Ottorino Respighi: L’Opera Per Pianoforte Solo

di Potito Pedarra Scrive Lorenzo Arruga presentando alcune “liriche più famose [di Respighi]: una volta le ho persino accompagnate in un piccolo concerto, accettando a… 

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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… 

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Gary Brain Remembered

It has not been a good week. On Friday Yodit, my beloved fiancée, partner of the past seven years and mother of our five-year-old Alex,… 

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Where are the Women Composers?

Women Composers Bundle Time for a little controversy on this blog – but that’s not my aim, which is to try to understand why, when… 

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Robert Fürstenthal: Complete Choral Music, Volume One

Like many Austrian Jews, Robert Fürstenthal (1920–2016) fled to the USA after the German invasion of his country in 1938. Music then became a link to his homeland: ‘When I compose, I am back in Vienna’. As an amateur composer, Fürstenthal preferred to work on a small scale, and his output of songs and chamber music is considerable. But he also wrote two sizable works for chamber choir, the first of which, in this series of two albums, is bookended by piano sonatas – all three works revealing that the tradition of Schubert and Brahms was alive in the California sun.

Ian Buckle, piano (Tracks 1–4, 16)
Richard Casey, piano (Tracks 5–10, 12–16)
Philippa Hyde, soprano (Tracks 6, 8, 12, 14)
Emma Roberts, contralto (Tracks 6, 7. 9, 12–15)
Rory Carver, tenor (Tracks 5–7, 10, 12, 14, 15)
Felix Kemp, bass (Tracks 5–7, 14)
Borealis (Tracks 5, 6, 8, 10, 13–15)
Skipton Camerata (Tracks 5–8, 10–15)
Stephen Muir, conductor (Tracks 5–15)

Peggy Glanville-Hicks: Sappho

Sappho, the last grand opera of Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-90), was written in her stone cottage on Mykonos in 1963. Never heard before this recording, Sappho reflects Glanville-Hicks' fascination with the orient and folk music, encapturing the colours of ancient Greece, with a heroic brass fanfare and epic writing for chorus, haunting woodwind solos and shimmering percussion evoking the stillness of crystal island waters. Deborah Polaski, who creates the role of the disenchanted Sappho, describes it as 'the kind of music that singers want to sing'. The libretto, based on Lawrence Durrell's verse-play, incorporates fragments of Sappho's own verse.

Deborah Polaski, soprano: Sappho
Martin Homrich, tenor: Phaon
Scott MacAllister, tenor: Pittakos
Roman Trekel, baritone: Diomedes
Wolfgang Koch, bass-baritone: Minos
Sir John Tomlinson, bass: Kreon
Jacquelyn Wagner, soprano: Chloe/Priestess
Bettina Jensen, soprano: Joy
Maria Markina, mezzo soprano: Doris
Laurence Meikle, baritone Alexandrian
Coro Gulbenkian, choir
Orquestra Gulbenkian, orchestra
Jennifer Condon, conductor

Double Disc!

Women Composers Bundle

Included in this bundle:

• Pauline Viardot: Songs
• Sadie Harrison: Solos and Duos for Strings and Piano
• Amy Woodforde-Finden: The Oriental Song-Cycles
• Judith Bingham: Piano Music
• Peggy Glanville-Hickes: Sappho
• Ester Mägi: Orchestral Music

Richard Flury: A Florentine Tragedy: Opera in One Act

The Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896–1967) felt the fascination for A Florentine Tragedy, Oscar Wilde’s drama of love and violence in Renaissance Italy, that also attracted his near-contemporary Alexander Zemlinsky: they set the same libretto. Flury responded to the text with this dark and swirling one-act verismo opera, sizzling with sexual tension, the vocal lines of the three characters unfolding over an orchestral texture remarkable for its plasticity and kaleidoscopic colour. It is preceded here by a dignified but impassioned operatic scena setting Grillparzer’s dramatic treatment of the suicide of the Greek poetess Sappho.

Julia Sophie Wagner (soprano), Tracks 1-3, 5-11
Long Long (tenor), Tracks 2-11
Daniel Ochoa (baritone), Tracks 2-11
Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra
Paul Mann (conductor)