Wallace, W V: Ye Banks and Braes

Wallace was, from his youth, steeped in Irish and Scottish traditional music. In 1848, five years after his brilliant successes in New York as a virtuoso pianist, he published his first set of arrangements, others following almost to the year of his death. In these ingenious and lovely works, written for the burgeoning domestic market, he avoids sentimentality, concentrating instead on warmth, wit, a touch of self-quotation, and brilliance. Rosemary Tuck and Richard Bonynge are the world’s leading interpreters of Wallace’s music. Volume 1 is available on 8572774.

RTÉ lyric fm is delighted to release a second CD from Una Hunt that is committed to reawakening interest in neglected Irish composers. Fallen Leaves from an Irish Piano Album gathers together for the first time the many strands of successful piano writing by nineteenth-century Irish composers.

Ireland's best known piano composer John Field is represented by one of his famous Nocturnes. Other names on the CD range from early composers like Thomas Augustine Geary and Philip Cogan to Charles Villiers Stanford who was a major force in the renaissance of English music at the end of the century. The Italian pianist Michele Esposito came to Ireland as professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and became the most important educational force in Irish pianism.

The music on Fallen Leaves from an Irish Piano Album is drawn largely from the music collections at the National Library of Ireland and is a joint venture by the library and RTÉ lyric fm.