In his day the now-forgotten Carl Gottlieb Reissiger (1798-1859) was highly esteemed, both as conductor and composer; indeed, his presence in Dresden from 1826 made it one of the main operatic centres in Germany. He wrote nine operas himself, as well as a huge quantity of vocal music (including at least twelve Masses), and his large output of chamber music boasts no fewer than 27 piano trios. These two early exemplars in this first-ever complete recorded cycle of those trios have a Mendelssohnian elegance and clarity, deepened here and there by a touch of Beethovenian pathos. Schumann was an enthusiast: 'When I think of Reissiger's trios, the words lovely and jewel-like come to mind. These choice and lovely works remind one of a chain of flowers. [...] His music never fatigues the ear, but holds our attention to the very end'.

This is the eighth album in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas in Georg Philipp Telemann's collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 - the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to appear in print. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (recorder, transverse flute, oboe or violin) and basso continuo, and generally take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann's cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

As with many other Australian composers, the music of Linda Kouvaras (b. 1960) has a strong sense of wide-open spaces, expressed in lyrical, elegiac melodic lines that soar over freewheeling Lisztian piano textures and atmospheric echoes of French Impressionism. In this first album of a series presenting all of her instrumental works, chamber music, and songs written since 1991, she also addresses two major contemporary issues, with a duo for saxophone and piano exploring the human response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a song-cycle confronting domestic violence from a woman’s viewpoint.

The music of the English composer John Gardner (1917–2011) – basically tonal and always impeccably crafted – is characterised by rhythmic vivacity and harmonic immediacy. His musical fingerprints come from his love of jazz, Renaissance and Baroque procedures and his mastery of imitative counterpoint; his use of established musical forms invests them with a quirky and distinctive harmonic idiom. This first album of two collecting his entire output of organ music presents not only his sly humour but also the staggering contrapuntal craftsmanship of his fugue on a theme by Anton Bruckner – one of the monuments of recent British writing for the organ.

The Cenci (1951–52) is Havergal Brian’s operatic realisation of Shelley’s gruesome tale of incest and parricide in Renaissance Italy. The score calls it simply an ‘Opera in Eight Scenes’, but it rarely goes in for grand tunes; instead, its dark colours reflect Shelley’s fascination with the struggle between good and evil. Stylistically, it is an unusual but highly effective hybrid: a music-drama focused on the intense delivery of Shelley’s text, with the declamatory style of the vocal lines echoing such recent oratorios as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, and the freewheeling orchestral writing producing something of a vocal symphony.

Toivo Kuula (1883–1918) is one of the many composers who died at a tragically young age – 35 in his case, the result of an alcohol-fuelled pub brawl. The striking quality of the music he wrote during his short life points to the immensity of the loss not only to Finnish culture but to music more generally – as this first album of two, presenting his entire output of songs for solo voice and piano, makes abundantly clear. The range of moods captured here is striking, from cheery folksongs to dark existentialist contemplations of the meaning of life and death. The most passionate of them generate an operatic intensity in their short span, in a style that balances directness of expression and rich late-Romantic harmonies.

Harpist to Queen Victoria, the Welsh composer John Thomas (1826–1913) also wrote prolifically for his own instrument, both for solo harp and for duos of two harps or harp and piano – a combination where the different sounds of the two instruments enhance the clarity of the texture. Thomas’ original works use the elegant Romantic style of his own day, but he often drew on Welsh folksong for his inspiration and also left a generous legacy of transcriptions, especially of operatic favourites. Although some of his music was intended for the Victorian drawing room, other pieces require a virtuoso technique – and all of it has a thoroughly engaging melodic appeal.

Richard Lambert, born in Bath in the English West Country in 1951, grew up with the sounds of organ and brass among his earliest musical experiences: he played cornet and trumpet as a boy and was soon taking organ lessons in Bath Abbey. His own compositions for brass and organ – many of them written to mark special occasions in the lives of friends and acquaintances – range in mood from the tender and intimate to the bold and heraldic, in a language downstream from Walton and Poulenc.

The Cremonese composer Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1535/36–92) is chiefly remembered as the teacher of Claudio Monteverdi while, for well-nigh 500 years, his own achievements were left to sit in the shadows. This fourth in a series of pioneering recordings from the Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, presents a sequence of music for Holy Week and Easter, confirming Ingegneri to have been one of the masters of his age. The striking range of moods heard here will confound conventional expectations of Renaissance polyphony: Ingegneri’s emotional palette extends from tender intimacy in some of these motets to dancing, celebratory jubilation in the Mass setting – all of it music of breathtaking richness and beauty.

Ronald Center (1913–73) is sometimes described as ‘the Scottish Bartók’, and his music does indeed capture some of the wild energy of the Scottish landscape in a style of Bartókian asperity. It also shows affinities with the music of Busoni, Debussy, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams, absorbed into an individual style that is audibly Scots. Center was essentially a miniaturist, his meticulous craftsmanship allowing him to encompass a range of emotions – heart-felt sorrow, grim humour, relaxed lyricism, dark despair – in a crisp and succinct manner, animated by sharp wit and irony. Many of the works recorded here also show off his skill as a contrapuntist and one, surprisingly, is a rumba.

The American composer John Stamp (b. 1954) – universally known as ‘Jack’ – is a familiar figure in the worlds of the symphonic wind-band movement that flourishes in US universities and of the brass band on both sides of the Atlantic. When the Barcelona Clarinet Players asked him for a new work, and then proposed this album, he had to create the repertoire from scratch. The range of moods he has generated here is surprisingly wide, from gentle night-music that caresses the ear, via jaunty fugal textures and buoyant counterpoint, to catchy dance-rhythms that set the foot tapping.

Pál Hermann, born in Budapest in 1902, was not only one of the leading cellists of his generation; he was also an important composer, one of the major figures in Hungarian music in the generation after his teachers Bartók and Kodály. But since only two of his works were published before his early death – in 1944, at the hands of the Nazis – and many more of them were lost, he has not had the esteem that he deserves. The works on this second volume of his surviving compositions – mostly chamber works for strings, several in their first recordings – have the wiry humour, sprung and spiky rhythms and Hungarian melos that mark him out as a worthy successor to Bartók – and hints at how much was lost with his murder.

This fifth instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two large canvases inspired by painters: Symphony No. 13 by the revolutionary Soviet artist Kazimir Malevich, and No. 14 by Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. Bruk may seem to write in a kind of stream of consciousness, but his works are subtly bound together through a network of motifs and details of scoring. Even so, the orchestral writing in both pieces is wildly inventive, a kaleidoscope of colour and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in its profligate abundance, with hints here and there of Prokofiev and Szymanowski.

Oskar Merikanto (1868–1924) made an enormous contribution to music-making in Finland, and to organ music in particular, as teacher, virtuoso performer and authority on performance practice, reforming the approach to the organ in both church and concert-hall. It was thought that all of his organ music was known and recorded, but recent discoveries have added a number of previously unknown works to his catalogue: a striking concert fantasia, an early funeral march, some pedal studies, a vast series of chorale preludes – some of them beautifully crafted miniatures, others only aphoristic ideas – and an organ transcription of a piano piece by Mendelssohn.

REVIEW:

Finnish organist and composer Oskar Merikanto made significant contributions to the musical life of Finland. He initiated reforms in the approach to organ music, playing, and building in both the church and concert hall. It was thought that most of his organ music had been published, but recent discoveries have unearthed a number of pieces that remained in manuscript. This program includes 4 of them as well as a selection of the 100 Chorale Preludes Op. 59, published in 1906.

The Fantasia and Trauermarsch are substantial pieces of emotional power and originality, infused with the spirit of Max Reger. Of particular interest are the 5 Concert Etudes for pedal solo. Although they are meant to develop pedal technique, they come across not as mere technical exercises, but as character pieces much in manner of Chopin and Liszt’s etudes for piano.. The Mendelssohn is part of a collection of arrangements that Merikanto assembled in 1915 but never published. Most are under a minute long and are extremely interesting in their variety and emotional content. Organists take note.

This is another recording in Lehtola’s extensive series exploring unknown and forgotten composers. He plays on a 3-manual, 70-stop 1929/2021 Kangasala organ in Tampere Cathedral, Finland, one of the most important and largest romantic organs preserved in its original state. Extensive and informative notes by the performer on the composer and music. A fascinating recording.

— American Record Guide

The musical language of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colours, producing a style that is instantly recognisable and immediately appealing. This fourth Toccata Classics album of his orchestral music opens with an engaging and energetic early Scherzo and a Concerto Grosso that has something of the dignified reserve of the Swiss composer Frank Martin, whom Rosner much admired – as the broadly expressive Variations on a Theme by Frank Martin go on to show. Rosner’s A Mylai Elegy, a symphonic poem inspired by a massacre of civilians in Vietnam, has few equals in the orchestral repertoire: it veers from profound sadness to wild, freewheeling anger – protest music at its grandest and most passionate.