Archive for Guest Blog
Rediscovering George Antheil — Not Such a ‘Bad Boy’ After All
When Martin Anderson of Toccata Classics first suggested a project of music by the American composer George Antheil, I immediately thought of the typically avant-garde…
Recording “An Outstretched Hand” and Other Chamber Works
At half past four on a Friday morning in May 2018 I set out from my home in south-eastern France to go to England. The…
An Infinity of Traces: Influence Without Anxiety
I often play a kind of party game with friends: each participant will offer a recording of a piece of music by a less-well-known composer,…
Introducing the Waldegrave Ensemble
The Waldegrave Ensemble established itself in 2009 as a flexible ensemble of wind, strings, piano, harp and brass, with a wind quintet at its core.…
All the Keys in Kent
One of the Toccata Classics releases later this summer will be a recording of a sequence of piano preludes commissioned from me in 2014 by…
Robert Saxton’s Piano Music: A Creative Collaboration
Clare Hammond introduces her album of Robert Saxton’s piano music, in preparation for release in March 2018 In August I travelled to SJE Arts in…
Rodney Newton’s Spanish Diary
UPDATE: ALBUM AVAILABLE NOW! Day 1, Sunday, 17 September 2017 This afternoon my old friend Martin Anderson and I set out for Málaga to record…
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…