The works of Samuel Adler - born in Mannheim in 1928 but long since one of the leading figures of American music - are both modern and approachable: the blend an edgy angularity with long flights of lyrical melody, and are often informed with both a buoyant charge of energy and an impish sense of humour. This conspectus of his chamber and instrumental music covers almost sixty years of his activity as a composer and thus presents a kind of portrait in sound.

Derek Scott, born in Birmingham in 1950, has an international reputation as a leading 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 subject matter. These six song-cycles - with influences ranging from Vaughan Williams to the Beatles - reveal a master craftsman and natural tunesmith, who manages to unite good humour, unerring technique and deep feeling in music of immediate appeal, setting texts by poets who include Burns, Hardy, Shakespeare, Swift, Wordsworth, Yeats, and the composer himself.

The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it underperformed for a century or more. This third volume presents his very first orchestral work, a strikingly assured Overture in D major, written when he was seventeen, and his last, a sombre, dignified and deeply felt Prelude and Fugue for string, composed on the death of his mother in 1910. Between them comes Mszkowski's First Orchestral Suite, from 1885, a joy from start to finish, with one delightful inspiration following another in a daisy-chain of dance-rhythms, memorable tunes and instrumental colour.

Pal 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 Bartok and Kodaly. 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, and 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 Bartok – and hints at how much was lost with his murder.

Manuel Cardoso (1566-1650) was one of the most important composers of the seventeenth century. But history has not been kind to him: the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that ruined the Convento do Carmo, where he spent most of his wokring life, also resulted in the loss of the only attested image of the composer and a good deal of his music - and much of that which survived has been neglected, his Masses included. This series will shed long-overdue light on these forgotten masterpieces, beginning with two 'parody' Masses, so called because they are based on existing music, in this instance two Palestrina motets.

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 fourth volume of his orchestral works presents four works which are all symphonic studies in essence, each remarkable for its unassertive strength of purpose and its suggestion of a sense of scale beyond its actual dimensions – perhaps in part a reflection of the majesty of the Scottish Highlands where he made his home, and of the quiet resolve of his own character.

REVIEWS:

Is it recommended? Indeed. The playing of the Liepāja Symphony Orchestra is comparable to that on earlier volumes, while John Gibbons directs with his customary ear for detail and care for balance. Hopefully a fifth volume, perhaps including the hitherto unheard Sixth Symphony, will not be long in coming.

-- Arcana.FM

The piano music of the Estonian composer Heino Eller (1887–1970), a total of 206 works, is not only the largest part of his output: it is also the largest body of works in Estonian classical music. But most of these pieces are unknown, even though the best of them are original contributions to the twentieth-century piano repertoire, with Eller’s sensitive lyricism underpinned by gentle humor and an occasional epic tone. This eighth volume brings music from half a century of music, from 1912 to 1960 – mostly miniatures but each of them full of atmosphere and personality.