Archive for Guest Blog
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…
Recording Francis George Scott’s Piano Music
Two years after I began to record it, the first-ever album of Francis George Scott’s piano music is now available. The programme as it appears…
Reflections on the Life and Work of Friedrich Gernsheim – With Some Help from the Young People of Worms
Ever since, some years ago, I heard the State Philharmonic Orchestra of Rhineland-Palatinate performing a symphony by Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), I have been seeking to…
Some Thoughts on Marcel Mihalovici’s Left-Hand ‘Passacaille’
On 2 October Toccata Classics releases the first-ever album of the piano music of the Romanian-born, Paris-based Marcel Mihalovici (1898–1985), in performances by the Berlin-based…
Prokofiev’s Violin Partnerships
At the beginning of October Toccata Classics will release a new album, by the violinist Yuri Kalnits and pianist Yulia Chaplina, of music by Prokofiev…
Elcock: From One Fifth To Another
Steve Elcock has mastered the fast introduction. A device favoured by Berlioz gets a new lease of life: both Elcock’s Third (2005–10) and this new…