Archive for Guest Blog
Mixing the Classical and the Popular
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…
Vocal Works That Still Feel Excitingly New
The prolific compositional output of Elisabeth Lutyens includes 129 vocal pieces. The two pieces included on this album were written seventeen years apart: Nativity in…
Elisabeth Lutyens’ Complete Organ Music
Elisabeth Lutyens is not a composer usually associated with the organ. For most of her life she inhabited a musical world which was very much…
Adopt a Composer — Jürgen Thym and Samuel Adler
One of the most rewarding aspects of my activities as a musicologist has been following the life and works of living composers – be they…
Three Generations of Tcherepnins
Three Generations explores music by three generations of composers from the Tcherepnin family: Ivan, Alexander and Nikolai. Each of the three wrote a wide range…
Songs of Loneliness
Songs of Loneliness was recorded in the autumn of 2020; the oldest music on the disc dates back to 2016. Here is a selection of…
Stravinsky and Me
The longest piece on the new Toccata Classics album of my choral works is A Lenten Cantata. It was premiered in 2017 with organ and…
Some Thoughts on Marcel Mihalovici’s Left-Hand ‘Passacaille’
On 2 October Toccata Classics releases the first-ever album of the piano music of the Romanian-born, Paris-based Marcel Mihalovici (1898–1985), in performances by the Berlin-based…
Songs of Love, Sorrow and Satire (And Not Forgetting the Baboon!): Recording Hans Gál’s Music for Voices
One of the proudest, happiest and most surreal moments in my singing career to date has been uttering the final notes of a choral concert…
Remembering Cedric Thorpe Davie
Cedric Thorpe Davie was born into a musical family in London in 1913. His father, Thorpe Davie, was a remarkable Scot who had a successful…
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…
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 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…
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…