The Toccata Classics Blog
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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,…
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…
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…
Too Many Symphonies? — Part two: Fridrich Bruk
Having traversed the symphonies of Robert Keeley in Part One of this brief survey (Too Many Symphonies – Part One – posted on 9 March…
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Music for a Prince, Music by a Prince: How Our Recording Came About
As a student I was engaged in postgraduate research at Cambridge on the works of Sir William Walton. At the time, I noticed that one…