Classical Music

In it's bell-like sonorities, clear textures and ritual manner, the piano music of Robert Saxton (born in London in 1953) suggests an almost oriental fascination with light and the way light refracts and diffracts - and yet it is audibly music written by an Englishman. In the two Books of Saxton's Hortus Musicae in particular, this fascinating confluence generates a soundworld somewhere downstream from Takemitsu and Tippett, giving these gardens of music both a ceremonial dignity and sense of spring growth. Hailed as a pianist of 'amazing power and panache' (The Daily Telegraph), Clare Hammond is recognized for the virtuosity and authority of her performances and has developed a 'reputation for brilliantly imaginative concert programmes' (BBC Music Magazine, 'Rising Star'). In 2016, she won the 'Young Artist Award' of the Royal Philharmonic Society in recognition of outstanding achievements. She is a champion of modern repertoire: this is her sixth album of music by a living composer, and she has given 35 world premieres to date. Clare completed a BA at Cambridge University, where she obtained a double first in music, and undertook postgraduate study with Ronan O'Hora at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The German-Dutch composer Julius Röntgen (1855–1932) composed an astonishing number of works in almost every classical genre: 25 symphonies, 17 concerti, 32 string quartets, 16 string trios, 14 piano trios, as well as many sonatas for his five string-player sons. + With the number of available recordings increasing, his vast output has begun to emerge from obscurity. + These world premiere recordings further confirm his fine craftsmanship and extraordinarily prolific melodic sensibility.

The cellist-composer Justus Johann Friedrich Dotzauer (1783-1860), an orchestral musician in Dresden and Leipzig as well as an important soloist and teacher, is best remembered for the music he wrote for his own instrument: the studies of his Violoncellschule are still in use today. But the prolific Dotzauer wrote much else, and his generous output of chamber music includes a handful of good-natured quartets for solo wind instruments and strings. They share an elegant late-Classical manner, with echoes of Mozart and Haydn, but their poise and charm can disguise fearsome technical demands and occasional harmonic boldness. The Ensemble Pyramide consists of flute, oboe, violin, viola, cello and harp- here Markus Bronnimann, flute, Barbara Tillman, oboe, Ulrike Jacoby, violin, Muriel Schweizer, viola, and Anita Jehli, cello. In it's concert programmes, the Ensemble enjoys exposing surprising connections in music history by juxtaposing early and new music. Having worked for years in the same formation, it's members have developed an unmistakable ensemble sound and a special stylistic flexibility in the performance of music from the Baroque era to the 21st century. It's special repertoire includes quartets and quintets of the Classical era as well as French chamber music with harp from the first half of the twentieth century. The Ensemble also dedicates it's energy towards the performance of long-forgotten works, and has had it's own concert series in Zurich since 1995.

This fourth Toccata Classics album of the chamber music of Gerard Schurmann – born in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, naturalised Briton and now a resident of Los Angeles – adds two major song-cycles (one of them written for Britten and Pears) and works for flute and piano to the mix, in a distinctly personal language derived from influences as distinct as Javanese gamelan to Bartók and Britten. Schurmann’s music somehow manages to blend elegant intensity and touching lyricism, with a result balanced between strength and sensitivity.

The English composer and conductor Gregory Rose (b. 1948) here presents a programme of some of his recent orchestral compositions, prefaced by a 90th-birthday tribute to Aaron Copland. Many of these pieces show the influence of Stravinsky in their angular melodies, brittle harmony, hieratic gestures and fondness for dance. Rose’s Violin Concerto, a single span of nine interlocking episodes, has a similar sense of implicit drama: it casts the soloist as the central character whom the instruments of the orchestra engage in dialogue as the work progresses.

The London-born Peter Racine Fricker was once a prominent figure on the British musical landscape but slipped from view after he took up a teaching post in California in 1964. This first-ever survey of his organ music reveals a vigorously contrapuntal style, one which reconciles a taste for crunchy dissonance with a strong sense of melodic direction, it's moods ranging from angular elegance to fierce climaxes swirling with energy and glittering with light. The organist here is Tom Winpenny, Assistant Master of the Music at St. Albans Cathedral and one of Britain's brightest young stars in the organ firmament. He was formerly Sub-Organist at St. Paul's Cathedral, and during this time he performed with the Cathedral Choir at the American Guild of Organists National Convention, performed in Mahler's Symphony No. 8 with Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra, and played for many major state occasions. He has also broadcast regularly on BBC Radio and been featured on American Public Media's 'Pipedreams.'

Alexander Krein (1883-1951) was a member of a dynasty of Jewish musicians active in both Imperial and Soviet Russia. His compositions reveal the confluence of several strands of musical history: his Russian background, the transition from late Romanticism to early modernism - where the influence of Skryabin is readily audible - and, particularly in the works on this album, the Jewish folk-heritage, with it's emotionally powerful blend of high spirits and melancholy. In this fifth volume in the Toccata Classics series 'Russian Jewish Classics', the cellist Aron Zelkowicz, pianist Rodrigo Ojeda and the Musicians of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival are joined by two stars of the musical firmament, the violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley, first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, and clarinetist David Krakauer, who unites classical and klezmer.

The American composer Richard Moriarty (born in Boston in 1946) spent his professional life as a pathologist, taking up composition upon his retirement as a student of Adolphus Hailstork and Richard Danielpour. His deeply felt orchestral song-cycle We That Wait, using poems from the American Civil War written by women, and the expansive, exuberant Missa Adsum! Celebrating Women, are both grand statements in a proud American tradition of Neo-Romanticism, accessible, direct and sincere. Of the premiere performance, one reviewer wrote: “Adsum-Celebrating Women was a tour de force, whose title comes from the Roman rite of ordination when candidates are called by name and answer “Adsum- Present!” It was sung with passion and beauty…” (M.D. Ridge)

In his short life (1839-72) Eduard Adolf Tod garnered a reputation as one of the finest organists of the day: Liszt praised his playing, and he gave a recital in the Royal Albert Hall in the very year of it's opening. Most of Tod's handful of works for the organ - solo and as a duo partner - have not been recorded before; here they are joined by three other little-known German organ sonatas to give an overview of the genre as it evolved from it's well-behaved Mendelssohnian origins into late-Romantic grandeur. International organ virtuoso Dr Jan Lehtola is one the most successful and progressive Finnish organists of his generation. He has appeared with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tapiola Sinfonietta, the Lahti Symphony, Tampere Philharmonic and Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestras and the St. Michel Strings. He has performed at many international festivals, including the Lahti Organ Festival, Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, and the annual Festival of New Organ Music in London. He has worked with conductors including Kent Nagano, Juha Kangas, Sakari Oramo, Muhai Tang and Osmo V�nsk�, amongst others. Dr Lehtola has also given recitals in leading European concert halls such as Gewandhaus in Leipzig and cathedrals and churches such as La Trinit� in Paris, St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey in London.

Busoni's transcriptions of Bach have long been one of the mainstays of the piano repertoire. Bach himself worshipped the music of the Danish-born Diderich Buxtehude (1637-1707), famously walking 250 miles to L�beck to hear him play. The Liszt student August Stradal (1860-1930) obviously shared that admiration, transcribing ten of Buxtehude's most imposing organ works for piano, thus creating alongside 'Bach-Busoni' a corpus of grandiose - and virtuoso - Baroque music for the modern concert grand that has somehow remained almost entirely unknown. Meilin Ai studied for her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance with Joseph Banowetz at the University of North Texas and is now a full-time faculty member of the Conservatory of Music of the Sichuan Normal University in China.

The English composer Michael Brough (born in Yorkshire, in northern England, in 1960) is rather an unusual character: he is also a full time solicitor. Late in 2013, with a commission from the Swaledale Festival, he sat down at his piano and began to improvise the first of what would become 25 Picture-Preludes, in the major and minor keys. Like Rachmaninov's Etudes-Tableaux and Medtner's Skazki, these short pieces are intended to stimulate a response in the listener's imagination. Rachmaninov and Medtner are audible influences on Brough's bluesy, late-Romantic musical language. This recording was made on the 'Bosendorfer 290', a piano with an extended range in the bass. Michael Brough was educated at Leeds University, where he was the chaplaincy organist from 1980 to 1982. He qualified as a solicitor in 1988 and still advises on property and private client law. He has been one of the organists at Holy Trinity Sloane Street, Chelsea, in central London, continuously since 1986. As a composer, he has above all written songs; there is also chamber music, including a half hour bass clarinet sonata, sacred and choral music, and a few pieces for organ.

The inspiration of Denmark lies behind much of the music in this recording. The English composer and conductor Matthew Taylor (b. 1964) readily confesses to a fascination with the music of Carl Nielsen, and, as with Nielsen's own music for winds, Taylor's shows a similar blend of symphonic purpose and bucolic humor. Several of the works here take their inspiration directly from Nielsen; indeed, 'Skal!' is a piece of whimsy that consists almost entirely of quotations from Nielsen's music. The 'Trio in memoriam VH' is a tribute to Vahn Holmboe, the leading Danish composer in the generation after Nielsen. This is the debut recording of The Waldegrave Ensemble, a new London-based wind quintet, who have called in some of their musician friends to join in. The Waldegrave Ensemble performs a diverse range of repertoire for wind quintet, as well as collaborating with a wider range of instruments to perform larger mixed chamber works. Since it's formation in 2009, The Waldegrave Ensemble has set out to embrace new ways to engage it's audiences, incorporating storytelling and theatre into performances, collaborating with dancers and using visual stimulus to enrich it's listeners' experiences.

The name of the Austrian composer Julius Bittner (1874–1939) has been almost entirely lost from view, and yet he was one of the most successful composers of opera and operetta of his day, a mainstay of musical Vienna. Unusually, Bittner was also a practicing lawyer; more unusually still, he was a double amputee, the result of the ravages of diabetes. None of his orchestral music has been recorded before – astonishingly, given the quality of the two works presented here. Vaterland is an expansive, Lisztian symphonic poem written on a patriotic impulse early in the First World War; and Bittner’s ambitious First Symphony, which has its starting point in Brahms and Bruckner, is a major piece of late-Romantic musical architecture, both tuneful and grandiose.

Like Korngold, Toch, Schoenberg, Zeisl and Zemlinsky, Richard Stöhr (1874–1967) was another Austrian composer driven into American exile by the Nazis. His generous output of music, being rediscovered at last in these Toccata Classics recordings, includes seven symphonies, much chamber music, songs, and choral and piano pieces. These chamber works, from his first years in the United States, show him in surprisingly relaxed mood, the Viennese lyricism of his native city maintained in his US refuge. The Flute Suite in particular – though written only four years after his flight from Vienna – can boast a number of easy-going ‘ear-worms’ that linger in the memory long after the music has stopped.