Archive for Guest Blog
Toccata e due CD: Rediscovering Early Martinů – Part III
Volume One of the Martinů Early Orchestral Works series brought much satisfaction to all involved. Martin Anderson was delighted by the quality of the new…
Svetik, My Hair and I
My contribution to Svetik – the opening section, ‘Three Sisters’ – deals with Sviatoslav Richter’s relationship to his mother and her sister (Dagmar von Reincke,…
Coming in from the Unknown
English composer Steve Elcock describes his emergence from total obscurity At the age of seventeen, I sat the entrance examination to go to Oxford to…
Sviatoslav Richter: The Pianist and the Person
In the autumn of 1959 I was beginning my final year at Oxford. A friend called David Tempest, like me a piano nut, asked me…
Jaromír Weinberger Re-Discovered
Today (well, I guess it depends on when you read this) – 8 January 2016 – marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of the…
Discovering Henry Cotter Nixon
Given my long involvement with The Havergal Brian Society – I was its Secretary and Newsletter editor from 1976 to 1992 and Chairman from 1994…
Discovering The Music of Leopold Damrosch
One of my favorite things to do is go into libraries, find my way to the orchestral scores and lose myself in there for untold…
Ronald Stevenson: all-too-brief encounters, and an astounding legacy.
I met Ronald only once. I simply came to his music too late in his life — which came to a peaceful end on 28…
A Birthday Present for Ronald Stevenson — by James Reid Baxter
This Friday, 6 March, Ronald Stevenson will celebrate his 87th birthday. In a different world, or even just a different country, one where human life…
Tully Potter on the Tully Potter Collection
Tully Potter is not only the author of the massive Toccata Press biography of Adolf Busch (currently out of print but undergoing preparation for a…
David O’Brien — Dreams Come True: Recording my Grandfather’s Orchestral Music
On Monday, 4 August, one hundred years to the day after the start of the first World War, I found myself flying via Frankfurt on…
Tim Collins Reporting from Lillehammer: Celebrating Leif Solberg’s 100th Birthday
If the name of the small town of Lillehammer in Norway rings any bells for you, it is probably as the site of the 1994…
John Kinsella: A Tale of Two Symphonies
My Symphonies Nos. 5 and 10 were premiered eighteen years and a millennium divide apart, in 1994 and 2012. They were also written in very…
Orlando Jacinto García — A Project Realized: Three Orchestral Works on Toccata Classics
My new Toccata Classics CD is a labor of love and, as with many such projects, came together through the support of a number of…
Paul Mann: Solberg Sessions — A Report from Liepāja
Tucked away on the west coast of Latvia is the town of Liepāja, home to fewer than 100,000 people, but boasting an especially fine orchestra,…
Stefan Koch: Why Richard Stöhr Has Nearly Taken Over My Musical Life
Greetings to fans of Toccata Classics. If you are reading this blog posting, hopefully you are either listening to my new recording of Richard Stöhr’s…