Now almost entirely forgotten, Adolf Jensen (1837-79), one of the major figures of German Romanticism, composed a large corpus of songs and piano music in a language fusing the heritage of Schumann, Chopin and Liszt into an individual style distinguished by it's melodic and lyrical appeal. This first in an important, new series of recordings of Jensen's music features Erling R. Eriksen, Prof. Of piano in the Dept. Of Music and Dance at the Univ. Of Stavanger (Norway). The extensive booklet notes are by one of the experts on 19th c. piano music, Rohan Stewart-McDonald.

The music of Andrei Golovin (b. 1950, Moscow) lies in the Russian symphonic tradition downstream from Shostakovich and Boris Tchaikovsky. His music employs a somber lyricism to conjure up images of vast open spaces but can also flare up in outbursts of considerable power. This CD presents a conspectus of almost four decades of compositions, ranging from his first symphony to his most recent. This is the first appearance of any of Mr. Golovin's music on any western label. These recordings also mark the first appearances of Messrs. Bereznitsky, Rudin and Levin on Toccata Classics.

The intensity with which the Russian composer Herman Galynin (1922-66) lived his short life is reflected in the extraordinarily high voltage of his music. In spite of a difficult start in life - he was an orphan - his instinctive musicality combined with the impulsiveness of his personality to make him one of the best known of Soviet composers while he was a student. Although mental illness put an early end to his meteoric career, the wild, freewheeling energy of his compositions - as witness these five works for strings - leave little doubt that Galynin would have been one of the major musical voices of the second half of the twentieth century; as it is, what he did achieve is remarkable.

In 1925-26 the French publisher Heugel brought out three volumes of 24 songs by the young Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977), all setting poems by the 'Acmeist' Russian poet, Sergei Gorodetsky (1884-1967) - Tcherepnin's Opp. 15, 16 and 17. Not until 2014, when Tatyana Kebuladze, the pianist on this recording, examined the composer's manuscript in the archives of the Sacher Foundation in Basel was it realized that those three recueils were the tips of a much larger iceberg: a cycle of 35 settings of the 37 poems in Gorodetsky's collection My Flowering Staff, plus an anonymous epilogue - one of the most extensive song-cycles in musical history. The songs themselves are audibly in the tradition of Tchaikovsky and other such Romantic Russian composers, but with a degree of psychological insight conveyed through the harmonic piquancy typical of the new century.

Whether in his original home of Vienna, as a conservatoire director in Germany, or as an �migr� in Edinburgh, where he became one of the mainstays of musical life, Hans G�l (1890-1987) championed choral singing as a way of directly involving people in making music: he founded and conducted a number of choirs and provided an extensive output of choral compositions. This first volume in a long-term project to record his choral music presents a rich variety of works for a cappella voices, ranging from demanding eight-part choruses to charming folksong settings.

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.

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.

Kepitis: Piano Miniatures from the Manuscripts, Vol. 1

Almost every pianist, it seems, wants to record Ravel, but virtually all of them have overlooked a treasure trove of music for solo piano: the composer's short score for Daphnis et Chlo�. Some parts of it are unplayable by a single pair of hands, but with judicious arrangement this working draft can be mined for diamonds. Only a handful of musicians have made their own suites for solo piano; here the Lithuanian pianist Indre Petrauskaite, carefully observing Ravel's original textures, has produced something new: a 40-minute concert suite of unsuspected Ravel for solo piano that also respects the dramatic outline of the original ballet. The other, more familiar works here extend the ideas of antiquity and transcription. Indre Petrauskaite recently performed this programme at City University of London for the completion of her DMA degree.

This album introduces both a new voice and a new choir to western audiences: the Estonian P�rt Uusberg (b. 1986) is well known at home as a film actor as well as a composer; and in 2017 Collegium Musicale carried the coveted Silver Rose Bowl of the EBU competition 'Let the People Sing' home to Tallinn. Uusberg's works use many of the devices that have made recent Baltic choral music so popular in the wider world: melodies that unfold calmly over long bass lines, sustained by suspensions and piqued by mild dissonance - reflecting an awareness of the immensity of nature in music that is both exquisitely beautiful and infinitely touching. Endrik Uksvarav graduated from the Estonian Academy of Music and Theater as a conductor in 2004. The Estonian chamber choir Collegium Musicale was founded by Endrik Uksvarav in October 2010, with a repertoire extending from Renaissance to contemporary music. A special place in that repertoire belongs to Estonian composers, among them Arvo Part, Erkki-Sven Tuur, Helena Tulve and Part Uusberg. The aim is to act as ambassadors for Estonian music at the same time as delivering an intense emotional experience.

Here at last is the next installment of what Guy Rickards in Gramophone called "an enterprise quite unprecedented in modern composition- or recording." When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner Martin Anderson asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have now written or agreed to write for it- in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This second volume presents twelve more pieces- all in their first recordings, of course- in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear.

Nicola Fago (1677-1745) was one of the leading practitioners of the chamber cantata, a kind of mini-opera for voice and ensemble brought to perfection by several generations of composers working in the aristocratic courts in Naples. The six examples by Fago recorded here - for the first time - reveal him to have been a master of the genre: they are dramatic, full of rhythmic excitement and stuffed with catchy tunes. Fago's contemporaries called him 'Il Tarantino', since he was born in Taranto, in the area now known as Puglia, in the heel of Italy; this recording is the second of a series of three Toccata Classics albums dedicated to Fago's cantatas, and part of a wider exploration of Pugliese composers.

As Principal Bassoon in the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Harri Ahmas (b. 1957) is one of Finland's most highly regarded orchestral musicians. But he is also the composer of a substantial body of music, including four symphonies, eight concertos, much chamber music and a generous number of works for wind band. Some grandiose and powerful music for organ is threaded through his composing career, too, much of it composed for the musician who plays it here, Jan Lehtola. Coincidentally, Dr Lehtola, Finland's leading concert organist, is a native of Lahti, the industrial town inland from Helsinki brought to international prominence by the Sibelius recordings it made under it's former chief conductor Osmo V�nsk� - who is a Patron of Toccata Classics.

The composer and conductor Fritz Hart (1874-1949) led a peripatetic life: London-born, he moved to Australia to tour travelling productions of musicals there and in New Zealand. He soon became a formative figure in Australian musical life as teacher and conductor, but in 1936 left to become the first professor of music at the University of Hawai'i and permanent conductor of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Hart's three violin sonatas - poised but passionate - reveal a musical language influenced by Debussyan Impressionism but also coloured by his own Celtic roots. Here they receive their first recordings from two of Australia's most highly regarded musicians, the violinist Susan Collins, in her first appearance on Toccata Classics, and Stephanie McCallum, a Toccata regular.

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.