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.

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.

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.

The Portuguese composer and pianist Óscar da Silva (1870–1958) was one of the major figures in Portuguese and Brazilian musical life in the first half of the twentieth century He left an extensive legacy of compositions for his instrument, cast in a soft and sultry Romanticism somewhere between Chopin and Rachmaninov. All four of the collections recorded here concentrate on delicacy of tone-color, expressing a particularly Portuguese sense of human emotion.

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.

The ‘École de Paris’ was a group of composers from Central and Eastern Europe who made the French capital their home in the 1920s and ’30s. One of their number was the Romanian Marcel Mihalovici, born in Bucharest in 1898 and based in Paris from 1919 until his death in 1985 – one of the most significant of twentieth-century composers who has yet to receive the recognition he deserves. This first album dedicated to his piano music traces his stylistic evolution, the early blend of French insouciance, echoes of eastern European folk-music and Neo-Classical contrapuntal clarity gradually taking a tougher turn and blending Bartók and Bach. It ends with a monumental passacaglia for the left hand alone, one of the most daunting summits of the piano literature.

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 is a collection of eighteen pieces and a Symphonic Sonata for organ by Gunnar Idenstam, born in Swedish Lappland in 1961; this album presents fifteen of these pieces in a series of three suites. Written between 2013 and 2019, they exploit the full range of the modern symphonic organ to give musical expression to the idea of angels in a Gothic fantasy world. Idenstam’s distinctive musical language blends the physical energy of symphonic rock and metal and the modal cast of Scandinavian folk-music with an approach to the organ in the French cathedral tradition of such composers as Dupré, Vierne and Widor. This recording presents some of the most fiercely exciting organ music of recent years, in high-voltage performances by the composer himself.

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.

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.

The Cremonese composer Marc'Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36-92) is chiefly remembered as the teacher of Claudio Monteverdi while, for well nigh 500 years, his own achievements were left to sit in the shadows. This pioneering recording reveals Ingegneri to have been one of the masters of his age, writing music of breathtaking richness and beauty: the polychoral works to be heard here combine learned, intricate counterpoint with the kind of sheer sonic thrill that brings a shiver of physical excitement. Girton College Chapel Choir is an international-prize-winning choir of some 25 members, which has grown in prominence over the last ten years, due to it's impressive musical standards, regular recordings, and ambitious, exciting touring schedule. During Full Term, the Choir's principal function is to sing the liturgy in Girton's Chapel. This includes Choral Evensong every Sunday, and Compline (a beautiful, meditative evening service) every Tuesday, and Vespers every Friday. For this, the Choir rehearses just twice a week. Recent foreign tours have included Israel & Palestine, Canada, Portugal, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, USA, Germany, Slovenia, France, Ireland, Switzerland and Spain.

The piano music of the Czech-born composer Antoine Reicha (1770–1836) – friend of Haydn and Beethoven, teacher of Berlioz, Liszt and Franck – has only recently begun to be discovered. He was an important influence on composers of the next generation but until the last few years his piano works remained almost completely unknown. Encompassing Baroque practices as well as looking forward to the twentieth century, they are full of harmonic and other surprises that show this liveliest of musical minds at work. In this fourth volume of his survey of Reicha’s piano music Henrik Löwenmark sandwiches a number of quixotic miniatures between two grand but idiosyncratic sonatas.

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.

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.

Roy Agnew (1891-1944) - one of few early-twentieth-century Australian composers to gain international success - wove many external influences into a warmly Romantic personal style of striking variety and wide appeal, and his compositions, largely for the piano, are startlingly virtuosic, harmonically daring and charmingly sentimental by turn. Beautifully written by a natural pianist for his own instrument, they often recall the virtuosic textures of Liszt and Skryabin and occasionally show flashes of the Impressionist colours of Debussy. This is the fifth album that Stephanie McCallum - Associate Professor in piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music - has recorded for Toccata Classics. The four earlier ones all focused on French composers: Alkan, Bo�ly and Ropartz. Now she turns her considerable talents to rescue a forgotten composer from her native Australia.

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 Czech Jew, 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 first album of his piano music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Janácek, Ravel, Schoenberg and other mid-twentieth-century masters, animated by a hard-edged, freewheeling energy and grim humour reminiscent of his close contemporary, Nikos Skalkottas. Brigitte Helbig, who grew up in Munich and also studied there, is one of Germany’s livelier young pianists, with a respectable track record in the performance of new music.

The Swiss composer �mile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. The buoyant miniatures recorded here document his fascination with dance, including a flirtation with jazz and ragtime, although the apparent innocence of the music conceals a striking degree of metrical and rhythmic complexity, cast in a style that owes something to Debussy and Faur� - animated by the blithe spirit of Chabrier. Xavier Par�s, a native of Barcelona, and Patricia Seiffert, from Fribourg, in Switzerland, have their own concert careers but both also teach at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva.

Hans Gál (1890–1987) wrote extensively for the viola, including several remarkable works dating from the first decade of his new life in Edinburgh, where he took refuge after the Nazis seized power in his native Austria. His poignant Suite Concertante for viola and orchestra – effectively a concerto for the instrument – is joined here by three substantial chamber works, all infused with Gál’s trademark lyricism. Hanna Pakkala, the violist in all four works here, is the principal viola of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra and also plays in the Kokkola String Quartet; and Toccata Classics is delighted to welcome the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra and its chief conductor, Sakari Oramo, to its roster of artists.

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'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 new 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. This first instalment crowns his earliest keyboard compositions with the magisterial Three Preludes on Gregorian Melodies, miniature Lisztian tone-poems presented with Busonian grandeur.

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 second volume brings two concertos, both major works - though long forgotten, and strongly contrasted in their approach: the gritty and muscular Piano Concerto is cast in a single, tightly argued span, whereas the lyrical Violin Concerto is expansive and unhurried - and deeply touching. They are complemented by the Three Pastoral Sketches, which grow gently from understated autumnal hues to a dignified and moving climax. All three scores show an extraordinary command of orchestral color.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812-65) was one of the leading musicians of his day, a friend of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for Joseph Joachim 'the greatest violinist I ever heard'. This sixth album - in a series of seven presenting all his compositions for the first time - begins and ends with some of the most difficult music for solo violin ever composed: Ernst's Six Polyphonic Studies (the last of which is a set of variations on 'The Last Rose of Summer') and his transcription of Schubert's song, Der Erlkonig. Between these pieces come some less familiar fare: five Schubertian piano pieces, and two settings of Goethe.

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.

Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), born in Worms, on the Rhine, grew up to be one of the most formidable musicians of his age: composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. Even as a teenager, Gernsheim was attracting attention as a virtuoso-composer, earning comparisons with Mozart. These two early piano sonatas – restored by Jens Barnieck from Gernsheim’s manuscripts – combine youthful freshness with preternatural assuredness, showing awareness of Schumann and anticipating Brahms. By the time of the Six Preludes, written a decade later, Chopin has become the dominant star in Gernsheim’s firmament.

The Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is best remembered for his development of Eurhythmics, which teaches the appreciation of music through movement. But Jaques-Dalcroze, who studied with Delibes and Fauré in Paris and with Bruckner and Fuchs in Vienna, was a considerable composer in his own right, with operas, cantatas and orchestral works among his substantial output. His 20 Caprices and Rhythmic Studies constitute an important but hitherto unknown set of character-studies, combining a relaxed lyricism with technical challenges of considerable subtlety for the player. Paolo Munao, born in Sicily, is a winner of the prestigious Premio Claudio Abbado and the UNESCO Aschberg Prize for Artists. A student of Sergio Fiorentino and an assistant at the Musik-Akademie in Basel, he now teaches in Florence through the Ministero de l’Instruzione e dell’Universita e della Ricerca and lives in the Impruneta Hills, near Florence.