gives the mambo, the tango, the tarantella and the waltz a new and spirited twist amid echoes of Stravinsky, Revueltas and Bernstein. In Fischer's Trumpet Concerto, soloist Jens Lindemann plays trumpet, cornet, and flügelhorn.

The dignified bearing and quiet wisdom of Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950) gained him the sobriquet "the conscience of Russian music," and those qualities are reflected in the unemphatic strength of his music. His orchestral, chamber and instrumental works are regaining the currency they once enjoyed, but his large corpus of songs, many of them understated masterpieces, has yet to attract systematic attention – a situation that this series hopes to remedy. The pairing here of his late Violin Sonata with his last two song-cycles for soprano and piano mirrors the Moscow concert in 1947 when all three were given their first performances.

REVIEW:

This disc can be recommended just for the vocal works. The late Violin Sonata is a bonus, especially in its final revised version – the work underwent two revisions after its 1947 premiere by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin. Just a few years ago, there were no recordings of the piece.

The 28-page booklet contains very well translated informative notes and full song text translations from Russian into English. This outstanding release is highly recommended. For me, it is one of the finest discs of 2021.

-- MusicWeb International

Ronald Center (1913–73) is sometimes described as ‘the Scottish Bartók’, and his music does indeed capture some of the stark, wild energy of the Scottish landscape in a style of Bartókian asperity. These three string quartets show him, in his northeast corner of Scotland, to have been fully conversant with the quartets being written around the same time by Barber, Britten and Shostakovich, but their direct manner, terse expression, wiry humor and roots in Scottish folk-music ensure that Center is his own man.

This second volume of orchestral music by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) brings works from across his career. A suite drawn from an early Festspiel – a community pageant – opens with a march of Elgarian swagger and continues with a mix of charm and substance. Flury was a gifted violinist, and his Third Violin Concerto, written at the height of the Second World War, is virtuosic and lyrical in equal measure, its unashamed Romanticism perhaps an escape from troubled times. The four late Caprices for violin and orchestra form a concertante serenade in all but name; and one of his very last pieces was a dark and moving tribute to a musician friend, the slow movement of a suite he did not live to finish.

Respighi’s orchestral works are some of the most popular in the mainstream repertoire. His output of piano music, by contrast, is as good as unknown, and this Toccata Classics series will be the first ever to present it all: original works and transcriptions alike, for solo piano, piano four hands and two pianos. The prentice works on this second volume of solo works reveal a Respighi with roots in the high-Romantic past of Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, but they also show the first signs of his later interest in the Italian pre-Baroque.

The piano music of the Estonian composer Heino Eller (1887–1970), a total of 206 works, is not only the largest part of his output: it is also the largest body of works in Estonian classical music. But most of these pieces are unknown, even though the best of them are original contributions to the piano repertoire of the twentieth century, with Eller’s sensitive lyricism underpinned by gentle humor and an occasional epic tone. This seventh volume brings music from half a century of music, from 1912 to 1961 – mostly miniatures but each of them full of atmosphere and personality.

The Russian composer Yevgeny Zemtsov (1940–2016) may be better known for the dynasty of musicians – most of them violists – that he fathered than he is for his own music. This first album ever to be devoted to his music features works from the beginning and end of his career: some early violin works, influenced by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, a Bartókian string quartet, three spirited and spiky piano miniatures, an oblique piano elegy and five late, enigmatic, almost ritualistic settings of Japanese haikus. Late in life, too, he discovered a fascination with tango, and the album also features his elegant arrangements for string quartet and quintet of two Piazzolla favorites.

It might seem that modern classical music rarely expresses happiness – but Aviv, a piano concerto by Joel Feigin (born in New York in 1951), suggests the warmth and optimism of the coming of spring. The angular, even anguished, essay for strings Surging Seas, by contrast, was inspired by the devastation wrought by the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011. The Two Songs from Twelfth Night have their origins in the tradition of American orchestral song established by Samuel Barber. And in the diptych Mosaic, also for strings, a first ‘panel’ of heartfelt lyricism is succeeded by an outburst of buoyant energy.

This twelfth release in the Toccata Classics exploration of the music of Ferenc Farkas (1905–2000) once again puts his chamber music with flute in the spotlight – here with an oboe chaser. As with previous albums in this series, the music highlights the characteristics that make Farkas’ music so appealing: catchy tunes, transparent textures, buoyant rhythms, a fondness for Baroque forms and a taste for the folk-music of his native Hungary that marks him out as a true successor to Bartók and Kodály. The works in this recording are all reworkings – by Farkas or the two soloists here – of music first written for different forces and now taking on a new lease of life.

The music of 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. This third volume of his orchestral works brings two major scores in their first studio recordings. Wordsworth’s Cello Concerto is a work of symphonic proportions, blending angular rough-and-tumble with a sober lyricism in a style that sits somewhere between Shostakovich and Bloch. The Fifth Symphony has an even grander sense of scale, its radiant first movement and the introduction to the confident finale unfolding as calmly and unhurriedly as a change of season; the martial tone of the gruff scherzo, by contrast, is laced through by an impish sense of humour. 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.

Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) wrote a considerable quantity of piano music, but it is generally remembered today only for a single piece, ‘Étincelles’, which Horowitz enjoyed playing. The early works on this first instalment in Ian Hobson’s survey of Moszkowski’s complete music for solo piano reveal a debt to Mendelssohn and Schumann, but the craftsmanship already justifies a later remark of Paderewski’s: ‘After Chopin, Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique’.

The phrase ‘unashamed Romantic’ might not have been coined for the French composer Corentin Boissier, born in the Paris suburbs in 1995, but it certainly fits him well. As the titles of his Glamour Concerto and Philip Marlowe Concerto suggest, he revels in the full-textured sound of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood, the golden age of Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, Rota’s Legend of the Glass Mountain and other such high-calorie classics. The Second Piano Sonata, the Sonata Appassionata, is no less Neo-Romantic, but has flecks of Russian color, locating it downstream from Rachmaninov.

Pál Hermann, born in Budapest in 1902, was not only one of the leading cellists of his generation: he was also an important composer, one of the major figures in Hungarian music in the generation after his teachers Bartók and Kodály. But since only two of his works were published before his early death, in 1944, at the hands of the Nazis, and many more of them were lost, he has not had the esteem that he deserves. This series will present all his surviving compositions, most of them in first recordings. The major work on this first album, Hermann’s Cello Concerto of 1925 in a reconstruction by the Italian composer Fabio Conti (b. 1967), sits somewhere between Bartók and Korngold and bids fair to become a staple of the cello repertoire.

Joseph Woelfl (1773-1812), a friend of the Mozart family from childhood, was one of the best-known musicians of his day: he was regarded as a rival of Beethoven in Vienna and a worthy successor to Haydn in the musical life of London. His late-Classical piano music sits between Mozart, Haydn and Clementi and looks forward to Schubert and Mendelssohn. This first-ever project to examine it in any detail hopes to rescue Woelfl's once starry reputation from the folds of history. The three sonatas which open this second volume are dedicated 'a Mr L. Van Beethoven'.

The music of the Bulgarian composer-conductor Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) explores the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. His mighty Seventh Symphony, almost an hour in length, is conceived on a massive scale. The monumental opening Allegro moderato passes through islands of calm during its desperate ride through hell, and is followed by a heaven-rattling funeral march and a wild, swirling dance. The finale opens by stoking up the tension in an extensive slow introduction before the music is once again whipped into a maelstrom of dark, driven energy, piling forward to its inexorable conclusion.

The man who as W. D. Munn published papers on that branch of mathematics known as semigroup theory had another side to his personality: Douglas Munn (1929–2008), professor of mathematics at the University of Stirling, was also a fine pianist and a gifted composer. His piano music has its origins in Chopin, Brahms and Bartók but is clearly also inflected by Scottish folksong – much of it has a sense of the hills and the open spaces – and is written by someone with an intimate knowledge of the instrument. The Latvian pianist Arta Arnicane knew Douglas Munn and this album is the fulfillment of an unspoken promise to record his piano music.

The organist and harpsichordist John Worgan (1724–90) was one of the most highly respected musicians in the London of his day: Handel admired his playing, and Burney described him as ‘very masterly and learned’. All that survives of his harpsichord music are a ‘New Concerto’, an independent Allegro non tanto and two collections, one of six sonatas and the other of thirteen teaching pieces, but they encompass an eclectic variety of styles and a surprising range of emotions – proud, spirited, witty, impulsive, touching, vivacious – making Worgan sound something like an English Domenico Scarlatti.

The composing career of Simon Bainbridge (born in London in 1952) is spanned by the four chamber works in this album, all of them cast as single narrative spans. The First String Quartet, written when its composer was not yet twenty, blends lyricism and pointillism, rather as if it were recasting abstract poetry in sound; and the recent Second offers a kaleidoscopic tableau of color and nervous energy inspired by visual art. In his Cheltenham Fragments, as the title suggests, Bainbridge uses mosaic technique to build up textures and thematic outlines. And the long lines of the virtuosic Clarinet Quintet generate fleetfooted whirlwinds as they unfold. Linda Merrick and the Kreutzer Quartet worked closely with the composer on the preparation of these recordings.

Although Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems exist in two-piano transcriptions prepared by the composer himself, it was his Czech student August Stradal (1860–1930) who transcribed twelve of them for solo piano – versions which demand almost superhuman virtuosity. Stradal died before he could tackle the last of the symphonic poems, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe; Risto-Matti Marin has made good that lacuna with his own virtuoso transcription, and adds six of Stradal’s transcriptions of Liszt songs for good measure. The Finnish pianist, Risto-Matti Marin, began his piano lessons at the Kuopio Conservatoire as a pupil of Jouni Räty and continued with professional studies there under Jaakko Untamala. In 1998 he transferred to the Sibelius Academy to study with Erik T. Tawaststjerna, and from 2002 onwards also studied with Teppo Koivisto. He gained a Master´s degree in music in 2004. Since 2005 he has studied at the Sibelius Academy DocMus department. Winner of the first prize in the Kuopio Piano Competition in 1996 and the Helmi Vesa Piano Competition in 1999, Marin was awarded the third prize in the Weimar International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in 2003.

Grigory Krein (1879–1955), a member of an astonishing dynasty of Russian-Jewish musician-composers, was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the major composers of his day. His piano music charts a stylistic evolution from the early influence of Grieg, Reger (with whom he studied) and Debussy towards a more complex and chromatic language with harmonies that synthesize the sound-worlds of Skryabin and Szymanowski; there’s also an echo of the rhapsodic Celtic wildness of Bax. Indeed, all of these pieces are informed by a remarkable sense of energy – latent in some and given its head in others.

Joly Braga Santos (1924–88) was one of the most important composers in twentieth-century Portugal. In his early works his fondness for modal harmony, absorbed from the Portuguese masters of the Renaissance, and his busy counterpoint combine to make him sound surprisingly close to such particularly English composers as Vaughan Williams and Moeran. Although his harmonic language became more astringent with time, it retained a burly sense of humor and a powerful charge of energy, often infused with the spirit of Portuguese folk-dance.