In Preparation

Vytautas Bacevičius: The Complete Mots for solo piano, solo organ and two pianos

The Lithuanian pianist and composer Vytautas Bacevičius (1905–70) is one of the undiscovered pioneers of twentieth-century music. His series of seven Mots (‘Words’) for keyboard – five for solo piano, one for organ and one for two pianos – were written between 1933 and 1966 and show the evolution of his musical language from the post-Skryabin style of the early works, via the influence of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, to a highly individual modernism, akin to that of two fellow radicals, Varèse and Wolpe.

Release date: 13 February 2012, but digital downloads available through this site.

Hans Gál: Music for Cello

The Vienna-born Hans Gál (1890–1987) settled in Edinburgh after fleeing from the Nazis in 1938 and became a much-loved figure in his adoptive town. But he never lost his Viennese fondness for melody, as these three works demonstrate – the Sonata with piano composed in 1953 and the two works for solo cello in 1982, when he was 92, almost the last music he wrote.

Mihkel Kerem: Violin Sonatas

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. Hardly surprisingly, he has written for his own instrument, including a concerto and these four sonatas – the First an astonishing achievement for a thirteen-year-old and the Second hardly less surprising from a fifteen-year-old composer. Kerem’s style is powerful and direct, reminiscent of Prokofiev in its steely strength and motoric energy.

Ernst Krenek: Music for Chamber Orchestra

These five works for chamber orchestra by Ernst Krenek (1900–91) were written between 1931 and 1979 – both before and long after Krenek abandoned Hitler’s Austria for California. They demonstrate that serial music, in capable hands, does not have to abandon the virtues of more conservative idioms: the emotions embraced here range from translucent lyricism, via powerful dramatic utterance, to laugh-out-loud humour. Much of it is, quite simply, very beautiful.

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.

Riccardo Malipiero: Complete Music for Solo Piano

Brahms by Arrangement, Volume One

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.

Igor Raykhelson: Viola Concerto; Violin Concerto

In the words of his friend the violist and conductor Yuri Bashmet, the composer-pianist Igor Raykhelson – born in Leningrad in 1961 and now resident in New York – ‘possesses a superb mastery of both classical and jazz idioms’. The unashamed Romanticism of Raykhelson’s Violin Concerto (2007) and its emphasis on melody place it downstream from Korngold, and though the Viola Concerto (2005) has its darker moments, its vigorous, jazz-tinged finale has the knock-about good humour of Rodion Shchedrin.

Release date: 13 February 2012, but digital downloads available through this site.

Karel Reiner: Music for Cello

Karel Reiner (1910–79) – a major missing voice in Czech music – suffered under both of twentieth-century Europe’s major tyrannies. As a Jew he was imprisoned by the Nazis, miraculously surviving a series of atrocities: Terezín, Auschwitz, a camp near Dachau and a death march. Then, back in Prague after the War, he was accused of ‘formalism’ by the Communists. This first CD of a series reviving Reiner’s music presents the large-scale Concerto he completed just before his internment in Terezín – and first heard, in this live performance, only in 2010 – and three chamber pieces which evolve though echoes of Janáček and Martinů to the brittle humour of the Stravinskyan Verses, one of his last works.

Release date: 13 February 2012, but digital downloads available through this site.

Gerard Schurmann: Music for Violin and Piano

The Anglo-Dutch composer Gerard Schurmann, born in the East Indies in 1924 and based in the USA since 1981, first made his mark in Britain in the 1940s and ’50s, as a pianist and composer, particularly of chamber music and, later, of film scores. His concert output is intense, passionate, tightly argued and charged with energy, but also infused with lyricism, as these four pieces demonstrate.

Release date: 13 February 2012, but digital downloads available through this site.

Myroslav Skoryk: Music for Violin and Piano

The leading Ukrainian composer of today, Myroslav Skoryk (born in Lwów, now Lviv, in 1938) grew up in Siberia, where his family was deported after the Second World War, and he began to write music under the tutelage of other political prisoners there. He later studied with Kabalevsky in Moscow before settling back in his native city, where he soon became an important teacher and is now a major figure in Ukrainian cultural life. His music is direct and forthright, with echoes of Prokofiev: there are passages of driving energy and power and a keen sense of drama – and Skoryk, too, is not afraid of writing a glorious tune when he wants to.

Georg Philipp Telemann: Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, Volume Four

This is the fourth CD 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.

Release date: 13 February 2012, but digital downloads available through this site.