Archive for Guest Blog
My Grandfather Pál Hermann: A Journey of Personal and Musical Discovery
In the film project ‘VISUALS’ Paul van Gastel, grandson of the Hungarian cellist and composer Pál Hermann, charts his personal journey of discovery of his…
Freda Swain: A Composer Unboxed
The composer David Hackbridge Johnson reacts with surprise to the piano music of the unknown Freda Swain (1902–85) – whose music, after her death, spent…
Paul Creston’s “Three Narratives” — Recorded At Last
The release of Paul Creston’s Three Narratives for piano solo on Toccata Classics is the fulfilment of a quest I’ve carried around for more than 50…
Arranging Wagner and the Ensuing Obsession
The release of Wagner by Arrangement, Volume Three (TOCC 0673), is the first part in a personal masterplan of Wagnerianism that has been going on for the…
Irmela Roelcke on Cloches et Carillons
My concert and recording project, Cloches et Carillons, impressed on me how much basic acoustic characteristics have influenced my most recent artistic interests and inclinations.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Too Many Symphonies? – Part One: Rob Keeley
Sometime in the 1950s, when John Barbirolli famously said ‘there are too many symphonies this year, or any year’, he might have been weary after…
Reflections on Recording The Rosner ‘Requiem’
It has given me so much pleasure to read the wonderful reviews of the Rosner Requiem recording, where discerning critics have enthusiastically endorsed the great…