In Preparation

Judith Bingham: Piano Music

Judith Bingham (born in Nottingham in 1952 and London-based since 1970) spent several years as a member of the BBC Singers, which may help explain the lyricism of her music. But the works on this CD also reveals her strong response to poetry and to place, a keen instinct for drama, an ear for keyboard colour and a Busonian sense of space and atmosphere.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Petr Eben: Chamber Music for Oboe

The Czech composer Petr Eben was best known during his lifetime (1929–2007) as one of the world’s finest concert organists. But the Velvet Revolution of 1989 led to the gradual discovery of his music by international audiences and he is now taking his place as one of the major figures in Czech music in the generation after Martinů. This first complete recording of his chamber music for oboe shows how he managed to bring Gregorian chant and Renaissance and Baroque procedures into a feisty and individual modern style.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Luis Carlos Figueroa: Orchestral and Chamber Music

Luis Carlos Figueroa, born in 1923, is one of the senior figures in Colombian music, much esteemed as composer, pianist and teacher. His works marry spontaneous lyrical charm – perhaps with a French twist from his student days in Paris – with vibrant South American folk influences, thus siting him downstream from Canteloube and Villa-Lobos. His 1986 Piano Concerto, for example, combines rhythms from the Caribbean and the Valle del Cauca around his hometown of Medellin with classical forms and structures, creating a work full of passion and energy. The String Quartet is a first recording; the other works have not been released outside Colombia before.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Théodore Gouvy: Sérénades for Flute and Strings

The rediscovery of the three Sérénades for flute and strings by the Franco-German Romantic Théodore Gouvy (1819–98) – two of them commissioned by the Philharmonic Club of New York – brings a welcome expansion to the repertoire of nineteenth-century chamber music for flute. Gouvy’s charming melodic language disguises the expert craftsmanship of a composer who, not belonging to any national school, has not had the attention his warm-hearted music deserves.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Jeronimas Kačinskas: Chamber and Instrumental Music

The Lithuanian composer Jeronimas Kačinskas (1907–2005) is one of the lost radicals of twentieth-century music. He abandoned traditional syntax in favour of an atonal athematicism, whereby the music is in constant evolution, with freely pulsing rhythms and melodic lines that branch forward like tendrils. His lyrical but tightly woven Nonet was well received in the 1930s, but when Kačinskas fled Lithuania from the approaching Russians in 1944 he had to abandon almost all his scores. Only with the collapse of the Soviet empire could the work be reconstructed – and the composer return home in triumph.

Mihkel Kerem: Orchestral and Chamber Music

The Estonian violinist Mihkel Kerem (born in Tallinn in 1981) is familiar as a performer in Britain as well as at home; he is also a prolific composer, with over one hundred works to his credit,  three symphonies among them. The three-movement Third (2003) and the Lamento for viola and strings (2008–9) lie downstream from Shostakovich and Boris Tishchenko, whereas the String Sextet (2004), cast in a single half-hour span, has its musical starting-point and initial poetic impulse in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht but also manifests the polyphonic lyricism of Strauss’ Metamorphosen. All three works are concerned with the expression of human emotions in music, in the Third Symphony and Lamento with the struggle of the individual voice against oppressive ideology.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Oleg Kormanitsky: Chamber and Instrumental Music

In his short life the Moscow-born Oleg Komarnitsky (1946–98) produced music in a wide variety of genres – orchestral, choral, chamber, instrumental and more, not least works for children – but almost none of it has been recorded before; it wasn’t even heard outside Russia before 1996. Komarnitsky’s music is accessible and lyrical, with the Slavic melancholy which colours the string works here (apparently all that survives of his chamber music) balanced by the buoyant and innocent humour of his piano music, with its echoes of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Gustavo Leone: String Quartets

The music of Gustavo Leone – born in Buenos Aires in 1956 and now a professor of music at Loyola University in Chicago – combines a strong sense of atmosphere with a feeling for drama, its basic lyricism coloured with echoes of folk-music and the Baroque and animated by outbreaks of dancing energy.

Boris Mykolayovych Lyatoshynsky: Romances for Low Voice and Piano

The Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) studied with Glière at the Kiev Conservatory, where he remained as a much-loved teacher for the rest of his life. Lyatoshynsky’s songs – a neglected part of his output – meld intense Scriabinesque expressionism with elements of Ukrainian folksong in a language that embraces both the lyrical and the dramatic. His setting of Shelley’s Ozymandias, with its warning of the impermanence of power, was a brave act in the Soviet Union of 1924.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

David Matthews: Music for Solo Violin, Volume One

David Matthews’ Fifteen Fugues for solo violin, composed over four years between 1998 and 2002, not only constitute what is probably the largest set of violin fugues by a living composer; they also form an extended essay in musical portraiture, with each fugue ‘depicting’ its dedicatee. Like the Three Studies (1985) and Winter Journey (1982–83), a tone-poem for solo violin inspired by Schubert’s Winterreise, they pose extraordinary technical challenges to the performer.

Ernst Mielck: Orchestral and Choral Works

The early death of the Finnish composer Ernst Mielck, in October 1899, two days before his 22nd birthday, robbed music of an extraordinarily gifted musician – he was also a fine pianist – and perhaps one of the major voices of the next generation: the rapid evolution in his language in the three years covered by this CD is striking. The two overtures and cantatas make clear that he was already a gifted composer in the post-Schumann Romantic tradition, and the Finnish Suite written in the last year of his life brings a striking simplification of his textures and what seems to have been a nascent nationalism.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Leo Ornstein: Piano Music, Volume Two

The Russian-born American pianist-composer Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) lived long enough – an astonishing 109 years – to see his music both fall into and re-emerge from obscurity. With his earliest surviving work dating from around 1905 and his last from 1990, Ornstein’s music naturally embraces a range of styles, extending on this second CD of his piano music from the Rachmaninov-like Suite Russe (1914) to the brittle but urgent Impressionism of A Morning in the Woods (1971). The meat of this disc is the extraordinary sequence of seventeen Waltzes Ornstein composed, largely in the 1960s and ’70s, which vary from the sexily languorous to the boldly tempestuous, requiring the fearless virtuosity that Arsentiy Kharitonov brings to them here.

Nikolai Peyko: Complete Piano Music, Volume One

The Russian composer Nikolai Peyko (1916–95) studied with Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatoire, where he later became Shostakovich’s teaching assistant and then an important teacher in his own right. Peyko’s piano music shares Shostakovich’s fondness for irony and Prokofiev’s for driving march-rhythms and playful good humour and, as with so many Russian composers, the sound of bells can often be heard. Each of the two CDs in this complete recording of his piano music ends with one of Peyko’s two works for two pianos – the first time that any of this music has been heard in its entirety.

Jean-Philippe Rameau: The Complete Keyboard Music, Volume Three

Rameau was one of the great composers for the keyboard. But because pianists have not adopted his harpsichord music as they have that of the other great names of the Baroque – Bach, Handel and Scarlatti – his stature as one of the world’s major keyboard composers is not as fully acknowledged. This series of three CDs aims to underline that claim by presenting all his keyboard music on the piano: the familiar suites, a number of discoveries and arrangements by his contemporaries.

Anton Reicha: Complete String Quartets, Volume One

The Czech-born composer Anton Reicha (1770–1836) was an exact contemporary of Beethoven – and his close friend from their mid-teens. The music of each man shows an awareness of what the other was doing: they showed each other their compositions-in-progress. But although Reicha was closely associated with one of the best-known names in western culture, his own music has been grievously neglected: only his woodwind quintets have achieved any currency. Of his vast cycle of almost forty string quartets just one has been recorded before – an omission this ambitious project intends to put right, thereby revealing one of the most inventive and engaging spirits in classical music.

Release date: 3 June 2013, but digital downloads available through this site.

Michael Alec Rose: Chamber and Solo Works for Strings and Horn

In 2004 the American composer Michael Alec Rose (born in 1959 in Philadelphia) met the English violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved. That meeting sparked off a productive friendship: Rose has since written a number of works for Sheppard Skærved and his musician colleagues, pieces marked by striking emotional directness, balancing warm lyricism and mordant wit.

Matthew Taylor: Symphony No. 2, Viola Concerto

Matthew Taylor’s sense of musical architecture extends the symphonic tradition of Sibelius and Nielsen into the modern age, also acknowledging the symphonism of Robert Simpson, an important influence on Taylor’s style. The Second Symphony, first drafted when Taylor was only 27, responds to the challenge with a mighty explosion of energy, in a work his fellow-composer Robin Holloway described as ‘exceedingly powerful – tough, cogent, persuasive, compelling’. The more inward, reflective Viola Concerto pays homage in spirit, though not in style, to Sibelius’ Humoresker for violin and orchestra and Schumann’s Humoreske for piano.

Sándor Veress: Complete Music for String Quartet

Sándor Veress (1907–99) was born in Kolosvár, then in Hungary (it is now Cluj-Napoca in Romania), but spent the last half-century of his life in Switzerland as an exile from Communism. In the 1930s he worked as Bartók’s research assistant in his work on Hungarian folksong, with audible results in the two early string quartets. By the time of the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra three decades later, Veress had developed a lean and muscular style, incorporating elements of modernism but retaining a powerful sense of onward momentum, combined in an original voice which speaks not from the head but from the heart.