Jeremy Dale Roberts (1934-2017) was a unique figure on the British musical landscape: as a composer, he steered a path between traditional tonality and modernism, developing a language that can range from aching, pastoral lyricism to wild, freewheeling energy. This album - to which Dale Roberts referred as 'a kind of testament' - counterpoints works from the beginning and end of his career, all distinguished by his unmistakable sense of drama and poetry and his peerless technical command. The performers here worked intensely with the composer over a number of years, and he was involved with every aspect of these recordings, from initial rehearsals up to the final edits. Peter Sheppard Skaerved is known for his pioneering approach to the music of our own time and the past; over 400 works have been written for him. He is the founder and leader of the Kreutzer Quartet and Viotti Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music.

The music of Nicolas Tzortzis, Athens-born (in 1978) and now a resident of Paris, often involves other art-forms, not least video and elements of theatre. Two of the works on this album, part of a trilogy inspired by surrealist films by Man Ray, are intended to mirror the unsettling discontinuities of Ray's films in musical surrealism of their own. Another, '... de ce qui est en lutte', has it's starting point in an aphorism of Heraclitus, and seeks coherence in extremes of contrast, throwing ideas against one another like images in a kaleidoscope. And What the wave meant - the title comes from a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers - processes the stages of grief. All four pieces pay close attention to instrumental timbre and bristle with energy, occasionally leavened by an anarchic sense of humour. Das Neue Ensemble - one of Germany's premier new-music groups - was involved in some of these pieces from the very start, commissioning two of them, and it has worked closely with the composer on this recording, guaranteeing the authenticity of the performances.

The vitality of these three works by the Irish composer Jerome de Bromhead point to the sheer pleasure that their creator takes in writing music. The swirling ebullience of the tone-poem A Lay for a Light Year suggests the scale and energy of the cosmos. The edgy, elegiac lyricism of the Violin Concerto inhabits textures that are brittle and clear like Stravinsky's. The more chromatic Second Symphony suggests a vast sense of space behind a glittering foreground of kaleidoscopic orchestral colors. A member of his family, Lt. Gonville Bromhead, who fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift, was made famous when Michael Caine played the part of Lt. Bromhead in the 1964 film Zulu. Alan Smale studied at the Royal Academy of Music, moving to Dublin in 1977 as co-leader of the then RTE Symphony Orchestra. Coleman Pearce is a composer and pianist as well as a conductor. He has conducted most of Ireland's orchestras, among them the RTE Light Orchestra and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra, with which he performed many works by contemporary international and Irish composers.

Charles O’Brien (1882–1968) is the archetypical composer for a Toccata Classics release: this CD rescues a forgotten Scottish Romantic from oblivion. O’Brien was a mainstay of musical life in Edinburgh, but his attractive, lyrical muse has long since been lost from view there, let alone anywhere else. His lively music reflects his Scottish heritage, mixing grand gestures with Schumannesque intimacy. This is the first recording in a series to be devoted to the music of Charles O’Brien. Pianist Warren Mailley-Smith studied at the Royal College of Music. He has recorded eight CDs.

This release marks the second album of piano music by the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson and it focuses on several strands of his irrepressible musical personality. Stevenson was deeply engaged with the folk traditions of Scotland and with Scottish cultural history and this album contains some exquisitely beautiful realizations of Celtic harp music. He enjoyed creative friendships with other musicians - the evocative, sonorous Hebridean Seascape reworks music by Frank Merrick, and Lament for a Blind Harper transcribes a moving harp piece by his own daughter, Savourna Stevenson. He was concerned that music for young pianists should be rewarding and Three Scots Fairy Tales were written to challenge young players. The critics loved volume one, whcih was released in 2015. American Record Guide reported "Gorgeous Steinway, strong and rich bass, clear treble - absolutely everything I could want in a piano, and Guild is a fantastic advocate for this almost unknown music. I can't wait for volume 2." Christopher Guild has established himself as a pianist with a keen interest in promoting music less often heard, including that of the British Isles and especially his native Scotland. He has worked on a number of projects wtih Judith Weir, Master of the Queen's Music. He is a co-founder and member of the Edison Ensemble. His radio appearances have been numerous, and include a live performance on BBC Radio 3's In Tune, a recorded performance from the Purcell Room of the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Born into a family of musicians, Edward Loder (1809-65) was known for his operas and conducting during his early to middle adulthood before slipping out of the public eye towards the end of his life. Piano Music, released to mark the 150th anniversary of Loder's death features the pianist Ian Hobson and a large part of the revelatory nature of this recording lies in how much of the Romantic era influenced Loder's compositions.

The Lithuanian pianist and composer Vytautas Bacevicius (1905-1970) is one of the undiscovered pioneers of the twentieth century. This second volume of his piano music presents works written between 1927 and 1966, most of them receiving their first recording here. This release shows the evolution of his musical language from the post-Scriabin style of the early works. This release takes its place in the extensive - and still growing - representation of Lithuanian music on Toccata Classics.

The music London-born William Yeates Hurlstone was able to compose during his short life (1876-1906) shows remarkable accomplishment. This CD presents the first-ever recording of his complete piano music. Developing from confident childhood essays taking on board the influences of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, his music matured into an assured and natural style balancing lyricism and drama. Hurlstone scholar Dr Kenji Fujimura, one of Australia's most important musicians, is currently situated at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University.

The Classical style compositions of the Czech-born Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812) also foreshadow the coming of the Romantic age. + His Douze Études mélodiques – here receiving their first recording – offer a sort of musical United Nations of the day, its national elements intended to appeal to the contemporary fashion for the exotic. + The F major Fantaisie is in effect an eight-movement suite, presenting an array of musical forms and capturing the improvisatory spirit and harmonic exploration of the fantasia. + This is pianist Vincenzo Paolini’s first recording for Toccata Classics.

Jerzy Bauer is one of the leading Polish composers of the generation after Lutoslawski and Panufnik. Since his son Andrzej is one of the major cellists of the current generation, it is hardly surprising to find that music for cello figures prominently in his large output. Bauer's mild modernism showing a respectful engagement with the music of the past. The second of his two cello concertos demonstrates that he is fully aware that the cello is the singing instrument par excellence, and his work This is inspired by a late poem of Czeslaw Milosz. The cellist Andrzej Bauer is one of the leading Polish musician sof his generation. He has given recitals in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Munich and Paris, and performed with orchestras across Europe, the United States and Japan.

Classical Music

This year sees the centenary of Estonian independence. One of the main figures in the 'national awakening' in the half-century that preceded independence was Karl August Hermann (1851-1909). Hermann was indefatigable: he was a linguist, journalist, choir-leader, song-writer, historian, literary philologist, encyclopaedist and more. As a composer he is known only for his choral songs, but French pianist Nicolas Horvath has discovered the scores of his 26 surviving piano pieces. This first recording reveals them to be charming salon miniatures, blending echoes of Chopin and Grieg with the essence of Estonian folksong. Nicolas Horvath began his music studies at the Academie de Musique Prince Rainier III de Monaco. Known for his untrammelled musical explorations, he is an enthusiastic promoter of contemporary music: he has commissioned numerous works and collaborated with a number of leading contemporary composers, among them Valentin Silvestrov. He is also a rediscoverer of forgotten or neglected composers.

The Viennese-born Carl Czerny (1791-1857) is best remembered for his countless pedagogical studies - hundreds and hundreds of them. But Czerny's astonishing fecundity - his opus numbers go up to 861, but there is much more music than that - has served to obscure the fact that he was an important composer in his own right, his output forming a link between Beethoven (his teacher) and Liszt (his student), between the Classical and Romantic eras. The pieces recorded here, all for the first time, reflect the brilliance of his own playing and were intended to impress the salons of Biedermeier Vienna.

Alexander Brincken, born in Leningrad in 1952 and Swiss-based since 1992, writes in an accessible and unashamedly late-Romantic language. His grandiose Fourth Symphony of 2014-15, written for a huge orchestra, has echoes of a number of earlier composers, among them Berlioz, Bruckner, Martinu, Wagner and, especially, Franz Schmidt and Richard Strauss, all assimilated into a big-hearted style that blends dignity, lyricism and power, with a strong sense of the Swiss landscapes in which he has made his home. The earlier Capriccio for piano and orchestra - a concerto in all but name - has, in turn, something of the sober strength and wiry energy of Frank Martin - curiously, since it was written seven years before Brincken moved to Switzerland. Rainer Held's recent Sutermeister recording for Toccata Classics was a revelation, and here's proof that he has not yet run out of symphonic surprises.

Francois Couperin once confessed that he preferred to perform his collection of chamber music on two harpsichords however this series is the only one in existance that does just that. Volume one of the harpsichord series received fantastic reviews - "The playing by harpsichordists Jochewed Schwarz and Emer Buckley is finely matched. Both blend well with each other and provide a strong, virile performance that brings the nuances and ornamets of Couperin's music to life. One can see through their interplay why the composer considered this his ideal performance medium..".