The English composer-pianist Freda Swain (1902–85) left behind a huge legacy of music that was largely unknown even during her own lifetime. Her compositions – hundreds of them, in a series of large boxes – found their way to the Swiss pianist Timon Altwegg, who begins his survey of her piano music with these three mighty sonatas. They are astonishing discoveries: big-boned, virtuosic pieces, full of wild energy, crossing from late Romanticism to a more modern idiom – from Rachmaninov to Bartók, so to speak – and with Bax’s fondness for Celtic seascapes and a hint of Debussyan Impressionism.

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Freda Swain studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, married New Zealand pianist and mentor Arthur Alexander, with whom she formed a successful piano duo, and devoted her life to composing, teaching, and performing. Some of her 450 compositions were performed with success, but her refusal to bend to post-war musical trends meant she fell into obscurity.

Altwegg’s recording of three sonatas and three short pieces should go a long way to reinstating this remarkable composer with a highly individual voice. The most fascinating work is the three-movement Sonata Saga that Swain left unnumbered and which Altwegg found in a box of unsorted loose pages. He has painstakingly worked it into a performance version, and it is an impressive and powerful debut work from a 22-year-old.

The gem of the collection is the Sonata No 1 in A Minor, nicknamed “The Skerries”, written in 1936 and inspired by the Scottish landscape. Altwegg gives a memorable performance. The Sonata No 2 in F Sharp Minor dates from 1950 and shows how Swain advanced in her approach to form and harmony. The short pieces are delightful.

-- Limelight

The German composer Felix Woyrsch was born in 1860 in Troppau (then the capital of Austrian Silesia and now, as Opava, in the Czech Republic) but became prominent in the musical life of Altona, now part of Hamburg, as organist, choirmaster and teacher; he died there in 1944. Woyrsch’s late-Romantic organ music, with distant roots in Bach’s counterpoint, inhabits a harmonic world somewhere between Brahms and Reger, its dark colors reflecting the upheavals in the times through which he lived.

The tale of Hans Winterberg (1901-91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Jewish Czech man, he settled in Munich after the War as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but with his death his estate disappeared into a legal limbo, emerging only in 2015. This second album of his piano music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Janáček, Ravel, Schoenberg and other early- to mid-twentieth-century masters, animated by a hard-edged, freewheeling energy.

This second volume of orchestral music by the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) brings works from across his career. A suite drawn from an early Festspiel – a community pageant – opens with a march of Elgarian swagger and continues with a mix of charm and substance. Flury was a gifted violinist, and his Third Violin Concerto, written at the height of the Second World War, is virtuosic and lyrical in equal measure, its unashamed Romanticism perhaps an escape from troubled times. The four late Caprices for violin and orchestra form a concertante serenade in all but name; and one of his very last pieces was a dark and moving tribute to a musician friend, the slow movement of a suite he did not live to finish.

Far from being a treatment of the usual Latin, the Requiem of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (1945–2013) sets spiritual and secular texts on death from a number of the world’s cultures, including Whitman, Villon, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a sutra from Zen Buddhism and the Jewish Kaddish. The work of a young man (Rosner was 28 when he wrote it), this Requiem is both monumental and wildly energetic – but it also encompasses passages of transcendent beauty. His musical language clothes the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony in rich Romantic colors, producing a style that is instantly recognizable and immediately appealing. Some of the music was first written for an aborted operatic treatment of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, where the main character plays chess with Death; in like spirit, Rosner’s Requiem is a major statement of human defiance in the face of mortality, even if its gentle closing pages bring uneasy acceptance.

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Arnold Rosner’s Requiem (1973), no exaggeration intended, is one of the great works of the 20th Century. Rosner (1945-2013) was a postmodernist at a time when modernism was unshakable in academic circles. He studied at SUNY/Buffalo—a notorious hotbed: the faculty laughed at him. They were wrong. They couldn’t deal with his love of Renaissance and early music (Dufay especially), his tonality and post-tonal language. Written when he was 28, the maturity and vision is striking. Inspiration for this work was triggered by his fascination with Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. He wanted to adapt it for an opera, but Bergman refused permission. He began to write it anyway, and some of it appears in the Requiem. His sources include the New Testament, François Villon, the Kama Sutra, Whitman (When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed), Dante, the Kaddish, and the Dies Irae. All are set with sensitivity and profound musicality. The London Philharmonic is great, but Ms Hollis’s soprano is wobbly. Helpful notes by Rosner scholar Walter Simmons. Texts and translations. Don’t miss this.

-- American Record Guide (Allen Gimbel)

The ‘École de Paris’ was a group of composers from Central and Eastern Europe who made the French capital their home in the 1920s and ’30s. One of their number was the Romanian Marcel Mihalovici, born in Bucharest in 1898 and based in Paris from 1919 until his death in 1985 – one of the most significant of twentieth-century composers who has yet to receive the recognition he deserves. This first album dedicated to his piano music traces his stylistic evolution, the early blend of French insouciance, echoes of eastern European folk-music and Neo-Classical contrapuntal clarity gradually taking a tougher turn and blending Bartók and Bach. It ends with a monumental passacaglia for the left hand alone, one of the most daunting summits of the piano literature.

The Czech-born Eduard Nápravník (1839–1916) became one of the pivotal figures in the musical life of nineteenth-century Russia: as conductor of the Imperial Mariinsky Opera in St Petersburg, he gave the premieres of some of the most important Russian operas, among them Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, six by Tchaikovsky and nine by Rimsky-Korsakov. But his own music has largely been lost from sight – a fate it emphatically does not deserve, as these three works for violin and piano prove: big-hearted and big-boned, replete with passionate Tchaikovskian melody, they reveal a composer ripe for rediscovery.

This unusual recording brings princely offerings of two different kinds. In 1970 Prince Charles – who had studied cello and trumpet – was presented with a leather-bound volume containing pieces written for his entertainment by the composers on the council of the Performing Right Society. These fourteen bonnes bouches are complemented by fourteen German Lieder written by Prince Charles’ great-great-great-grandfather, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, whose style owed something to that of his good friend, Felix Mendelssohn.

Josef Schelb (1894–1977) is one of the better-kept secrets of German music. His output was substantial: he lost most of his early music in a bombing raid in 1942 but, as if to make up for lost time, wrote some 150 more works after that, in the tonally liberated, quasi-Expressionist contrapuntal tradition of Hindemith and Hartmann; Bartók was an important influence, too. These three concertos show him at his most engaging: the contrapuntal craftsmanship that drives the music forward is deployed with a light and nimble touch, and passages of touching delicacy contrast with others where a lively sense of humour comes bubbling up to the surface.

The tale of Hans Winterberg (1901–91) is a strange one. A survivor of the Terezín concentration camp, where he had been interned as a Czech Jew, he settled in Munich after the War as a German citizen, and his music enjoyed a number of broadcasts – but with his death his estate disappeared into a legal limbo, emerging only in 2015. This first album of his piano music reveals an unusual and individual voice, an idiosyncratic blend of Janácek, Ravel, Schoenberg and other mid-twentieth-century masters, animated by a hard-edged, freewheeling energy and grim humour reminiscent of his close contemporary, Nikos Skalkottas. Brigitte Helbig, who grew up in Munich and also studied there, is one of Germany’s livelier young pianists, with a respectable track record in the performance of new music.

The Toccata Classics 2014 release of Mieczys?aw Weinberg’s Symphony No. 21, Op. 152 Kaddish and Polish Tunes, Op. 47, No. 2 was remarkable and created considerable interest. Now Toccata present a second Weinberg volume comprising two world première recordings. Once again Toccata use the admirable Siberian Symphony Orchestra under Dmitry Vasilyev.

Thanks to a burgeoning interest in Weinberg there is now an increasing number of recordings of this Polish-born Soviet composer. The Bregenz Festival in 2011 headlined a Weinberg Retrospective and gave the stage première of Weinberg’s Holocaust opera The Passenger directed by David Pountney the festival’s music director (review ~ review). As the Bregenz festival’s featured composer a number of other Weinberg scores were performed including his Gogol opera The Portrait directed by John Fulljames. David Fanning’s recent book Mieczyslaw Weinberg: In Search of Freedom has undoubtedly increased awareness and further widened the knowledge of this talented and fascinating composer. It would only take a renowned conductor - maybe one born in Russia - such as Kirill Petrenko, Vasily Petrenko or Kirill Karabits to make recordings of Weinberg’s symphonic works to command international attention.

From 1958 The White Chrysanthemum ballet in three acts after A. Rumnev and J. Romanovich has a scenario based on a girl who is blinded at Hiroshima but later has her sight restored by Soviet doctors. The ballet was never staged probably due to difficult political relations with Japan around that time. No score has been found and it is even possible that Weinberg left the ballet unorchestrated. It was Weinberg himself who extracted the Six Ballet Scenes and orchestrated them as the Choreographic Symphony and dated the manuscript July 1973. This is a memorable score, full of delicious contrasts, often percussion laden in a similar way to late Shostakovich. In the energetic and restless opening Allegro the forceful percussion seem to be jousting with the strings and the following Adagio is infused with an exotic middle-eastern flavor. Appealing is the playful and dance-like Allegretto and the dark mystery of the Adagio-Moderato is heavy with foreboding. Especially engaging, the penultimate movement an Adagio contains some gloriously melodic writing that could have easily come from the pen of Rachmaninov. Ending the work the Presto just bristles with raw energy. Towards the beginning of the movement the music contains a definite klezmer feel but overall has all the vivacious force of Prokofiev.

Illness delayed Weinberg’s writing of his Symphony No. 22 and it was left unfinished at his death in 1996. Dedicated to Olya his wife the unfinished manuscript was completed in piano version only. Weinberg’s widow suggested to Kirill Umansky that he might orchestrate the score. Immersing himself in Weinberg’s symphonic music Umansky completed the orchestration and the first performance was given by the Belgorod State Philharmonic Orchestra in 2003. The symphony steeped in melancholy is notable for its bleak rather severe character and sense of foreboding. I found little in the way of contrast throughout the three movements and although it’s not a work I especially enjoyed its intensity and severe emotions are certainly hard to ignore. At just under 25 minutes the opening movement is over double the length of the next longest. Titled Fantasia the writing contains a feeling of intense sadness and a searching quality combined with a near constant icy chill. Relatively short at just over 5 minutes the second movement an Intermezzo contains that now familiar bleakness although it’s not quite as harsh. Titled Reminiscences the Finale eschews originality returning to the austere character of the opening movement.

Under the assured baton of Dmitry Vasilyev the Siberian Symphony Orchestra excel with compelling playing of unyielding vitality in the Six Ballet Scenes and vigor matched with sheer concentration in the Symphony. Recorded at Philharmonic Concert Hall, Omsk in Siberia the sound quality is full and clear. The release also has the benefit of a helpful essay in the booklet from leading Weinberg authority David Fanning.

For those unaccustomed to Weinberg this admirably played release is not the place to start however the Six Ballet Scenes was a satisfying surprise and is worth obtaining for that alone.

– MusicWeb International (Michael Cookson)

The phrase ‘unashamed Romantic’ might not have been coined for the French composer Corentin Boissier, born in the Paris suburbs in 1995, but it certainly fits him well. As the titles of his Glamour Concerto and Philip Marlowe Concerto suggest, he revels in the full-textured sound of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood, the golden age of Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, Rota’s Legend of the Glass Mountain and other such high-calorie classics. The Second Piano Sonata, the Sonata Appassionata, is no less Neo-Romantic, but has flecks of Russian color, locating it downstream from Rachmaninov.

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. This series will present all his surviving compositions, most of them in first recordings. The major work on this first album, Hermann’s Cello Concerto of 1925 in a reconstruction by the Italian composer Fabio Conti (b. 1967), sits somewhere between Bartók and Korngold and bids fair to become a staple of the cello repertoire.

This is the seventh album in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from 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, violin, transverse flute or oboe) 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. Bergen Barokk was established by Frode Thorsen and Hans Knut Sveen in 1994 in connection with a concert series supported by the city arts department in Bergen and is today one of the leading early-music ensembles in Norway. The group has performed in concerts and radio broadcasts in Europe, Russia and the USA. Its recordings on Simax Classics, BIS, Bergen Digital Studio, LAWO and Toccata Classics include German, English, Italian and French repertoire.

Le rouge et le noir, the pioneering psychological novel by Stendhal published in 1830, has had a number of adaptations on film but surprisingly few treatments in music. This three-act ballet, premiered in 2000, by the Romanian composer Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea (b. 1959), rectifies that omission in the grand manner. The atmosphere is dark and passionate, as the novel requires, and the musical language reflects the remarkable tradition of Romanian modernism that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century from the music of Enescu – a distinctive soundworld that blends rich timbral colour with deep roots in Romanian folk-music.