Toccata Classics Sale
Over 200 titles from Toccata Classics are on sale now at ArkivMusic!
Discover titles from iconic artists such as Christopher Guild, The Fejes Quartet, and Bergen Barokk; featuring music by Telemann, Liszt, Winterberg, and more.
Shop now before the sale ends at 9:00am ET, Tuesday, June 30th, 2026.
249 products
David Maslanka: Music For Wind Ensemble / Middle Tennessee State University Wind Ensemble
Although the American composer David Maslanka (1943–2017) wrote in a wide range of genres, it is for his generous output of music for wind band that he is best known. Three of the works heard here are in effect symphonic poems, all three infused with that big-hearted sense of space found in the best of American music and the quiet dignity of those endless open landscapes, but also energized by a powerful sense of freewheeling drama. The fourth piece is a charming and hugely engaging presentation of the instruments of the symphonic wind ensemble, a latter-day Peter and the Wolf – likewise intended for children and similarly bubbling with good tunes. The composer himself was closely involved in the preparation for these recordings – the last major project involving his music before his death – which now stand as a testament to a man much-loved in American musical circles.
Sigtenhorst Meyer: Piano Music / Albert Brussee
The early piano music of the Dutch composer Bernhard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer (1888–1953) suggests the art of the miniaturist painter. These ‘portraits’ of birds, flowers, landmarks and other natural phenomena have the static and studied quality of Japanese prints and owe much to French Impressionism: they sit somewhere between Debussy and Satie, and unfold with gentle, unhurried dignity. Albert Brussee offers a final bonne bouche with his own gentle tribute to Van den Sigtenhorst Meyer.
Julian Carrillo: Orchestral Music / Zapata, San Luis Potosi Symphony
Although the Mexican composer Julian Carrillo (1875–1965) came to be remembered as a pioneer in the science of acoustics, the music he wrote in the first part of his career has a late-Romantic opulence and spaciousness that was very much of its age. Here his powerful and dignified Second Symphony, which sits somewhere between Bruckner, Wagner and Rachmaninov, is joined by two early pieces d’occasion and excerpts from his grand historical opera of 1910, Matilde, or Mexico in 1810, which marked the centenary of the Mexican War of Independence.
Óscar da Silva: Piano Music, Vol. 1 / Luis Pipa
Prokofiev By Arrangement / Yuri Kalnits, Yulia Chaplina
The 37 short pieces by Prokofiev transcribed for violin and piano brought together here ought really to come with a health warning. So distinctive are the contours, angles and extensions of the Prokofiev tune, drawn from an apparently inexhaustible hoard, that even a short exposure to the memory circuits of the mind can result in permanent occupation. This album is full of them, creating a panoramic tour around five decades of an exceptionally rich, diverse but ultimately sadly truncated life. Violinist Yuri Kalnits has participated in festivals throughout the world and has played at some of the world’s most important venues. He is a dedicated chamber musician as well as concert soloist.
Marcel Mihalovici: Piano Music / Matthew Rubenstein
Rosner: Requiem, Op. 59 / Palmer, London Philharmonic Orchestra
Far from being a treatment of the usual Latin, the Requiem of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) sets spiritual and secular texts on death from a number of the world’s cultures, including Whitman, Villon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sutra from Zen Buddhism and the Jewish Kaddish. The work of a young man (Rosner was 28 when he wrote it), this Requiem is both monumental and wildly energetic – but it also encompasses passages of transcendent beauty. His musical language clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colors, producing a style that is instantly recognizable and immediately appealing. Some of the music was first written for an aborted operatic treatment of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, where the main character plays chess with Death; in like spirit, Rosner’s Requiem is a major statement of human defiance in the face of mortality, even if its gentle closing pages bring uneasy acceptance.
REVIEW:
Arnold Rosner’s Requiem (1973), no exaggeration intended, is one of the great works of the 20th Century. Rosner (1945-2013) was a postmodernist at a time when modernism was unshakable in academic circles. He studied at SUNY/Buffalo—a notorious hotbed: the faculty laughed at him. They were wrong. They couldn’t deal with his love of Renaissance and early music (Dufay especially), his tonality and post-tonal language. Written when he was 28, the maturity and vision is striking. Inspiration for this work was triggered by his fascination with Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. He wanted to adapt it for an opera, but Bergman refused permission. He began to write it anyway, and some of it appears in the Requiem. His sources include the New Testament, François Villon, the Kama Sutra, Whitman (When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed), Dante, the Kaddish, and the Dies Irae. All are set with sensitivity and profound musicality. The London Philharmonic is great, but Ms Hollis’s soprano is wobbly. Helpful notes by Rosner scholar Walter Simmons. Texts and translations. Don’t miss this.
-- American Record Guide (Allen Gimbel)
Metal Angel / Gunnar Idenstam
Krenek: Piano Music, Vol. 2 / Khristenko
This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900–92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination – and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has its origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek’s treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy – and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.
Nixon: Complete Orchestral Music, Vol. 3 / Mann, Liepaja Symphony Orchestra
The English composer-conductor Henry Cotter Nixon (1842–1907) had entirely disappeared from music history until this series – presenting all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings – revealed him to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Weber, Brahms and Sullivan. This third and final volume mixes music for the concert hall and the stage and adds the Coronation March for Edward VII that turned out to be Nixon’s last composition. Most of the pieces here were left incomplete, but thanks to Paul Mann’s orchestrations they now confirm Nixon’s position as one of the superior tunesmiths of Victorian England.
Ingegneri: Missa Laudate pueri Dominum - Croce: In spiritu h
Reicha: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 4 / Lowenmark
Scharwenka: Piano Music, Vol. 1 / Pipa
As composer, pianist and educationalist, the Prussian Philipp Scharwenka (1847–1917) was one of most highly respected musicians of his day, although his star faded soon after his death. His music – more conservative and classical in orientation than that of his pianist-composer brother, Xaver – sits somewhere between Chopin and Brahms, with echoes of Schubert and Schumann. This first installment of a survey of his piano music is intended to put these immediately attractive works before the public once again – for the first time in over a century. They are played here by the Portuguese pianist-composer Luís Pipa, professor of piano and chamber music at the University of Minho, near Porto, following up on his well-received Toccata Classics album of music by his compatriot José Vianna da Motta.
Moszkowski: Orchestral Music, Vol. 1 / Hobson, Sinfonia Varsovia
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 decades. Astonishingly, he was only in his early twenties when he wrote his monumental ‘Symphonic Poem in Four Movements’ Johanna d’Arc – heard here in its first recording – a vast symphonic fresco depicting the life, death and transfiguration of the heroine of Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Moszkowski admitted to the influence of Wagner and Raff on the work – but he also managed to prefigure the musical language of the Hollywood epics of sixty years later. As pianist, Ian Hobson has a long-standing relationship with Toccata Classics, and this is the fourth recording he has made in his alter ego as conductor – at the helm of the Sinfonia Varsovia, as with his previous albums, which uncovered the early orchestral music of Martinu. This is the first of a series of Ian Hobson recordings for Toccata Classics that will focus on Moszkowski’s piano and orchestral music.
Agnew: Piano Music
Winterberg: Piano Music, Vol. 1 / Helbig
Jaques-Dalcroze: Piano Music, Vol. 3 - Works for Piano Solo
Gal: Music for Viola, Vol. 1 / Pakkala
Smalley: Piano, Vocal & Chamber Music / Various
Roger Smalley (1943–2015) made his mark, first in his native Britain and then in Australia, as composer, pianist, conductor, writer, academic and teacher. Although as performer and commentator he was at the forefront of musical modernism, he was also very fond of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and much of his music bridges the gap between old and new, retaining its roots in the past while reflecting the concerns of his own time, as the works on this album demonstrate.
Respighi: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 1
Wordsworth: Orchestral Music, Vol. 2
Ernst: Complete Music for Violin and Piano, Vol. 6
Teodorescu-Ciocanea: Music for Piano Duo, Duet & Solo / Smolyar
Piano music forms a large part of the output of the Romanian composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea (b. 1959), as you would expect of someone who has been playing the instrument since she was four. This first album of her music reveals a latter-day Impressionist, sensitive to half-light and petal-delicate tonal color – but she can also generate powerful surges of energy, and her musical portrait of Charlie Chaplin testifies to an impish sense of humor. Teodorescu’s music explores spectralism, neoimpressionism and postmodernism with a powerful lyric and dramatic effect (Oxford music online). She is Professor of composition at the National University of Music Bucharest and Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She introduced a new musical poetics called hypertimbralism pursuing intertextuality based on timbre. Teodorescu has lectured at Illinois Urbana Champaign, Oslo, Monash and Huddersfield Universities. She has written over 60 works.
Gernsheim: Piano Music, Vol. 1
