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The Toccata Classics Blog

The Reintroduction of Scotland’s Piano Music

An inadvertent benefit of the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 was that I had time to do lots of recording. I was able to record… 

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A Violist’s New CD Captures the Romance of Russian Sonatas

Article in the University of Denver Magazine (magazine.du.edu)by Tamara Chapman, 31 January 2022; reproduced with permission Compared with its siblings in the violin family –… 

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Mixing the Classical and the Popular

The urge to compose music arose after I joined a rock group in my teenage years. Although I was later classically trained, I continued to… 

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Not Just Another Piano CD

You may be thinking, ‘Oh not another piano recording’! But I believe that all piano albums are different. I have been writing music for over… 

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Vocal Works That Still Feel Excitingly New

The prolific compositional output of Elisabeth Lutyens includes 129 vocal pieces. The two pieces included on this album were written seventeen years apart: Nativity in… 

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Elisabeth Lutyens’ Complete Organ Music

Elisabeth Lutyens is not a composer usually associated with the organ. For most of her life she inhabited a musical world which was very much… 

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Adopt a Composer — Jürgen Thym and Samuel Adler

One of the most rewarding aspects of my activities as a musicologist has been following the life and works of living composers – be they… 

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Happy Collaborations — Samuel Adler: Music for Chamber Orchestra

Several years ago, through a mutual acquaintance, I met Dongmin Kim, the conductor of the New York Classical Players, and we immediately felt a kinship.… 

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Three Generations of Tcherepnins

Three Generations explores music by three generations of composers from the Tcherepnin family: Ivan, Alexander and Nikolai. Each of the three wrote a wide range… 

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My Relationship With The Piano — The Briefest of Histories

I started making up melodies, harmonies, rhythms and colours on the piano before I could read and write. But my real love affair with the… 

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Songs of Loneliness

Songs of Loneliness was recorded in the autumn of 2020; the oldest music on the disc dates back to 2016. Here is a selection of… 

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A Symphony by Mischa Spoliansky

It may come as a surprise to many that Mischa Spoliansky, the composer of the sly and witty cabaret songs that helped to launch the… 

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Borrowed Time

It is something of a myth that composers tend to die after completing their ninth symphony, based on the relatively few that did so and… 

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  “A Saami Requiem” in Rehearsal

Photographs by Claudius MayWoehl, Woehl-Orgel-Projekte A Saami Requiem A Saami Requiem is an extraordinary meeting-place of musical cultures – western classical, Sámi yoik, Nordic folk-dance, electric rock,… 

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Pál Hermann Recording Sessions

My friend and colleague Clive Greensmith and I were sitting in the audience of a concert, during which our violinist and pianist colleagues were performing… 

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Stravinsky and Me

The longest piece on the new Toccata Classics album of my choral works is A Lenten Cantata. It was premiered in 2017 with organ and… 

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