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The reputation of Havergal Brian (1876–1972) as a late-blossoming symphonist obscures the fact that he was an early-blossoming composer of choral music for the huge market of amateur choirs thriving in Edwardian England. His choral songs range from simple unison settings for children’s or women’s voices to harmonically complex essays intended to tax the ability of groups taking part in the choral competitions once popular in many parts of Britain.
Joyful Company of Singers
Peter Broadbent, conductor
Finchley Children’s Music Group
Grace Rossiter, conductor
The Latvian composer Jānis Ķepītis (1908–89) has a fairly low profile even in his home country, never mind beyond its borders. His output was nonetheless substantial, with no fewer than six symphonies to his name, ten concertos, a number of large-scale choral-orchestral pieces, countless songs and choruses and a voluminous body of chamber music – almost all of it unknown. Ķepītis was himself a gifted pianist, and his hundred or so compositions for piano show a predilection for the miniature. The works here, most of them discovered among his manuscripts, inhabit a world downstream from Skryabin and Rachmaninov, with a gentle hint of Debussy, an occasional wisp of Latvian folk-music,
and, here and there, just a hint of jazz.
Nora Lūse, piano
Jānis Ķepītis, piano (Track 30, rec. 1935)
This fifth instalment of the recent symphonic output of Fridrich Bruk (born in Ukraine in 1937 but a Finnish resident since 1974) brings two large canvases inspired by painters: Symphony No. 13 (2014) by the revolutionary Polish-Ukrainian Soviet artist Kazimir Malevich, and No. 14 (2015) by Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. Bruk may seem to write in a kind of stream of consciousness, but his works are subtly bound together through a network of motifs and details of scoring. Even so, the orchestral writing in both pieces is wildly inventive, a kaleidoscope of colour and counterpoint, sitting somewhere between Villa-Lobos and Pettersson in its profligate abundance, with hints here and there of Prokofiev and Szymanowski.
Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra
Imantis Resnis, conductor
Letters from Lony tells the story of Leonie (‘Lony’) Rabl in her own words. A German-Jewish exile from Nazism, she ran the Café de Paris in Amsterdam, writing when she could to her daughter and family, safe in England; two further letters survive from after her deportation, on the journey that took her via Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Ronald Corp sets Lony’s letters as accompanied arioso, all the more moving for its understatement.
Sarah Pring, mezzo-soprano
Chilingirian Quartet
Levon Chilingirian, violin
Ronald Birks, violin
Susie Mészáros, viola
Stephen Orton, cello
Andrew Brownell, piano
News has come through of the death this morning, 23 February 2014, of Alice Herz-Sommer, at the age of 110. Alice had become an icon,…
The death of Per Nørgård on 28 May 2025, at a grand old 92, sent me to my ‘article bank’, to look over my writings…
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…
A new Toccata Classics release restores to circulation the music of a composer who was both a cutting-edge modernist and an enthusiast for Romantic figures…
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.…
The third volume of Ronald Stevenson’s piano music (TOCC 0403, released on 1 February) has been probably the most interesting album of his music I’ve…
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,…
Music: A Connected Art/Die Illusion der absoluten Musik: A Festschrift for Jürgen Thym on his 80th BirthdayVerlag Valentin Koerner, Baden-Baden, 2023Reviewed by Niall Hoskin Jürgen Thym…
The narrative seems to have all the ingredients of a tragic, if not epic, film. The young genius, his potential cruelly crushed by an evil…
The urge to compose music arose after I joined a rock group in my teenage years. Although I was later classically trained, I continued to…
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…
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;…
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