Latest Releases

Vytautas Bacevičius: Piano Music, Volume One

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.

Havergal Brian: Orchestral Music, Volume Two

The English composer Havergal Brian (1876–1972) is renowned for his 32 symphonies, 21 of them – written after his 80th birthday – constituting one of the most remarkable Indian summers in the history of music. It is less well known that Brian also composed five operas; since none of them has yet been staged, this CD reveals for the first time some of the remarkably inventive and powerful orchestral pieces hidden within those scores.

Release date: 5 December 2011.

Heino Eller: Complete Piano Music, Volume Two

As both composer and teacher Heino Eller (1887–1970) was one of the founders of the classical tradition in his native Estonia. Yet his copious output for piano – some 200 works –is largely unknown, an omission this series of seven CDs seeks to redress. Volume Two presents compositions from six decades: charming romantic miniatures, virtuoso showpieces, expressionist preludes and quirky folk-pieces. The main item is his Theme and Variations from 1939 – one of his best works for piano, but not published or recorded before now.

Release date: 23 April 2012.

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.

Release date: 23 April 2012.

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.

Release date: 23 April 2012.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Release date: 23 April 2012.

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.

Dmitry Shostakovich: Songs for the Front

During the Siege of Leningrad, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, Shostakovich was famously photographed in a fireman’s outfit on the burning rooftops. But he also made a musical contribution to the defence of the city, arranging a series of songs – operatic arias, classical numbers and popular Soviet hits – for voices, violin and cello. The musicians then climbed into the back of a truck and were driven to the front, where they performed to the soldiers. The cheeky, folky – and defiantly Russian – insouciance of many of the songs, recorded here for the first time, must have brought a ray of hope and humour to the cold and hungry troops.

Release date: 5 December 2011.