The early piano music of the Dutch composer Bernhard van den Sigtenhorst Meyer (1888–1953) suggests the art of the miniaturist painter. These ‘portraits’ of birds, flowers, landmarks and other natural phenomena have the static and studied quality of Japanese prints and owe much to French Impressionism: they sit somewhere between Debussy and Satie, and unfold with gentle, unhurried dignity. Albert Brussee offers a final bonne bouche with his own gentle tribute to Van den Sigtenhorst Meyer.

Respighi’s orchestral works are some of the most popular in the mainstream repertoire. His output of piano music, by contrast, is as good as unknown, and this Toccata Classics series will be the first ever to present it all: original works and transcriptions alike, for solo piano, piano four hands and two pianos. The prentice works on this second volume of solo works reveal a Respighi with roots in the high-Romantic past of Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, but they also show the first signs of his later interest in the Italian pre-Baroque.

Norwegian folksong and -dance constitute the very DNA of the music of Carl Gustav Sparre Olsen (1903–84), on both a large and a small scale – from Draumkvedet, the 1936 oratorio that was his first major success, to the tiny miniatures that form most of his piano music, recorded here in its entirety for the first time. The apparent simplicity of much of this material belies the unassuming sophistication of its construction: many of these pieces, some barely a minute long, seem – to adapt William Blake – to contain the world in a grain of sand.

The Portuguese composer and pianist Óscar da Silva (1870–1958) was one of the major figures in Portuguese and Brazilian musical life in the first half of the twentieth century He left an extensive legacy of compositions for his instrument, cast in a soft and sultry Romanticism somewhere between Chopin and Rachmaninov. All four of the collections recorded here concentrate on delicacy of tone-color, expressing a particularly Portuguese sense of human emotion.

The dignified bearing and quiet wisdom of Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950) gained him the sobriquet "the conscience of Russian music," and those qualities are reflected in the unemphatic strength of his music. His orchestral, chamber and instrumental works are regaining the currency they once enjoyed, but his large corpus of songs, many of them understated masterpieces, has yet to attract systematic attention – a situation that this series hopes to remedy. The pairing here of his late Violin Sonata with his last two song-cycles for soprano and piano mirrors the Moscow concert in 1947 when all three were given their first performances.

REVIEW:

This disc can be recommended just for the vocal works. The late Violin Sonata is a bonus, especially in its final revised version – the work underwent two revisions after its 1947 premiere by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin. Just a few years ago, there were no recordings of the piece.

The 28-page booklet contains very well translated informative notes and full song text translations from Russian into English. This outstanding release is highly recommended. For me, it is one of the finest discs of 2021.

-- MusicWeb International

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, born in Warsaw in 1919, became a close friend of Shostakovich in Moscow, after fleeing eastwards before the invading Nazis in 1939. His style has much in common with Shostakovich’s: fluent contrapuntal skill, a keen feeling for melody, often inflected with Jewish cantilena, and an acute sense of drama which combines a natural narrative manner with an extraordinary ability to create atmosphere. Since his death in 1996, his vast output – which includes 26 symphonies, seven operas and seventeen string quartets – has enjoyed increasing recognition as some of the most individual and compelling music to have been composed in the twentieth century. This recording pairs an early orchestral work, the suite Polish Tunes of 1950, with the last full orchestral symphony he was to complete, dedicated to the memory of those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto.

REVIEW:

It’s truly incredible that works as excellent as these are being recorded for the first time. …[Polish Tunes, Op. 47, No. 2:] there is no shortage of appealing folk-inspired melodies in this fresh and uplifting music. …Symphony No. 21, Op. 152 is titled ‘Kaddish’ referring to the Jewish prayer service for the dead. …Bold and unsettling, almost sinister in character, the Allegro molto section has a swirling, driving momentum. The brass playing is especially striking in writing of a conspicuously martial quality with heavy and relentless percussion. …A fascinating feature that noticeably softens the emotional tension is the inclusion of a wordless soprano at 2:45-7:51 and 10:34-11:06 here performed by Siberian Veronika Bartenyeva. This was my first experience of hearing the Siberian Symphony Orchestra (Omsk Philharmonic) who under the reliable baton of principal conductor Dmitry Vasilyev excel in this wonderful and inexplicably neglected music. The Symphony makes compelling listening with Vasilyev’s unfailing instinct producing assured orchestral playing of striking directness. The engineers provide clear sound with a natural and realistic balance. This important release from Toccata Classics comprising first recordings of Weinberg’s orchestral music has exceptional appeal.”

-- MusicWeb International

Emile Naoumoff, born in Sofia in 1962, was a child prodigy as pianist and composer in his native Bulgaria but was soon taken under the wing of Nadia Boulanger in Paris – ‘the gift of my old age’, she said. Naoumoff himself has tended to record the music of other composers, and so this recital of his piano music has been recorded by Gregory Martin, who has worked with him in various capacities. It presents music from across Naoumoff’s career – from that gifted childhood to a piece inspired by the sight of Notre Dame Cathedral in flames in 2019 – absorbing influences from Slavic folk-dance to Gabriel Fauré, whose ‘grand-student’ he is.

When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she might be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have now written or agreed to write for it – in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This third volume presents eleven more pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear. Under the guidance of Paul Mann, who is coordinating this project as well as conducting it, the young players of the Ukrainian Festival really took this music to their hearts and produced performances of real intensity. Another point of interest: Yodit was from Eritrea, and so in these days when the classical world is worried that it might be appealing largely to a white, middle-class elderly male audience, here is a sequence of new classical works composed for a young black woman from north-east Africa.

Alfred Hitchcock commissioned his film scores from composers who were Hollywood’s master-craftsmen. The concert items prepared from those scores feature a dazzling variety of styles, from Baroque and jazz to dark Romanticism and angular angst, all using the orchestra with breathtaking virtuosity. The conductor John Mauceri, as at home with this repertoire as any other musician, has prepared a number of concert suites from the film scores and some of them receive their first recordings here. This recording was made live in concert in Danish Radio’s new concert hall in Copenhagen. The booklet contains an introductory text by John Mauceri and an extensive, illustrated essay on Hitchcock and his use of film music and work with composers by British film-music historian John Riley.

REVIEWS:

The concert recordings contain some ambient noises and quirks of balance (lots of bass tones). But the pluses are powerful: the orchestra's flair, the vivid colors and audible adrenalin. Even the most dedicated film buff should deepen their appreciation as Hitchkock's composers run the gamut.

– BBC Music Magazine

Hitchcock was the enabler of many hours of orchestral music that are part of the 20th century’s legacy. Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo and Psycho, and Franz Waxman’s for Rear Window, stand out. The Wagnerian Scène d’Amour, from Vertigo, comes over as one of the great slow movements.

– Sunday Times

Lyadov’s handful of orchestral works have become concert favorites, but his choral music is as good as unknown. It falls into three main categories: religious chants, folksong arrangements and original compositions. All three confirm Lyadov’s status as a kind of Fabergé of music: they blend exquisite craftsmanship and delicate beauty. The Academy of Russian Music Chamber Choir is the part of the Academy of Russian Music, founded by Ivan Nikiforchin in 2016, which combines a chamber orchestra and a chamber choir. A distinctive feature of the ensemble is the performances of outstanding works of Russian music of the twentieth and 21st centuries. The basis of the Russian part of its repertoire is the scores for chamber orchestra by Russian composers of different generations – Yuri Abdokov, Revol Bunin, Herman Galynin, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Nikolai Peyko, Gavriil Popov, Dmitry Shostakovich, Georgy Sviridov, Boris Tchaikovsky, Galina Ustvolskaya and Mieczysław Weinberg. A special place in the repertoire is reserved for the string-orchestra transcriptions by Rudolf Barshai of Bach, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The main concert venues in which the Academy of Russian Music performs are the Great Hall, the Small Hall and the Rachmaninov Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, and the Moscow International House of Music. The first Academy of Russian Music recording, with the complete music for strings by Herman Galynin (Toccata Classics tocc 0514), received a nomination in the International Classical Music Awards in 2021.

Until the advent of recordings, the way you got to know the music of the masters was to play them yourself. The expansion of domestic music-making at the beginning of the nineteenth century generated a huge market for arrangements, most of them for piano solo or duet. Mozart was a special favorite, and this programme extends the basic premise by arranging some of those pieces for organ as well as presenting some contemporary arrangements and completions, recorded on an organ of Mozart's own day. Zeno Bianchini was born in Verona and grew up in a family of scientists. His great-grandfather’s brother was the respected doctor Severino Bianchini, whose patients included Giacomo Puccini and the poet Giovanni Pascoli. Zeno played the organ in Verona Cathedral from an early age. Studies in Baroque organ, harpsichord, historic performing practice, musicology, composition, church music and conducting followed in Verona, Pistoia, Padua, Trossingen and Freiburg im Breisgau. He also trained as an organ expert. He worked in Donaueschingen from 2003 to 2009, and then moved to Stockach on Lake Constance, where he is cantor and organist at the Church of St Oswald. The Swiss musician and musicologist Christian Lambour was born into a Breton Huguenot family in The Hague, where he began his studies in historic keyboard instruments, which he continued in Vienna. His recitals have featured premieres of works by Fanny Hensel, Eusebius Mandyczewski, Frank Martin and Sir Hubert Parry. His compositions include the cantata Jerusalem, Triptychon for Edith Stein for flute and organ, Le Tombeau de Jehan Alain for organ, works for piano, a fantasy on the Dutch national anthem ‘Wilhelmus’ for harpsichord and a recent setting of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Von guten Mächten. His album AlmostMozart was released by Koch Schwann in 1991 for the Mozart bicentenary celebrations. He lives in Vienna and on Lake Constance.

Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) is regarded as ‘the father of Ukrainian classical music’ but his music is virtually unknown outside his home country.

As did Bartók later in Hungary, Lysenko went out into the field, listened to what the people were singing and fashioned an individual musical language that brought together the styles of Chopin and Liszt and the essence of Ukrainian folksong.

This CD presents his complete output of music for violin and piano, the main piece being the popular Second Rhapsody on Ukrainian Themes also known as ‘Dumka-Shumka’.

It is complemented by Spring Kaleidoscope, a new work for violin and piano commissioned by the performers on this CD to display the lyrical riches of Lysenko’s vocal writing: it is a transcription for violin and piano by the Ukrainian composer Viktor Kaminsky of ten Lysenko songs.

This CD is launched together with another Toccata Classics CD, Mykola Lysenko – Piano Music: Volume One, also played .by Arthur Greene.

The booklet contains commentary in both English and Ukrainian.

Solomia Soroka, violin, studied in her native Ukraine and resides in the USA. She has recorded CDs of Leone Sinigaglia, Arthur Hartmann and Myroslav Skoryk for Toccata Classics, where one critic praised the ‘elegance and refinement’ of her playing, continuing that ‘the ensemble between her and Arthur Greene, a husband and wife team, is splendid’. Arthur Greene was born in New York and grew up in Sheffield, Mass.; he studied at Yale and Juilliard where he studied with Martin Canin. He now teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The music of William Wordsworth (1908–88) – a great-great-grandson of the poet’s brother Christopher – lies downstream from that of Vaughan Williams and Sibelius; like that of his contemporary Edmund Rubbra, Wordsworth’s music unfolds spontaneously, as a natural process. This third volume of his orchestral works brings two major scores in their first studio recordings. Wordsworth’s Cello Concerto is a work of symphonic proportions, blending angular rough-and-tumble with a sober lyricism in a style that sits somewhere between Shostakovich and Bloch. The Fifth Symphony has an even grander sense of scale, its radiant first movement and the introduction to the confident finale unfolding as calmly and unhurriedly as a change of season; the martial tone of the gruff scherzo, by contrast, is laced through by an impish sense of humour. John Gibbons has conducted most of the major British orchestras. He has been Principal Conductor of Worthing Symphony Orchestra – the professional orchestra of West Sussex – with which he has given many world premieres of neglected works. He studied music at Queens’ College, Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, winning numerous awards as conductor, pianist and accompanist. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, vice chairman of the British Music Society, and choral director at Clifton Cathedral. His own music has been performed in various abbeys and cathedrals as well as on the South Bank, London.

This first extended survey of the piano music of Ernst Krenek (1900–92) continues with a range of works showing his craftsmanship and imagination – and humor. The early Toccata and Chaconne, Op. 13, has its origins in a joke intended to pull the legs of musicologists and music critics, but it develops into a massive contrapuntal essay of astonishing ambit. Krenek’s treatment of Baroque and contemporary dances in the three early suites reveal a fondness for learned whimsy – and that wry dispassion informs even the elegiac and brittle Fifth Sonata, written a quarter-century later in American exile. The closing Sechs Vermessene are kaleidoscopic miniatures with an improvised quality, as if advanced musical modernism were meeting the freest of free jazz.