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Steve ELCOCK: Orchestral Music, Volume Two

This second volume of orchestral music by the English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957), long since resident in France, brings three powerful works all with their origins in earlier pieces. Incubus examines the terrors of nightmare-riven sleep in a vigorous symphonic essay based on a movement from Elcock’s string quartet Night after Night. The impulse behind Haven, an expansive and surprisingly muscular fantasy, is the Sarabanda theme from Bach’s First Partita for solo violin. And Elcock’s Fifth Symphony takes its cue from the most famous of all Fifth Symphonies, re-examining Beethoven’s structural logic in Elcock’s own musical language to produce a volcanic new Fifth, its charge of wild energy husbanded to maximum dramatic effect.

Siberian Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Lopatin, violin (Track 2)
Grigorii Vever, clarinet (Track 5)
Evgeny Plaksin, horn (Track 5)
Dmitry Vasiliev, conductor

FIRST RECORDINGS

Steve Elcock: Orchestral Music, Volume Four

Steve Elcock – UK-born (in 1957) but long since based in France – was recently hailed by a fellow composer in the American magazine Fanfare as ‘the greatest living symphonist’. All eleven of the symphonies he has composed to date are, in various ways, concerned with the large-scale accumulation and dissipation of tension, rather in the manner of the later Nielsen symphonies – the half-hour span of his Fourth Symphony also reconciling tonality and atonality in its wild and energetic arch. Elcock is fond of bringing popular elements into his music, and a folk-like dance duly animates his Viola Concerto. These major works are book-ended here by two big-hearted orchestral showpieces that could become audience favourites.

Paul Silverthorne, viola
Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, conductor

Steve Elcock: Orchestral Music, Volume Three

This third volume of orchestral music by the Anglo-French composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) features two symphonies and a quasi-concerto. Over the course of its two movements, the Sixth Symphony, which bears the title Tyrants Destroyed, moves from grief to outrage, rising to a grimly triumphant conclusion. The one-movement Seventh – with some of its material derived from the words of a song Elcock heard in a dream – runs a gamut of emotion, from anger to heartbreak, in its impassioned narrative. Manic Dancing, a piano concerto in all but name, inhabits a complex world of driving rhythms, nostalgic flashbacks and hectic dance music – buoyant and good-natured, like Martinů on speed.

Marina Kosterina, piano (Tracks 8-10)
Siberian Symphony Orchestra
Dmitry Vasiliev, conductor

Steve Elcock: Chamber Music, Volume Two: String Quartets

The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) spent years writing music without ever expecting it to be heard: based in rural France, he worked as a translator, composing in his spare time. The emergence of his orchestral and chamber music on Toccata Classics over the past few years has led to his being acclaimed as one of the most important composers at work today. This recording of his four works (to date) for string quartet confirms that judgement: all in single spans, they generate tension and energy in equal measure – animated, in one of them, by a lively sense of humour.

The Tippett Quartet
John Mills and Jeremy Isaac, violins
Lydia Lowndes-Northcott, viola
Božidar Vukotić, cello

Steve Elcock: Chamber Music, Volume One

The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) spent years writing music without ever expecting it to be heard. The works on this first album of his chamber music show contrasting aspects of his style: the Clarinet Sextet and The Shed Dances are immediately appealing in their melodiousness, harmonic language and mischievous sense of humour, whereas the String Trio No. 1, with its stark juxtaposition of contrasts, and the sextet An Outstretched Hand, which treads a fine line between grief and consolation, both offer powerful comment on our troubled 21st century.

The Veles Ensemble
Daniel Shao, flute (Track 11)
Peter Cigleris, clarinet (Tracks 1–3, 5–11)
Yuri Kalnits, violin (Tracks 1–3)
Leon Bosch, double bass (Tracks 1–3)
Catalina Ardelean, piano (Track 11)

Steve Elcock: Orchestral Music, Volume One

The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) has been writing music since his teens, but with virtually no contacts in the musical world, told no one what he was doing – and thus has evolved a compelling symphonic style entirely his own, combining virtuoso orchestral writing with a sense of momentum that has its roots in the Nordic-British tradition of Sibelius, Nielsen, Simpson, Brian and similar figures. His Third Symphony is a vast canvas generating fierce energy and titanic violence, leavened at times by a sardonic sense of humour. Choses renversées par le temps ou la destruction is a dark symphonic triptych where fragile beauty is constantly at threat from the forces of ignorance. The breezy, buoyant Festive Overture, by contrast, has a Waltonian swagger that barrels on with relentless good humour.

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Paul Mann, conductor
James Clark, leader
Richard Casey, harpsichord Tracks 4, 6

Music For My Love, Vol. One

CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF A SPECIAL WOMAN

100+ NEW WORKS FOR STRING ORCHESTRA, VOLUME ONE

When in late 2014 Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a couple of composer friends to write some music to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she could be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously accepted, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have written or agreed to write for it – an undertaking unique in the history of music. This first volume presents the first eleven pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear.

Kodály Philharmonic Orchestra
Paul Mann, conductor

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