Music: Danse Macabre
Composer: Gregory Rose
Artists: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Chamber Ensemble; Gregory Rose
Album: Gregory Rose: Danse Macabre
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC0284
Street Date: September 2015

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The “Danse macabre” – the idea that Death comes for everyone regardless of status or importance – has fascinated musicians for centuries. In 2011, inspired by a vast sixteenth-century painting by Bernd Notke in the Niguliste, St Michael’s Church in Tallinn, the English composer Gregory Rose (b. 1948) set the mediaeval German texts which sit below each panel, turning Notke’s terrifying vision into a bleak but grimly humorous ritual.

Gregory Rose: Danse Macabre - II. Chorus 1 Requiem Aeternam

Music: Serenade for Clarinet, Violin and Cello, Op. 93: III Intermezzo
Composer: Hans Gál
Album: Hans Gál: Chamber Music for Clarinet
Artists: Ensemble Burletta; Katalin Kertész, violin; Shelley Levy, clarinet; 
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC0377
Available October 2016

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Like Brahms and Reger, Hans Gál (1890–1987) expressed some of his last musical thoughts in the form of a Clarinet Quintet, this one written when its composer was 87 years old. But the earlier works here – the Serenade written in Vienna between Gál’s expulsion from Nazi Germany and his flight after the Anschluss, and the Trio, composed in his new home of Edinburgh – reveal that its elegiac, autumnal lyricism was his natural mode of expression. In these three scores, indeed, he produced some of the loveliest music in the clarinet repertoire.

HANS GÁL: Chamber Music for Clarinet

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Hans Gál: Serenade for Clarinet, Violin and Cello, Op. 93: III Intermezzo

Steve Elcock: Song for Yodit, Op. 23
Album: Music For My Love, Celebrating the Life of a Special Woman, 100+ New Works for String Orchestra, Volume One
Artists: Kodály Philharmonic Orchestra, Paul Mann, conductor
https://musicformylove.org
Toccata Classics TOCC0333
Street Date: November 2016

Full Album Download Available When You Support The Project at https://musicformylove.org/donate/

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.

Music For My Love: Celebrating The Life Of A Special Woman, Volume One

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Steve Elcock: Song for Yodit, Op. 23

Music: Incubus, Op. 28
Composer: Steve Elcock
Artists: Dmitry Vasiliev, conductor; Siberian Symphony Orchestra
Album: Steve Elcock: Orchestral Music, Vol. 2 (TOCC0445)
Label: Toccata Classics
SKU/UPC/EAN: 5060113444455
https://toccataclassics.com

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.

Steve Elcock: Orchestral Music: Volume Two

Incubus, Op. 28

Elcock: Incubus, Op. 28

Music: My Flowering Staff: XXIIb. O angry idle voice
Composer: Alexander Tcherepnin
Artists: Inna Dukach (soprano); Tatyana Kebuladze (piano)
Album: Alexander Tcherepnin: My Flowering Staff (TOCC 0537)
Label: Toccata Classics
SKU/UPC/EAN: 5060113445377
https://toccataclassics.com

In 1925–26 the French publisher Heugel brought out three volumes of 24 songs by the young Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin (1899–1977), all setting poems by the ‘Acmeist’ Russian poet, Sergei Gorodetsky (1884–1967) – Tcherepnin’s Opp. 15, 16 and 17. Not until 2014, when Tatyana Kebuladze, the pianist on this recording, examined the composer’s manuscript in the archives of the Sacher Foundation in Basel was it realised that those three recueils were the tips of a much larger iceberg: a cycle of 35 settings of the 37 poems in Gorodetsky’s collection My Flowering Staff, plus an anonymous epilogue – one of the most extensive song-cycles in musical history. The songs themselves are audibly in the tradition of Tchaikovsky and other such Romantic Russian composers, but with a degree of psychological insight conveyed through the harmonic piquancy typical of the new century.

Alexander Tcherepnin: My Flowering Staff

My Flowering Staff: XXIIb O angry idle voice

Tcherepnin: My Flowering Staff: XXIIb. O angry idle voice

Music: Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 1 in D minor, Op. 16: II Scherzo: Allegro grazioso
Composer: Agnes Zimmermann
Artists: Mathilde Milwidsky (violin); Sam Haywood (piano)
Album: Agnes Zimmermann: The Violin Sonatas (TOCC 0541)
Label: Toccata Classics
SKU/UPC/EAN: 5060113445414
https://toccataclassics.com

Born in Cologne, Agnes Zimmermann (1847–1925) settled in London as a child. She made her concert debut in 1863, playing the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, and was soon celebrated as one of Europe’s more important pianists, her partners in chamber music including Clara Schumann, Joseph Joachim, Alfredo Piatti and Wilma Neruda, Lady Hallé. She enjoyed a reputation also as teacher, music editor and composer. At the centre of her modest output of compositions are three substantial violin sonatas. Dramatic and lyrical by turn, and always beautifully crafted, they lie somewhere between Mendelssohn and Brahms, but demonstrate an impressively personal musical voice.

Agnes Zimmermann: The Violin Sonatas

Agnes Zimmerman: Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 1 in D minor, Op. 16 - II Scherzo: Allegro grazioso

Music: Auden Variations, Op. 136 (1977) - Variation XIII: Risoluto
Composer: Vincent Persichetti
Artists: Tom Winpenny, organ of St Albans Cathedral
Album: Vincent Persichetti: Organ Music (TOCC 0549)
Label: Toccata Classics
SKU/UPC/EAN: 5060113445490
https://toccataclassics.com

The larger part of the organ music of the American composer Vincent Persichetti (1915–87) was composed towards the end of his life, with some of those pieces receiving their first recordings here. Several are based on hymn tunes, which can often be heard in the background – re-emerging in glorious affirmation in the Auden Variations. On occasion the language suggests a kaleidoscopic admixture of Hindemith and Messiaen, bristling with edgy flashes of colour; and Do not go gentle, an essay for pedals alone after the Dylan Thomas poem, is a statement of austere power. What these highly contrasted works have in common is complete textural clarity: Persichetti had been playing the organ since boyhood, and his writing for the instrument is that of a master.

Vincent Persichetti: Organ Music

Variation XIII: Risoluto

Persichetti: Auden Variations, Op. 136 (1977) - Variation XIII: Risoluto

Music: The Gay Typewriters: Operatic Farce in Two Acts
Composer: Henry Cotter Nixon
Artists: Ferenc Nagy (euphonium); Kodály Philharmonic Orchestra; Paul Mann (conductor)
Album: Henry Cotter Nixon: Orchestral Music, Volume Three (TOCC 0374)
Label: Toccata Classics
Learn more and order: https://toccataclassics.com/product/henry-cotter-nixon-orchestral-music-volume-three/

The Gay Typewriters: Operatic Farce in Two Acts - Prelude

Music: Symphony No. 2 - I. Allegro molto
Composer: Rob Keeley
Artists: Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra; Paul Mann (conductor)
Album: Rob Keeley: Orchestral Music (TOCC 0462)
Label: Toccata Classics
Learn more and order: https://toccataclassics.com/product/rob-keeley-orchestral-music/

Keeley: Symphony No. 2 - I. Allegro molto

Music: Twelve Studies, Op. 9 - No. 9 Vivace e molto leggiero
Composer: Frederick Septimus Kelly
Artist: Alex Wilson, piano
Album: Frederick Septimus Kelly: Piano Music (TOCC 0524)
Label: Toccata Classics
Learn more and order: https://toccataclassics.com/product/frederick-septimus-kelly-piano-music/

Kelly: Twelve Studies, Op. 9 - No. 9 Vivace e molto leggiero

Music: Symphony No. 6 - III. Allegro
Composer: Emil Tabakov
Artists: Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra; Emil Tabakov (conductor)
Album: Emil Tabakov: Complete Symphonies, Volume Five (TOCC 0562)
Label: Toccata Classics
Learn more and order: https://toccataclassics.com/product/emil-tabakov-complete-symphonies-volume-five/

Emil Tabakov: Symphony No. 6 - III. Allegro

Toccata Classics is a label dedicated to producing recordings of the huge amount of top-notch classical music that the concert halls and major record companies are ignoring.  We make a point of seeking out interesting composers from less familiar musical cultures and from all periods, in the Nordic and Baltic countries, in central and eastern Europe, Russia and further afield.

Toccata Classics was launched in 2005 to bring you these forgotten gems. We now have around 100 CDs in the catalogue with, in the pipeline, recordings of music by Alkan, Alnæs, Ashton, Adolf Busch, Enescu, Ernst, Farwell, von Hannenheim, Glanville-Hicks, Grigoriu, Kerem, Kornauth, León, Lyatoshynsky, David Matthews, Oppel, Buxton Orr, Peyko, Rameau, Ramey, Reicha, Röntgen, Sekles, Shebalin, Tartini, Matthew Taylor, Telemann, Vladigerov, Wagner, Weinberg, Woyrsch and many more.

Gregory Rose: Danse Macabre - II. Chorus 1 Requiem Aeternam

Toccata Classics

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