New Releases

The music of the Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968) is familiar in his home country but sorely neglected abroad.

Lyatoshynsky’s songs are neglected even there: this anthology of his best romantsiy for low voice and piano contains many first recordings.

The songs meld intense Scriabinesque expressionism with elements of Ukrainian folksong in a language that embraces both the lyrical and the dramatic.

His setting of Shelley’s Ozymandias, with its warning of the impermanence of power, was a brave act in the Soviet Union of 1924.

The booklet contains full sung texts, with English translations by Russian-music expert Anthony Phillips, who also provides an extensive introduction to Lyatoshynsky, his songs and his artistic milieu.

Judith Bingham’s music for chorus and organ has been released on CD but this is the first recording of her piano music.

Born in Nottingham in 1952, she has been London-based since 1970 and used to live near Westminster Cathedral, the inspiration for the opening work on the CD, The Moon over Westminster Cathedral.

She spent several years as a member of the BBC Singers, which may help explain the lyricism of her music.

The works on this CD also reveals her strong response to poetry and to place: Limehouse Nocturne was inspired by the Hawksmoor church, St Anne’s, Limehouse, and portrays the gentle movement of the Thames at night.

Byron, Violent Progress is a set of variations portraying the poet’s struggle with his own conscience.

Most of the music on this disc is receiving its first recording.

The rediscovery of the three Sérénades for flute and strings by the Franco-German Romantic Théodore Gouvy (1819–98) – two of them commissioned by the Philharmonic Club of New York – brings a welcome expansion to the repertoire of nineteenth-century chamber music for flute.

Gouvy’s charming melodic language disguises the expert craftsmanship of a composer who, not belonging to any national school, has not had the attention his warm-hearted music deserves.

Gouvy’s music is now being rediscovered for the first time in a century, with a symphonic cycle underway on CPO.

All the music on this CD is receiving its first recording.

Theodor Grigoriu (born in Galaţi, Moldavia, in 1926) is one of the major Romanian composers in the period after Enescu.

His vast output is little known outside his own country, although it includes oratorios, symphonies, cantatas, chamber music, film-scores and much more.

His musical roots reach back to Romanian folk-music and to the modal melodies of ancient Byzantium – as in this large-scale triptych, Byzantium after Byzantium, which consists of a violin concerto, a sonata for solo violin and a sonata for violin and piano.

All three works are performed here by Sherban Lupu, the violinist for whom the music was written.

The music of the Czech-born Viennese composer Egon Kornauth (1891–1959) was once a staple of Austrian concert-halls.

It has largely been forgotten in the half-century since his death.

In this pioneering recording Jonathan Powell uncovers the many strands that fed into Kornauth’s rich and full-blooded soundworld.

The music blends dark, late-Romantic harmony, inventive counterpoint, rhythmic assiduity, a fondness for folk-music and, not least, a straightforward melodic charm.

This is the first recording of any of Kornauth’s piano music.

2013 sees the bicentenary of the births not only of Wagner and Verdi but also of the maverick French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan.

Alkan’s music was little appreciated during his lifetime (1813–83), and in the century which followed, when he was largely lost from sight, but now he is increasingly recognised as one of the most individual personalities in all music.

The five albums he called Recueils de chants – miniature tone-poems which marry Classical constraint to virtuoso Romantic excess – provide an attractive gateway to his freewheeling imagination.

This is the first volume of a two-CD series presenting the first recording of the complete Chants in over twenty years and is accompanied by the first-ever recording of the ‘Introduction and Impromptu’ Une fusée.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812–65) was one of the leading musicians of his day, a friend of Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for Joseph Joachim ‘the greatest violinist I ever heard’.

But the popular encore pieces by which Ernst is remembered today represent only a fraction of his output: this third CD – in a series of seven presenting all his compositions for the first time – shows the full range of his creativity and charm.

The Élégie sur la mort d’un objet chéri is written in his most moving and melancholy vein, and the Airs hongrois variés push the virtuoso violin to its absolute limits.

Between these extremes lie the lyricism of the Pensées fugitives, the inventiveness of his treatment of two Halévy operas and the high spirits of his fantasy on a Strauss waltz.

The first two volumes in this series have been received with glowing critical approval: Vol. 1 earned an ‘Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and in Fanfare Robert Maxham praised Vol. 2 for its ‘exceptional notes by Mark Rowe [and…] stunning performances of works both familiar and unfamiliar by violinist Sherban Lupu and pianist Ian Hobson’.

Like his close friend and colleague Dmitry Shostakovich, Vissarion Shebalin (1902–63) knew a life of both celebrity and hardship: he was another of the composers condemned in the infamous 1948 Party congress in Moscow, and in later life he fought to overcome a series of crippling strokes.

His personality remained undaunted by these tribulations, as his music resolutely proves.

This is the first recording of his First Suite for Orchestra and the first appearance on CD of the Second.

Both Suites were prepared from theatre music and show the lighter side of Shebalin’s symphonic music.

A later CD will present a recording of the Third Suite and some other unrecorded orchestral scores by Shebalin.

This is the first of a series of recordings of Russian and other symphonic repertoire that the Siberian Symphony Orchestra and Dmitry Vasilyev will be recording for Toccata Classics.

Jean Françaix (1912–97) has long enjoyed a reputation as one of the happier composers, his Gallic charm and breezy good humour obscuring the superb craftsmanship of his writing.

Françaix once observed that ‘I live in exile in my own country and am nourished from abroad’. Plus ça change, he then might have thought, with this CD presenting a Hungarian ensemble led by a Canadian conductor on a British label.

The disc presents two first recordings and a rare hearing for one of his more substantial scores.

Françaix having been born in 1912, the CD marks his centenary.

The Estonian violinist Mihkel Kerem (born in Tallinn in 1981) is familiar as a performer in Britain as well as at home.

He is also a prolific composer, with over one hundred works to his credit, three symphonies among them.

The three-movement Third Symphony (2003) and the Lamento for viola and strings (2008–9) lie downstream from Shostakovich and Boris Tishchenko, and were inspired by the idea of the struggle of the individual voice against oppressive ideology.

The String Sextet (2004), cast in a single half-hour span, has its musical starting-point and initial poetic impulse in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, and was intended to reflect a sleepless night before the action of the Dehmel poem that inspired Schoenberg; it also manifests the polyphonic lyricism of Strauss’ Metamorphosen.