Archive for Guest Blog
Recording my Tone Poems in Liepāja
The first thing I noticed was the trees. Once we were out of Riga airport, they soon crowded up to the edge of the road;…
‘Long Memories’: The Diary of an Unfolding Project for Toccata Press – First Stop: Lithuania
‘Long Memories’ – the original idea for a book of interviews with senior composers came as the result of meeting and working with two very…
Robert Crowe Guest Blog on The Opera Stage
Explore Toccata artist Robert Crowe has penned a guest-blog for the site, The Opera Stage. Read the excerpt below, and continue reading on TheOperaStage.com and…
Unlocking the Secrets of Sacred Music in Late-Eighteenth-Century Rome: Detective Work among Dusty Manuscripts
For better or worse, I have always been highly (some would say provocatively) inquisitive, and not always content to accept, without question, received narratives of…
Discovering Robert Fürstenthal and his ‘Lost Lieder’
It was while I was working as music curator at the Jewish Museum in Vienna that someone told me about Robert Fürstenthal. It must have…
The ‘Yodit’ Pieces Begin to Take on a Life of Their Own — A Report from Orlando Jacinto García
Orlando García is one of the composers who has contributed to Martin Anderson’s ‘Music For My Love’ project of pieces in memory of his partner.…
Recording David Hackbridge Johnson in Liverpool
I’m just back from a thrilling two days in Liverpool conducting the first-ever recording of the music of David Hackbridge Johnson. Indeed, these were not…
The Re-Emergence of Leo Zeitlin
The story of Leo Zeitlin and his music’s re-emergence is so remarkable that it has already been duly reported in several online and printed articles.…
Tadeusz Majerski Remembered: An Interview With Andrzej Nikodemowicz
A December release from Toccata Classics (TOCC0344) presents the first-ever recording of works by the Polish composer Tadeusz Majerski (1888–1963), whose music incorporates elements of…
Exploring Stephen Dodgson’s Chamber Music
It is very exciting for me, as Stephen Dodgson’s widow, to report that Toccata Classics will be releasing a series of recordings of his chamber…
Hans Gál’s Chamber Music for Clarinet : A Joyful and Important Discovery
Read More For us in the Ensemble Burletta, a chamber-music group exploring chamber music for clarinet in various combinations, the music of Hans Gál is…
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…