Classical Music

A Richer Dust, the epic First Symphony of the English composer Nigel Clarke (1960) explores what it means to live with violence and extremism, the constant companions of human history. The work intertwines words collated from a wide range of sources by the writer Malene Sheppard Skaeved with Clarke's music, weaving together ideas and images in fragments of text from both historically significant figures and voiceless, ordinary people. The dark and powerful atmosphere of the Symphony is prefaced by the bright and sassy sound of Clarke's Magritte-inspired Mysteries of the Horizon, a concerto for cornet and wind orchestra. Harmen Vanhoorne is an international cornet soloist from Belgium who has performed all over the world. He is known as an innovator for his instrument, commissioning composers from his own country and abroad on a regular basis, expanding the repertoire and further the profile of the cornet. H. Stephen Smith studied voice at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He studied privately with Nicolai Gedda and has since alongside such artists as June Anderson, Tom Krause and several others. He joined the music faculty at Middle Tennessee State University in 1998, where he serves as Professor of Voice. Dr. Reed Thomas is teh Director of Bands and a Professor of Conducting at Middle Tennessee State University. He is an avid supporter of new music, commissioning over 40 compositions since 2003.

Classical Music

This album links the contemporary world with the Tudor England of 400 years ago. the English composer David Gorton has gone back to the music of John Dowland and re-thought it in contemporary terms. He has written an extended set of variations for string ensemble on Dowland's massive hit Lachrymae and another on Dowland's Forlorn Hope for 11-string guitar, where the titles of some of the variations poke funa t British politicians. Composers all over Europe made their own versions of Lachrymae, and this album proves that Dowland's fascination endures. Stefan Ostersjo is a leading classical guitarist specilizing in the performance of contemporary m usic. His debut album won a Swedish Grammy in 1997 and he has since recorded extensively and toured Europe, the USA and Asia. Longbow is a collective of international performers known for recordings on labels including Naxos, Toccata Classics and Metier. They regularly give performances at London's Wilton's Music Hall, where their programs bring together music ranging from early Mendelssohn to works written for them. The ensemble is drawn from some of the most creative and original performers active today - its members hail from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Macedonia, Taiwan, the UK and the USA.

•As a committed socialist and Communist Party member, the Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906–94) faced repression during the years of Prime Minister's Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship (1932-1968). His works were banned and he was stripped of his official positions. Lopes-Graça responded in music, evolving a feisty, wiry Bartókian style that drew on Portuguese folk-music. This recording features Lopes-Graça’s own Bechstein piano, played by Olga Prats, who worked closely with him.

Making many of Bernard Rose's works available for the first time, his son Gregory Rose conducts the award-winning artists on this new release. This album marks the centenary of the conductor, trainer and composer. Rose was one of the mainstays of English choral music in the second half of the twentieth century. Rose's compositions occupy an honorable place within the mainstream of the cathedral tradition, being both grounded in the past and leaning gently into the future and speaking its language of stylistic restraint and understated passion.

The music of Swiss composer Conrad Beck (1901-1989) has largely been forgotten since his death. Beck, during his lifetime, wrote seven symphonies, twenty concertos and concertante works, four string quartets, and several choral works and solo songs. This release is the first recording of Beck’s complete piano music. With a style similar to Hindemith and Honeggar, Beck uses heavy contrapuntal textures in these works. Pianist Gabrielle Beck-Lipsi performs these works, and is not only an outstanding musician, but also the wife of Hans Jacob Beck, son of Conrad Beck.

The organ music of Jona (or Juan) Cabanilles is virtuosic and colorfully Baroque, and touched with a distinctively Spanish intensity. Cabanilles is claimed as the most prolific of all composers for the organ and publication of his works, begun in 1927, have not caught up with his output yet. The surviving Cabanilles manuscripts can be seriously corrupt, requiring extensive editing and sometimes even detailed recomposition. This recording uses a number of new editions to present the music as never heard before, as close as possible to what teh composer might hav eintended. Timothy Roberts studied with Christopher Kite and Jill Severs, also receiving master-class tuition from Kenneth Gilbert and Gistav Leonhardt. He worked for over thirty years as a touring keyboardist. In recent years, Roberts has gained experience as a recording engineer and sound editor.

• André Tchaikowsky (1935–82) – no relation to Pyotr Tchaikovsky – was one of the finest pianists of his era, but his true calling was as a composer. • This first conspectus of his piano music features the first recording of his Piano Concerto, the epigrammatic Inventions and his only mature Piano Sonata. • This CD, the first of a series, is released in conjunction with the Toccata Press publication of an annotated edition of his diaries."

David Matthews has become one of the UK's leading composers, both of symphonic and chamber music. One US reviewer described his string quartets as "musical thinking of the highest order and quartet writing in the great tradition of Beethoven, Bartok, Britten and Tippett" - influences that Matthews readily acknowledges. The three piano trios on this release evoke two other masters, since they have something of the drama of Shostakovich and the lyrical intensity of Vaughan Williams. All of these elements are drawn together in Matthews' own voice to make these works some of the most moving chamber music of recent years, in performances that the composer considers exemplary.

The Portuguese-Brazilian composer Marcos António Portugal (1762–1830), well known in his own time for his fifty or so operas, is now a mostly forgotten figure. + He also composed a huge body of more than 160 religious choral works. + The two works here – their first modern performances – illustrate his conservative Classical style as well as revealing the operatic influences on his sacred music. + The absence of female voices from the chorus and violins from the orchestra bring an unexpectedly dark color.

David DeBoor Canfield is not only a composer, he is also an author, critic, editor, annotator, publisher, recording producer, researcher, archivist, violinist, scholar, theologian, and professor at a pastors’ college. For the last decade, Canfield has taken on the project of his ‘After’ Series- that is, composing pieces in the style of other composers. Canfield’s first work in this series is featured on this disc- Concerto after Gliere. The piece for alto saxophone and orchestra was completed in 2007, and has been performed over 100 times throughout the world. In addition to Concerto after Gliere, this release also contains Concerto after Tchaikovsky and Rhapsody after Gershwin. On composing after other people, Canfield writes, “although I don’t have the slightest delusion about being another Tchaikovsky, Gershwin or Gliere, since I have the technique to fill these gaps and am willing to do so, why not? […] If my music in whatever style brings enjoyment to performers and audiences, I shall be satisfied, and grateful to God.”

The Anglo-Dutch composer Gerard Schurmann (b. 1924), made his mark as a pianist and composer chamber music and, later, of film scores, among them Ealing comedies and Hammer horrors. His concert output is intense, passionate, tightly argued and charged with energy, but also infused with lyricism, as these four pieces demonstrate. Schurmann has taken the idea of ‘late quartets’ rather further than Beethoven: these first two numbered quartets date from his ninth decade.

This is Garry Walker's third CD for Toccata Classics after two well-received releases of Havergal Brian works with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. On this recording he explores Matthew Taylor's Viola Concerto, a work that "reinforced his status among the most significant living composers for string quartets" (International Record Review).

The Roaring Twenties roared in Russia as well as in Europe and America, to an extent generally unsuspected in the west. This CD reveals for the first time the light music of a minor master of the day, Matvey Nikolaevsky (1882-1942), whose songs and dances were hits in the early years of the Soviet Union. His style evolved effortlessly from the salon music of the late nineteenth century to the foxtrots, Charlestons and tangos popular during the relatively liberal New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in 1921 and which Soviet audiences continued to enjoy after the NEP was abolished by Stalin in 1928.