Tadeusz Majerski: Concerto-Poem and Other Works

The Polish pianist-composer Tadeusz Majerski (1888–1963), who spent his life in Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine), has been entirely lost from sight. But he wrote some of the most interesting Polish music of his day, bringing together late-Romantic sensitivity and the modern outlook of the new age. This first album dedicated to his work presents one of his major scores, the rhapsodic Concerto-Poem for piano and orchestra, as well as two powerful chamber works and a number of representative piano miniatures.

Michał Drewnowski, piano
Royal Scottish National Orchestra (Track 1)
Emil Tabakov, conductor (Track 1)
New Art Chamber Soloists (Tracks 2–11)
Arkadiusz Dobrowolski, cello (Tracks 12-13)

Samuel Adler: Music for Chamber Orchestra

The music of Samuel Adler – born in Mannheim in 1928 but long since one of the leading figures of American music – has its roots in the Neo-Classical clarity of composers like Copland and Hindemith, who were among his teachers. The works on this album arose from a range of impulses: a Neo-Baroque concerto grosso and a tribute to Bach encase a series of tributes to lost individuals and traditions; and two jeux d’esprit – Ives’ tongue-in-cheek Variations on America and Holst’s ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets – both bring jollity in Adler’s idiomatic arrangements for string orchestra.

Sooyun Kim, flute (Tracks 1–4)
Michelle Farah, oboe (Tracks 1–4)
Yoonah Kim, clarinet (Tracks 1–4)
Taylor Smith, bassoon (Tracks 1–4)
Charles Neidich, clarinet (Track 6)
New York Classical Players
Dongmin Kim, leader and conductor

Giovanni Maria Nanino: Music for Four, Five and Eight Voices

Giovanni Maria Nanino (1544–1607) was one of the major Italian composers of late-Renaissance polyphony. A successor of Palestrina as maestro di cappella at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, Nanino produced a modest but expertly crafted body of sacred music, and his madrigals, too, enjoyed widespread popularity. He also became the most influential teacher of composition in late-sixteenth-century Rome. But despite the prestige he enjoyed in his own day, his music has been almost entirely forgotten. This recording – the first to be dedicated to his music – reveals it to have struck a remarkable balance between beauty, passion and dignity, between darkness and light.

Gruppo Vocale Àrsi & Tèsi
Tony Corradini, director

Andrzej Panufnik: Composing Myself

Preface by Simon Callow
Extent: 478 pages
20 colour & 80 b/w illustrations
Hardback

Performing Wagner

USE CODE BB110 at Boydell & Brewer to save £35!

A Singer’s Perspective on the Major Tenor Roles

by Stephen Gould and F. Peter Phillips

Foreword – Katharina Wagner
Introduction – F. Peter Phillips
154 Pages
Hardcover
23.4 x 15.6 cm
25 colour and 22 b/w illustrations

Malcolm Dedman: Piano Music, Volume One

A number of diverse influences have helped shape the musical language of Malcolm Dedman (born in London in 1948 but resident in provincial South Africa since 2007), among them Bartók and Messiaen, his Bahá’í Faith and, more recently, his new South African homeland. Points of contact with other composers can be heard, too, not least Debussy, Ravel, Barber and Ginastera. These piano works embody a wide range of moods, from gentle introspection to energetic, dissonant vigour.

Nancy Lee Harper, piano

MUSIC FOR MY LOVE: Volume Three

Celebrating the Life of Someone Special

100+ New Works for String Orchestra, Volume Three

When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she might be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have written or agreed to write for it – in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This third volume presents eleven more pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear.

(Learn more at musicformylove.org)

Ukrainian Festival Orchestra
Paul Mann

Schubert and the Symphony: A New Perspective

Extent: 317 pages
Composition: Demy octavo ~ Illustrated ~ numerous appendices ~ Bibliography ~ Index
Illustrations: 10 b/w; 101 music exx.

Echoes of Autumn and Light: New Chamber Music from Luxembourg

These five pieces – all written by Luxembourgeois composers within the past decade – draw on the flexible forces of Kammerata Luxembourg to generate a kaleidoscopic range of colours and textures. Though the music is unapologetically modernist in style, it is presented in instrumental combinations remarkable for their delicacy and gentle contours – in the aural equivalent of a walk through autumn woods.

Kammerata Luxembourg
Mariette Lentz, soprano (Track 1)
Markus Brönnimann, flute, alto flute, piccolo (Tracks 1, 3–9, 11–16)
Sébastien Duguet, clarinet, bass clarinet (Tracks 3–16)
Max Mausen, clarinet, bass clarinet (Tracks 1-2)
Leo Halsdorf, horn (Track 1)
Sandrine Cantoreggi, violin (Tracks 1, 10)
Haoxing Liang, violin (Tracks 3 – 9, 11 – 16)
Sophie Urhausen, viola (Track 1)
Nora Braun, cello (Tracks 1, 10)
Ilia Laporev, cello (Tracks 2 – 9, 11 – 16)
Jeannot Sanavia, double bass (Track 1)
Chanel Perdichizzi, harp (Track 2)
Victor Kraus, percussion (Track 10)
Béatrice Rauchs, piano (Tracks 1, 3–16)
Camille Kerger, conductor (Tracks 1, 11–16)

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Dvořák: ‘Songs My Great-Grandfather Taught Me’

Antonín Dvořák has long been known as one of music's supreme melodists, but his songs have not made quite the headway of his best-known works. Now 30 of them are given a new lease of life in transcriptions for violin and viola and piano by his great-grandson, Josef Suk — the viola pieces performed here on Dvořák's own instrument, restored especially for this recording. With Josef Suk joined here by Vladimir Ashkenazy, this disc offers two of the world's greatest musicians playing — together for the first time — some of its most beautiful music, in versions never heard before.

Josef Suk, violin, viola
Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano

Wagner by Arrangement: Volume Three, Operatic Highlights

Necessity being the mother of invention, the English conductor Ben Woodward has arranged the full-symphonic textures of some of Wagner’s operas for eighteen-part chamber orchestra to bring them within range of the forces available to Regents Opera in London – arrangements which should, indeed, put them with the reach of smaller companies everywhere. This new ‘room-sized Wagner’ enhances the sense of scale of the originals with a striking degree of clarity.

Catharine Woodward, soprano: Brünnhilde (Tracks 1,3,4), Isolde (Track 5)
Keel Watson, bass-baritone: Wotan (Track 1)
Philip Modinos, tenor: Siegfried (Tracks 2,3)
Holden Madagame, tenor: Mime (Track 2)
Edwin Kaye, bass: Hagen (Track 4)
Regents Opera Ensemble
Ben Woodward, conductor

Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician – Two Volume Revised Edition Set

Volume 1: 1891–1939
Volume 2: 1939–1952; Appendices 1–12
Includes two CDs: Busch the Performer; Busch the Composer
Extent: 1432 pages
Composition: Royal octavo, 2 vols of 702 & 730 pp.
255 b/w illus.

Vytautas Bacevičius: Orchestral Music

The Lithuanian pianist and composer Vytautas Bacevičius (1905-70) is one of the undiscovered radicals of the twentieth century. The early works on this CD show him finding his voice, as in the First Piano Concerto, with its echoes of Scriabin, and the Poème électrique, cast in the 'machinist’ aesthetic in vogue in the 1920s and ’30s. The programmatic Second Symphony depicts the onset of the Second World War which Bacevičius, desperately anxious about his family in Poland and Lithuania, followed from his exile in the New World. And the late Sixth Symphony and Graphique, which show a kaleidoscopic, pointilliste use of orchestral colour, boiling with violent energy, point to an entirely new musical language.

Aidas Puodžiukas, piano
Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, orchestra
Vytautas Lukočius, conductor
Martynas Staškus, conductor

Special Offer — A Polish Package

Buy a copy of the latest Toccata Press book, Szymanowski’s King Roger: The Opera and its Origins, published in conjunction with the recent new production at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and we’ll throw in a hardback copy of Syzmanowski on Music, worth £35, for a mere £7.50.

Leopold Damrosch: Orchestral Music

The Prussian-born conductor-composer Leopold Damrosch (1832–85) built his reputation through the orchestra he founded in Breslau, emigrating in 1871 to the USA, where he founded a number of important musical institutions in New York and became chief conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. These spirited student performances reveal that the same sense of adventure informed his own music, heard here in its first recordings. At the heart of his only symphony, which sits between Brahms and Wagner, is a dark and powerful funeral march. The disc opens with a jubilant overture which takes an excited lead from Wagner’s Meistersingers and closes with a bonne bouche in the form of Damrosch’s orchestration of a Schubert favourite.

Azusa Pacific University Symphony Orchestra; Christopher Russell, conductor