The case of the composer Hans Winterberg (1901–91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Czech Jew, after the War he settled in Munich as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but after his death, his estate disappeared into the vaults of the Sudeten German Music Institute, where it was placed under embargo, emerging only in 2015. This first album of his music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Stravinsky, Janácek and Hindemith, with touches of Poulenc, often expressed with brittle humor and rhythmic verve. The Arizona Wind Quintet is the faculty ensemble-in-residence at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music in Tucson. Formed in 1977, the AWQ has cultivated a tradition of excellence in both performance and teaching. The other instrumentalists on this recording are distinguished musicians active in the Tucson area, several of them teaching at the Fred Fox School of Music, although they appear in concert and at festivals all over North America.

This recording pairs music for violin and piano by two young British composers who found themselves marooned in American exile by World War II: Richard Arnell (1817-2009) and Stanley Bate (1911-59). Both composers established respectable careers for themselves in the New World before returning to Britain, Arnell in 1947 and Bate in 1949. Arnell’s music can be warmly lyrical and fiercely dramatic by turn, rather like its volatile and energetic composer. Bate’s First Violin Sonata has echoes of two of his teachers- Vaughan Williams and Hindemith. Plymouth-born violinist Patrick Wastnage attended Dartington College of Arts from the age of sixteen. He went on to the Guildhall School of Music, where he studied with Yfrah Neaman, Erich Gruenberg, David Takeno and later with Sandor Vegh. Joining the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1986, he has led a parallel career as soloist and chamber-music player. Elizabeth Dunn studied the piano at the Guildhall School of Music with Geraldine Peppin. Since then she has performed extensively as soloist, accompanist, and in chamber groups.

The Austrian composer Walter Bricht (1904-70) was one of many musicians of Jewish ancestry who fled Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of the USA; Bricht became a valued professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Fittingly, it is the nearby Fort Wayne Philharmonic, in its own debut recording, that has made the first album of Bricht’s music. The recording reveals another major Viennese voice and points to yet another potentially important career cut off in the bud by the Nazis. Bricht was reportedly Franz Schmidt’s favorite student, and the late-Romantic styles of the two men are indeed very closely aligned in their mix of Baroque counterpoint, Classical form and Wagnerian chromatic harmony: Bricht’s Symphony in A minor might almost be Schmidt’s No. 5.

The orchestral music of the English composer David Hackbridge Johnson (b. 1963) is one of the most important discoveries to have been made by Toccata Classics. This second volume brings two mighty symphonies: the dark and tragic No. 10 (2013), cast in a single monumental span, and the three-movement No. 13 (2017), a fierce and fiery affirmation of life. They are complemented here by an orchestral ‘motet’ which passes plainchant in kaleidoscopic review. Writing in Gramophone, Guy Rickards said of Hackbridge Johnson’s Ninth Symphony: “what is so astonishing is not his ambition in attempting such large, big-boned structures… but that he possesses the compositional technique to achieve them so completely… This is a profound, complex, and visionary utterance.” Paul Mann, who here leads the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is a regular guest conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and the Far East. He enjoyed a famous collaboration with the legendary rock group Deep Purple and was a close friend of its keyboardist Jon Lord. He first came to international attention as first prizewinner in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, and as a result was appointed assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. This is his twelfth project with Toccata Classics.

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.

The Toccata Classics survey of the music of the Hungarian composer Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000) continues with this fifth album of his orchestral music. Earlier releases have presented the lighter side of his music, with its quasi-Baroque textures and buoyant good humor, but this one shows Farkas working on a larger scale and in generally darker mood. Here he uses the full resources of the symphony orchestra in a number of powerful and dramatic works, including two movements from a symphony that he later withdrew and an orchestration of Liszt’s Funerailles. A lighter bonne bouche-the Dances from the Matra, rather like Kodaly’s Dances from Galanta- rounds things off. Gabor Farkas (no relation to the composer) graduated from the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest in 2005, finishing his doctoral studies there in 2014 at his alma mater under the mentorship of Zoltan Kocsis. In March 2012 he won the Franz Liszt Award ( the highest Hungarian state award for artists).

Throughout his long career Liszt’s songs – perhaps the most neglected part of his enormous output – took a radical approach to form: he eschewed convention in his search for a sincere musical response to each text. His free-spirited creativity meant that a single song would often call on a range of stylistic devices, among them bel canto vocal lines, unaccompanied recitative, orchestrally conceived piano textures and audacious harmonic procedures. This first recording of his songs by a bass voice brings out both the power and poetry of Liszt’s remarkable imagination. The American bass Jared Schwartz was born in Berne, Indiana, where he began piano lessons at the age of three, violin at seven and French horn at ten. He began a double major in pre-med and music at Bethel College, Indiana, then studied piano with Alexander Toradze and voice with Victoria Garrett, earning a graduate degree from the Eastman School of Music. For Toccata Classics he has already recorded albums of songs by Faure and Flegier.

REVIEW:

Schwartz's forte singing is most impressive, and his voice remains lustrously smooth and elegant in all registers. His vocal coloring, use of contrasting dynamics, and feeling for the text combine to make his readings thoroughly engaging. When he sings with gentleness and lyricism he weaves a magic spell, as in ‘Des Tages Laute Stimmen Schweigen’, which ends sublimely as he delivers the final line of the text (“As night embraces you with gentle silence”). It is stunning.

Mary Dibbern, who collaborated with him in his Flegier album and in preparing his Fauré album, does a superb job with Liszt’s often challenging accompaniment. She also wrote the comprehensive and informative notes for the release.

I learned to enjoy Liszt through his songs, especially his early high-flying Schiller and Petrarch settings, sung by tenors. I am now enjoying a voice that plumbs the sonic and textual depths of the songs.

-- American Record Guide

The Scottish musician Helen Hopekirk (1856-1945) was regarded as one of the major concert pianists of her generation. She also made a lasting contribution as a piano teacher in Boston, Mass., after her emigration in 1897. As a composer, she forged an intriguing path by turning to the music of her native country as the wellspring of her creativity. The early pieces can sound like Brahms in the Highlands, and her later works marry Debussyan Impressionism with Hebridean folk-music, to evocative, touching and exhilarating effect. This is the first album dedicated to Hopekirk's music. Gary Steigerwalt, who is writing a biography of Helen Hopekirk, recently retired as a professor on the music faculty of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusets, where he taught for 35 years. He gave the first performance in over a century of her Concertstuck with the Mount Holyoke College Symphony Orchestra in 2015.

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 Bulgarian Emil Tabakov (1947) follows in the footsteps of such musicians as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, being active as both composer and conductor. Like Mahler, he prefers to write for large forces and now has nine symphonies and an impressive series of concertos to his name. Again like Mahler, Tabakov's symphonies explore the darker side of the human spirit in epic scores as austere as they are powerful. Both the First Symphony and the Viola Concerto use small motifs to build up compelling symphonic structures, generating expansive, sometimes bleak, post-Shostakovichian landscapes that can explode with violence and energy. The composer and conductor Emil Tabakov began to compose at 14. From 1975 to 1979 he conducted the Ruse Symphony Orchestra. He then directed the Sofia Soloists Chamber Ensemble, the Sofia Philharmonic and several others. Alexander Zemtsvo has been performing as a solo violist since the age of 15 and at 23, was appointed Principal Viola of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2012 he left the LPO to dedicate himself to a career as soloist, conductor and chamber musician. In 2014 he made his conducting debut with the International New Symphony Orchestra Lviv, and the next year was apointed artistic director and principal conductor.

Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) was one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth century. His fundamental style is a Stravinskian Neo-Classicism, animated by the dance-rhythms of his native Poland. It is also energized by a masterly command of counterpoint. This second installment in this first-ever survey of his piano music demonstrates its stylistic range, from Neo-Baroque via Polish folk-music and the orient to the Blues. Early in his career, Tansman settled in Paris, where he was helped by Ravel, but he was also another of the Jewish composers forced to flee Europe by the Nazis. A native of Texas, Danny Zelibor studied at Texas Christian University, where he studied with Tamas Ungar winning numerous accolades and scholarships. A top prize-winner in the 2014 Los Angeles International Liszt Competition, he is also a graduate of the University of North Texas, where he studied with Joseph Banowetz. He is currently pursuing a degree in Collaborative Piano.

This recording revives long-forgotten sonorities that once would have been very familiar: the sound of piano and organ being played together. It also presents a Sibelius premiere: the arrangement by Sigfrird Karg-Elert of the suite from ''Pelleas and Melisande''. As the popularity of domestic music-making grew through the nineteenth century, it brought first the piano and, then, often the harmonium into well-off living rooms across the western world. Composers naturally responded, with original works and arrangements: Sibelius' Andante catabile was written after a visit to relatives who had both instruments in their salon. Karg-Elert, by contrast, was one of the world's outstanding virtuosi on both harmonium and organ and composed with his concert public in mind. Annikka Konttori-Gustafsson has appeared as a soloist, chamber musician and Lied pianist in her native Finald, of course, but in concert halls across the world, performing a wealth of Finnish music and French twentieth century repertoire. Dr. Jan Lehtola is one of the most successful and progressive Finnish organists of his generation. He has given more than 150 world and regional premieres and can be heard on more than 30 commercial recordings.

Einar Englund (1916-1999) was not only one of Finland's major symphonists; he was also one of his country's most important pianists. He was destined for a virtuoso career until he damaged a finger as a soldier in the Battle of Bengtskjar in the ''Finnish Continuation War'' in 1941 - but when he later discovered the bullet holes in his beret, he realized he had a lucky escape! Englund wrote surprisingly little for his own instrument, but the works he did produce glitter with a Prokofievan steely strength and textural clarity. They are also animated with the ironic humor that was typical of the composer himself. The pianist here is one of Finland's finest musicians, Laura Mikkola. The booklet essay is by Christian Holmqvist, Englund's biographer, and is followed by a personal reminiscence of Einar Englund by Martin Anderson, founder of Toccata Classics. Laura Mikkola studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinkin, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana. She has been the recipient of many awards, among them second prize in the Queen Elizabeth International Piano Competition in Brussels in 2016.

Over a period of some twenty years, from the late 1720s, Handel composed a series of virtuoso arias using only the words ''Allelujah'' and ''Amen'' as his texts. They were probably for use in private worship, and take their place in the tradition of ''Divine Song'' established by Purcell and other compoesrs. Here they receive their first recordings, set in a context of contemporary sacred song and instrumental music, with the accompaniment provided by the beguiling soun dof two theorbos and chamber organ. They are heard here in the extraordinarily dramatic timbres of a male-soprano voice - perhaps as close as modern listeners can come to the vocal acrobatics of the castrati who so amazed their own audiences. Robert Crowe has worked for over 25 years as a male soprano, was a 1995 National Winner of the Metropolitan Opera Competition and has sung over 70 leading roles in operas and dramatic oratorios in the United States and across Europe.

Ernst Krenek’s seven piano concertos – four for solo piano, one for two pianos, one with violin and one with organ – is one of the major concerto-series of the twentieth century, but perhaps also the least familiar. This second installment in their first complete recording reveals breath-taking bravura writing – in the virtuoso piano technique, the dazzling orchestration and the stylistic integration of serialism and good-natured recollection of Viennese tradition. Mikhail Korzhev is a pianist that “projects strength, atmosphere and the ability to tangle even the knottiest passages…” (International Record Review). He is equally active as a solo recitalist, performer with various chamber groups, a soloist with orchestras, and as a recording artist. The first installment in this series received enthusiastic reviews in Gramophone, Diapason, and many other sources, and instantly made it to the shortlist of best new releases by Sunday Times (London) and Fanfare magazine.

The English composer David Hackbridge Johnson has been, until now, one of the best-kept secrets in music. He has built up a huge catalogue of works completely unknown even within the classical world. learning the orchestra from the inside, as a player, he has developed a confident and powerful language inherited in part from Brian, Copland, Janacek, Rubbra, Sibelius, Simpson, Tippett and other such masters. As these three pieces show, his music is capable of bold strokes of color and gripping dramatic gestures, expressed with a natural sense of symphonic architecture. Amazingly, he had heard almost none of his orchestral pieces before this recording was made in December, 2016. Paul Mann is a regular guest-conductor with many orchestras throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and the Far East. He is well known for his collaboration with the legendary rock group Deep Purple. This is the sixth recording for Toccata Classics.