In Preparation

 

Mario Lavista — Complete String Quartets

The influences on the work of Mario Lavista (b. 1943), Mexico’s leading contemporary composer, range from mediaeval and folk music to modernism. His music has a powerful sense of atmosphere and colour – the Second String Quartet, Reflejos de la noche, is played entire on harmonics – and a vigorous rhythmic drive reminiscent of the quartet-writing of Shostakovich.

Joaquín Nin-Culmell — Symphonie des Mystères

Joaquín Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) was a student of Dukas and Falla and his early music reflects his Spanish background. The Symphonie des Mystères (1992-4) for alternating Gregorian chant and organ, is a product of the religious devotion of his old age, the chant sections setting in bold relief the austerely passionate organ commentaries, which have an affinity with Messiaen, as Nin-Culmell's music traces a dramatic arch charting the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Reinhard Oppel — Piano Music, Volume One

Reinhard Oppel (1878-1941) was a central figure in inter-War Germany, as composer, teacher and theoretician. His rich, late-Romantic music encompasses symphonies, chamber and choral music, songs and works for piano. A determined opponent of Hitler, Oppel also suffered posthumously from the Communist regime in East Germany: when his family fled to the West, they hid his music under the garden shed and there it remained, unknown, until the fall of Communism when his son was able to return and retrieve it. This first CD of his heart-warming, Dvořákian piano music begins a series of releases intended to win Oppel's music the audience it deserves.

Leone Sinigaglia — Chamber Music

Leone Sinigaglia, born in Turin in 1868, was a friend of Brahms in Vienna and a student of Dvořák in Prague, applying their classical techniques to the inspiration he found in Italian folksong: his music is marked by strong melodies and a sophisticated use of harmony. Championed by musicians of the standing of Barbirolli, Furtwängler, Kreisler, Stokowski and Toscanini, he was also a famous mountaineer, with two first climbs in the Dolomites to his credit. Sinigaglia, who was Jewish, died in Turin in 1944 as he was being arrested, at the age of 75, by the occupying Nazi forces. His tuneful chamber music bears witness to the happy life that preceded that tragic end.

David Matthews — Complete String Quartets, Volume One

To date David Matthews (b. 1943) has written seven symphonies and eleven string quartets. ‘I have continued’, he explains, ‘along a path similar to that taken by Tippett and Britten: one rooted in the Viennese Classics – Beethoven above all – and also in Mahler, Sibelius and the early twentieth-century modernists. I have always been a tonal composer, attempting to integrate the musical language of the present with the past, and to explore the rich traditional forms.’ This first volume of his complete string quartets presents works written between 1981 and 2001.

Anatoly Lyadov — Complete Piano Music, Volume One

Anatoly Lyadov (1855–1914) is remembered these days chiefly for his Musical Snuffbox, once a favourite encore. Lyadov was indeed a miniaturist – but a far more productive one than his reputation for laziness suggests. His substantial output for piano – never previously recorded in its entirety – reveals a composer with an energetic keyboard manner reminiscent of Schumann, often coloured with a hint of Russian folk-music.

Alfred Schnittke — Discoveries

The output of Alfred Schnittke (1934–98) has been documented in recordings more thoroughly than that of any other Russian composer since Shostakovich. But there are a number of works which have not yet been released on CD, and four of the five here are not only first recordings; they also document Schnittke’s stylistic evolution over more than four decades of creative activity, moving from the relatively traditional Preludes, via the serial Dialogue and the experimental Yellow Sound to the elliptical Variations, one of his last works, written in the teeth of enormous physical difficulty.

Boris Lyatoshynsky — Songs 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.

Salomon Jadassohn — Piano trios

Salomon Jadassohn (1831–1902) is best remembered as a much-revered teacher at the Leipzig Conservatoire: his students included Busoni, Delius and Grieg; he himself studied with Liszt. Jadassohn’s own compositions, roundly forgotten for a hundred years, are only now beginning to attract attention. As these three trios demonstrate, they are central to the German Romantic tradition, with something of Schumann’s melodic inspiration, the spontaneity of Schubert and Mendelssohn’s classicising elegance – fused together with Jadassohn’s own impeccable craftsmanship.