A number of diverse influences have helped shape the musical language of Malcolm Dedman (born in London in 1948 but resident in provincial South Africa since 2007), among them Bartók and Messiaen, his Bahá’í Faith and, more recently, his new South African homeland. Points of contact with other composers can be heard, too, not least Debussy, Ravel, Barber and Ginastera. These piano works embody a wide range of moods, from gentle introspection to energetic, dissonant vigor. They are brilliantly performed on this recording by Nancy Lee Harper.

REVIEW

Here, in what promises to be a multi-volume ‘shelf’, is a complete Dedman recital and it’s of some substance. He cites his debt to Messiaen and Bartók but acknowledges the impact of ‘post-modernists’ and of his beleaguered but gritty determination to speak directly to audiences. In addition to much piano solo music, he has written a Danses Concertantes for strings and a Piano Duet Concerto.

There’s a princely crock of gold on this disc which proffers four significant works from the period 1984-2021. His Reformation is rockily defiant and takes in aspects of boogie-woogie, jazz and the dynamism and poetry of Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin. The earliest piece here is the second sonata In Search. Its two outer movements again remonstrate with the listener as if confronted by a disputant. There’s a degree of repetition of phrases but it never becomes tedious; more tender and mesmeric. The central Lamentoso pays out a slowly insinuating and engaging melody as if there were all the time in the world.

The 2008 Four Kinds of Love owes its expressive to the Bahá’í faith. The movements, ingeniously and with religious severity, ring the changes on love with four tracks: 1. ‘Love of Man for Man – Unity of Spirits’; 2. ‘Love of Man for God – Divine Faith’; 3. ‘Love of God for Man – Inexhaustible Graces’; 4. ‘Love of God towards the Self – God is Love’. The music is chaste or head-bowed and tender, of bell-like clarity and what feels like moral fibre. It is touched with a measure of Messiaen or Szymanowski but without either composer’s magnetic draw towards dense complexity. The most recent work presented is the Third Sonata To the Memory of an Angel [in] which...textures adhere as usual to a brave clarity.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has an international reputation as an historian of the British music hall and other forms of light entertainment. But he is an outstanding composer in his own right, his music treading a fine line between a very English whimsy and a profoundly felt and natural response to his (often Celtic) subject matter. These works reveal a master craftsman and natural tunesmith, who manages to unite good humor, unerring technique and deep feeling in music of immediate appeal. His two symphonies – originally written for brass band – embody a return to the formal, Classical clarity of Haydn, though expressed with the satisfyingly beefy textures of the modern orchestra. He lists among his influences Shostakovich and Sibelius and, less predictably, The Beatles and The Kinks.

During his short life Don Banks (1923–80) enjoyed a reputation as the leading modernist among Australian composers. Studies with Mátyás Seiber, Milton Babbitt and, especially, Luigi Dallapiccola helped refine his serial technique, but his music never retreated into academic abstraction, as this recital of chamber and vocal works demonstrates: it retained a keen sense of drama, an ear for atmosphere, a rather angular lyricism and, occasionally, a touch of humor. The works are performed by Ole Bohn, Robert Johnson, Geoffrey Gartner, Rowan Phemister, Daniel Herscovitch, Francesco Celata, Jenny Duck-Chong, Alison Pratt, Daryl Pratt, and Joshua Hill.

The organ works of Axel Ruoff, born in Stuttgart in 1957, constitute one of the most important contributions to the literature for the instrument by any composer since Messiaen, with Ruoff often using its unparalleled resources to write music of extraordinary power and dramatic flair. This third volume in Jan Lehtola’s complete recording features the organ in the unusual role of duo partner in chamber music – but it is chamber music conceived on a symphonic scale. Here these five muscular duo works are separated by a series of weighty chorale preludes.

The music of the Moravian composer Jan Novák (1921–84) – a natural successor to Bohuslav Martinu, with whom he briefly studied – is nothing less than life-enhancing: it has Martinu’s rhythmic charge and his unflagging energy. And although Novák had such difficulties with the authorities in Communist Czechoslovakia that he chose to emigrate, there is an infectious optimism, a joie de vivre, in these three works that is instantly communicative. A second volume of works for chamber orchestra (TOCC0565) is also currently in preparation.

The Karlsruhe-based Josef Schelb's (1894–1977) output was substantial: he lost most of his early music in a bombing raid in 1942, but wrote some 150 more works after that. In the four chamber works recorded here Schelb’s counterpoint is given a bucolic twist under the influence of French Impressionism, the two traditions combining to invest these pieces with a freewheeling energy. Of the first volume of Schelb’s Chamber Music, MusicWeb International wrote: ‘All the performances here are well-recorded, stylish and alert.'

Paul Juon was born in Moscow, of Swiss parents, in 1872, studying there with Arensky and Taneyev; Rachmaninov, a fellow student, dubbed him ‘the Russian Brahms’. At the Hochschule der Musik in Berlin, Woldemar Bargiel, Clara Schumann’s half-brother, was his main teacher before Juon himself became a respected member of the staff. There are indeed echoes of Brahms in Juon’s early music but there is also a fondness for Russian folksong and a mastery of counterpoint, which all feed into his urgent, late-Romantic lyricism.

REVIEW

Paul Juon...studied with Woldemar Bargiel in Berlin at the Hochschule für Musik. These influences developed him into a hothouse for late-Romantic lyricism and, on this showing, a skilled purveyor of channelled sentimentality.

The sound here is right upfront to the listener...The musicians play right to your heart.

Of the two tightly-timed viola sonatas, the D major, Op. 15 work is from the turn of the 19^th and twentieth centuries. It overflows with torrential Brahmsian high romance, rather in the style of the Brahms Double Concerto. There’s no question of a temperate or distanced approach here and the musicians are at one with that mind-set; they constantly ‘push’ the mood and the tempo to intensify rather than in impatience with it. Listen to them in the finale. The Second Viola Sonata Op. 82a is from 1924. Its Moderato assai is a shade cooler but soulful and does not disappoint. On this disc it is the viola sonatas, with their robust and memorable themes and treatment, that will have the listener sitting bolt-upright.

--MusicWeb International (Rob Barnett)

The organ music of Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83) presents a meeting of contrasts: it can at the same time be both angular and lyrical, and it spans an enormous dynamic range, from intimate delicacy to sheer, raw, hieratic power. Her reputation as one of Britain’s leading serial composers is belied, too, by the direct appeal, the range of color and the narrative instinct of many of the pieces recorded here, most of them for the first time. Born in London in 1906 Elisabeth Lutyens influenced serialism in British music both past and present. Highly regarded by her peers, not least by Igor Stravinsky, Lutyens was and remains a respected avant-garde artist, and an innovator of serialism itself.

With its roots in the tradition of Borodin and Mussorgsky, the music of the Ukrainian-born Soviet composer Yuri Shaporin (1887–1966) sits between the late Romanticism of Scriabin and the harder edges of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, blending a mastery of counterpoint with an acute sense of Russian keyboard color. In Shaporin’s piano music his fondness for the epic – expressed in two large-scale sonatas and a mighty passacaglia – is contrasted with a number of gentle, almost whimsical miniatures.

Kirill Kozlovski is a Finnish-Belarusian pianist, harpsichordist and researcher. He holds a doctoral degree from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki for his research into the music of Dmitri Shostakovich (2017). His present research interests include Soviet music and cultural history, as well as performance practices within the Russian piano school.

REVIEW:

Shaporin is a composer of greater interest and merit than I had hitherto suspected, and it has left me wanting to hear more of his music. I strongly recommend this release to those interested in the Russian piano repertoire and those who would like to discover an unfamiliar but worthwhile Soviet-Russian composer.

-- Fanfare

These two works for string orchestra were composed on either side of the flight of the Viennese composer Richard Stöhr (1874–1967) from occupied Austria to the USA, and from prominence and danger to liberty and obscurity, and they reflect the change in his circumstances: the Concerto in the Old Style is expansive, witty, energetic and endlessly good-natured, whereas the Second Suite is introspective, understated and deeply felt. These first recordings allow the discovery of two major additions to the repertoire for strings; the Second Suite is also one of the last grand statements of late Romanticism.

This album brings together music by two English composers who are also good friends –and both born in East Anglia: Nicholas Barton in Norfolk in 1950 and Christopher Wright in Suffolk in 1954. Moreover, they share a similar musical language: largely tonal, if loosely so, rhythmically alert, transparently but dramatically scored and with a natural feeling for symphonic argument and growth, and a powerful sense of scale. “Mark Forkgen and his versatile chamber choir Canticum are obviously fully committed to Wright’s music and have done him proud.” --Choir and Organ

One could hardly intuit from these fresh and flowing violin sonatas the obstacles their female composers had to face - family opposition for Mel Bonis in France and Ethel Smyth in England, institutional conservatism for Elfrida Andrée in Sweden. It has taken a century and more for that initial prejudice to fall away, and they are now beginning to attract a fair hearing for their music. What ultimately matters, of course, is not whether composers are male or female but whether they write good music, and these three sonatas - melodically expansive, rhythmically vivacious, harmonically warm - point to the musical riches that further exploration of their creators' output will uncover.

The music of Samuel Adler – born in Mannheim in 1928 but long since one of the leading figures of American music – has its roots in the Neo-Classical clarity of composers like Copland and Hindemith, who were among his teachers. The works on this album arose from a range of impulses: a Neo-Baroque concerto grosso and a tribute to Bach encase a series of tributes to lost individuals and traditions; and two jeux d’esprit – Ives’ tongue-in-cheek Variations on America and Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets – both bring jollity in Adler’s idiomatic arrangements for string orchestra.

REVIEW:

Adler’s arrangements not only provide string orchestras the opportunity to perform these works, they offer considerable excitement and impact in their own right. The performances by the New York Classical Players and conductor Dongmin Kim are excellent throughout. The playing is incisive, tonally rich, and phrased with great care. The featured soloists are first-rate as well. Jürgen Thym’s excellent liner notes, including commentary from the composer, are brimming with information offered with erudition, clarity, and enthusiasm. Samuel Adler: Music for Chamber Orchestra is a marvelous tribute to an American musical treasure who has long distinguished himself as a composer, teacher, and writer. Recommended.

-- Fanfare

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 second in a series of pioneering recordings from the Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, reveals Ingegneri to have been one of the masters of his age, writing music of breathtaking richness and beauty: the works heard here combine learned, intricate counterpoint with the kind of sheer sonic thrill that brings a shiver of physical excitement. It is, of course, religious music, but it is also extraordinarily passionate, to a degree not previously heard, nor for centuries to come, until the rise of the great Romantic choral works.

The Russian-born Mischa Spoliansky (1898—1985) became one of the major names in cabaret in 1920s Berlin and then, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, in London, he became one of the best-known composers of film scores. He also wrote a handful of orchestral works, which have remained unknown until now. His Boogie is a witty, tongue-in-cheek piece of orchestral jazz, and the Overture to My Husband and I, one of his stage shows, has a Mozartian sparkle and wit. But it is his only Symphony, an epic statement composed over a period of nearly three decades, that constitutes his real achievement as an orchestral composer – the fourth of its five movements apparently offering Spoliansky’s own musical commentary on the Holocaust.

REVIEW:

Some may recognize Spoliansky’s name as the composer for a host of British films from the 1930s onwards, including Sanders of the River, The Ghost Goes West, King Solomon's Mines, The Happiest Days of Your Life , Saint Joan and North West Frontier. That he wrote this marvelous symphony during his ‘time off’ is quite something – tuneful, richly orchestrated, cleverly planned and gloriously uplifting, it remains one of the biggest surprises I have come across for a long time.

-- MusicWeb International