Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst: Complete Music, Volume Four

Purchase: http://bit.ly/Hqufvw

Catalogue Number: TOCC0189
EAN: 5060113441898

Violin Concerto in F sharp minor, Op. 23
Violin Concertino in D major, Op. 12
String Quartet in B flat major, Op. 26

Sherban Lupu, violin
Ciompi String Quartet, string quartet
Sinfonia da Camera, orchestra
Ian Hobson, conductor

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 fourth CD – in a series of seven presenting all his compositions for the first time – contains some of his most important compositions: an early Concertino with a melancholy slow movement and charming waltz finale; the fiendishly difficult Concerto that had a deep influence not only on Liszt’s Piano Sonata but also the Brahms and Sibelius violin concertos; and the late String Quartet, with echoes of Beethoven and Mendelssohn and an inwardness, charm and energy all of its own.

Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst: Complete Music Volume Four

Track: Sonata No. 5 for Violin and Piano, Op. 53 — III. Allegro moderato
Composer: Mieczysław Weinberg
Artist: Yuri Kalnits, violin; Michael Csányi-Wills, piano;
Album: Weinberg: Complete Works for Violin
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC 0026

FIRST COMPLETE RECORDING

Purchase: http://bit.ly/18En6lp

Mieczysław Weinberg, born in Warsaw in 1919, became a close friend of Shostakovich in Moscow, after fleeing eastwards before the invading Nazis in 1939. His style has much in common with Shostakovich, as these four violin works show: fluent contrapuntal skill, a keen feeling for melody, often inflected with Jewish cantilena, and an acute sense of drama which combines a natural narrative manner with an extraordinary ability to create atmosphere, often from only a handful of notes. Since his death in 1996, his music has increasingly been recognised as some of the finest by any twentieth-century composer.

Weinberg: Complete Violin Sonatas, Vol. 2: Sonata No. 5 for Violin and Piano — III. Allegro moderato

Music: Sonata for Piano — II Largo
Composer: André Tchaikowsky
Artist: Nico de Villiers
Album: André Tchaikowsky: Music for Piano, Volume One

More information: http://bit.ly/1dtEaO7

Although André Tchaikowsky (1935–82), Polish-born but based in Britain, was one of the finest pianists of his era, his true calling was as a composer, and this first conspectus of his piano music, features the first recording of his powerful Piano Concerto (1973–75), the epigrammatic Inventions he dedicated to a series of friends, his only mature Piano Sonata and two dances for piano from an incomplete set of six – evidence of the magnitude of the loss from his early death from cancer, aged only 46.

ToccataClassics.com

André Tchaikowsky: Music for Piano, Vol. 1 — Sonata For Piano: II. Largo

Music: Nocturne in B major (1915)
Composer: Heino Eller
Artist: Sten Lassmann, piano
Album: Eller: Complete Piano Music, Volume Five
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC 0225

Purchase: http://bit.ly/1kXEU1A

This fifth volume in Sten Lassmann’s complete survey of the piano music of the Estonian composer Heino Eller (1887–1970) contains two works of central importance: the Preludes, Book II (1920), are Eller’s highest achievement in a modernist-expressionist style, and the Bartókian 13 Pieces on Estonian Motifs (1940–41) mark his turn to the folk-like style favoured in the Soviet period. They are joined by a group of attractive, mostly early, miniatures and a prentice set of variations in the Romantic, virtuoso tradition.

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Heino Eller: Nocturne in B major

Music: Pieces de Clavecin, 2nd Livre: 6e Ordre. V Les Barricades Mistérieuses
François COUPERIN (France, 1668–1733)
Les Nations – Sonates, et Suites de Symphonies en Trio
and Other Pieces for Two Harpsichords,
Volume One
Jochewed Schwarz and Emer Buckley, harpsichords
First recording in this version
TOCC 0203
Street Date: July 8, 2014

François Couperin published two collections of chamber music – the Concerts Royaux in 1722 and Les Nations in 1726 – in what today would be called open scoring, so that they could be performed by whatever instruments were to hand. But he confessed in the preface to a later publication that he himself preferred to perform them on two harpsichords, although that suggestion had to wait for this series of two CDs to be taken up in a recording. Here Les Nations and movements from the Concerts Royaux are presented with a number of his Pièces de clavecin, also in rarely heard realisations for two harpsichords.

Couperin: Harpsichord Music, Vol. 1: Les Barricades Mistérieuses

Music: Excerpt from “Vertigo”
Composer: Bernard Hermann
Artists: Danish National Symphony Orchestra; Danish National Concert Choir; Klaudia Kidon, soprano; John Mauceri, conductor
Album: Music for Alfred Hitchcock
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC 0241
Street Date: August 12, 2014

Buy on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KZKWQQ6

Alfred Hitchcock commissioned his film scores from composers who were Hollywood’s master-craftsmen. The concert items prepared from those scores feature a dazzling variety of styles, from Baroque and jazz to dark Romanticism and angular angst, all using the orchestra with breathtaking virtuosity. The conductor John Mauceri, as at home with this repertoire as any other musician, has prepared a number of concert suites from the film scores and some of them receive their first recordings here. This recording was made live in concert in Danish Radio’s new concert hall in Copenhagen. The booklet contains an introductory text by John Mauceri and an extensive, illustrated essay on Hitchcock and his use of film music and work with composers by British film-music historian John Riley.

Hermann: Vertigo — Music for Alfred Hitchcock

Music: Suite for Three Cellos: II Molto lento
Composer: Ferdinand Thieriot
Artist: Hamburg Chamber Players
Album: Ferdinand Thieriot: Chamber Music, Volume Two
TOCC 0101
5060113441010

The Hamburg-born Ferdinand Thieriot (1838–1919) not only shared a teacher – Eduard Marxsen – with Brahms; both composers use a very similar musical language, one which is richly melodic and effortlessly contrapuntal. The musicologist Wilhelm Altmann wrote that ‘Thieriot's chamber music is without exception noble and pure. He writes with perfect command of form and expression’ – as the works on this second Toccata Classics volume prove, in their exquisite balance of depth and beauty.

Ferdinand Thieriot: Suite for Three Cellos: II Molto lento

Music: Glory and Alleluia
Composer: Georgy Sviridov
Artists: Credo Chamber Choir; Bogdan Plish, conductor
Album: Georgy Sviridov: Hymns and Prayers
Label: Toccata Classics – TOCC 0123
Street Date: December 9, 2014/January 11, 2015 (Germany & North America)

http://toccataclassics.com

Georgy Sviridov (191598) has been hailed as the most important composer of choral music of the twentieth century.

Sviridov saw himself as part of the thousand-year continuum of Russian culture, giving its resonance full expression in the monumental choral cycle Hymns and Prayers, written over a ten-year period from 1987 to 1997; he completed it only weeks before he died.

Extraordinarily beautiful and profoundly moving, Hymns and Prayers is perhaps the most important Russian choral composition since the liturgies of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.

Sviridov: Glory and Alleluia

Music: Was ist das Herz? Ein finstrer Ort, TWV 1:1516: Arie
Artists: Bergen Barokk
Composer: Georg Philipp Telemann
Album: Telemann: Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, Volume 8: Six Cantatas
TOCC 0266
June 2024

Telemann: Was Ist Das Herz  Ein Finstrer Ort, TWV 11516 Arie

Music: Toccata Romantica
Composer: Heikki Klemetti
Artist: Jan Lehtola
Album: Heikki Klemetti: Works for Organ
TOCC 0705
5060113447050

Heikki Klemetti: Toccata Romantica

Music: String Quartet in C: III Andante con moto
Composer: George Loughlin
Album: George Loughlin: Piano and Chamber Music
Artists: Darlington String Quartet
TOCC 0720
5060113447203
Coming July 2024

George Loughlin: String Quartet in C: III Andante con moto

Music: Divertimento for 13 Solo Instruments, Op. 30: VI Allegro con spirito
Composer: Adolf Busch
Artists: BuschKollegium; Ulrich Wagner (conductor)
Album: Adolf Busch: Orchestral Works, Volume One
TOCC 0671
5060113446718
Coming July 2024

Adolf Busch: Divertimento for 13 Solo Instruments, Op. 30: VI Allegro con spirito

Music: String Quartet No. 16, Op. 161: Molto vivace – 
Composer: David Matthews
Artists: Kreutzer Quartet
Album: David Matthews: Complete String Quartets, Volume Six
TOCC 0732
5060113447326
Coming July 2024

David Matthews: String Quartet No. 16, Op. 161: Molto vivace –

Music: Nativity of Christ: I. Nativity Song
Composer: Georgy Sviridov
Artists: Bogdan Plish, conductor; Credo Chamber Choir
Album: Georgy Sviridov: Hymns and Prayers
Label: Toccata Classics

Purchase on Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/1z3jwKl
Purchase on Amazon.co.uk: http://amzn.to/12kI344

Georgy Sviridov (191598) has been hailed as the most important composer of choral music of the twentieth century.

Sviridov saw himself as part of the thousand-year continuum of Russian culture, giving its resonance full expression in the monumental choral cycle Hymns and Prayers, written over a ten-year period from 1987 to 1997; he completed it only weeks before he died.

Extraordinarily beautiful and profoundly moving, Hymns and Prayers is perhaps the most important Russian choral composition since the liturgies of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.

Georgy Sviridov: Nativity of Christ — Nativity Song

Jānis ĶEPĪTIS
(Latvia, 1908–89)
Piano Miniatures, Volume Two
Portraits (1946)
Mood-Paintings (1956)               
Mood-Paintings: In the Meadows (1965)  
Impressions of an Evening (1974)          
Līgo Night: No. 3, ‘St John’s Fire’ (1935)*
Nora Lūse, piano
*Jānis Ķepītis, piano (rec. 1935)
Nora Rūse, piano
First recordings
Text: Nora Rūse
TOCC 0726

Ķepītis: Christmas Tree Dreams

Music: First Rhapsody on Ukranian National Themes
Composer: Mykola Lysenko
Artist: Arthur Greene, piano
Album: Mykola Lysenko: Piano Music, Volume One
Label: Toccata Classics — TOCC0287
Street Date: March 10, 2015

Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) is regarded as ‘the father of Ukrainian classical music’. As did Bartók later in Hungary, he went out into the field, listened to what the people were singing and fashioned an individual musical language that brought together the styles of Chopin and Liszt and the essence of Ukrainian folksong. This first CD of his piano music reveals a voice, long forgotten, of extraordinary immediacy and appeal.

Mykola Lysenko: First Rhapsody on Ukranian National Themes

Music: Romance, Op. 27
Composer: Mykola Lysenko
Artists: Solomia Soroka, violin; Arthur Greene, piano;
Album: Mykola Lysenko: Complete Music for Violin and Piano
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC 0177
Street Date: March 10, 2015

Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) is regarded as ‘the father of Ukrainian classical music’. As did Bartók later in Hungary, he went out into the field, listened to what the people were singing and fashioned an individual musical language that brought together the styles of Chopin and Liszt and the essence of Ukrainian folksong. This CD presents his complete output of music for violin and piano, complemented by a new work for violin and piano commissioned to display the lyrical riches of Lysenko’s songs.

Mykola Lysenko: Romance, Op. 27

Music: Sonata No. 14 In G Major: III. Allegro
Composer: Giuseppe Tartini
Artist: Peter Sheppard Skærved
Album: Giuseppe Tartini: 30 Sonate Piccole for Solo Violin, Volume Three: Sonatas Nos. 13-18
TOCC 0297
Street Date: July 3, 2015

http://toccataclassics.com

In the last years of his life, the great composer, violinist and swordsman Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) laboured at a cycle of sonatas for solo violin. The resulting manuscript offers the most important composition for solo violin after Bach and, at six hours in duration, the largest integrated work for the instrument. This first complete recording is based on a fresh study of the source and includes a number of works in Tartini’s shorthand, overlooked in earlier editions.

Giuseppe Tartini: Sonata No. 14 In G Major: III. Allegro

Music: En Sourdine, Op. 58, No. 2
Composer: Gabriel Fauré
Artists: Jared Schwartz, bass; Roy Howat, piano;
Album: Gabriel Fauré: Songs for Bass Voice and Piano
Label: Toccata Classics TOCC0268
Street Date: September 2015

http://toccataclassics.com

This collection of Fauré’s mélodies – the first recording to be conceived for a bass voice – juxtaposes some of the composer’s best-loved songs with some of his lesser-known works. Going beyond the often arbitrary ordering of early editions, this programme draws out connections of poets and poetic themes, some of which restore the composer’s own original groupings. This is the first recording to be based on the new Peters Edition, which eliminates countless errors in older publications.

Gabriel Fauré: En Sourdine, Op. 58. No. 2

Music: Twelve Poems Of Pushkin Fet And Turgenev No. 12 'Stars'
Composer: Pauline Viardot
Artists: Ina Kancheva, soprano; Ludmil Angelov, piano; Christo Tanev, cello;
Album: Pauline VIARDOT: Songs
Label: Toccata Classics, TOCC303
Available January 2016

VIARDOT: Songs

Pauline Viardot - Twelve Poems Of Pushkin Fet And Turgenev No. 12 'Stars'

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

Stream more tracks at https://toccataclassics.com/?p=9225

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

Track: Complete Waltzes, s400-16: No. 14, Allegro non troppo
Composer: Leo Ornstein
Album: Leo Ornstein: Piano Music, Volume Two
Artist: Arsentiy Kharitonov, piano

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Includes First Recordings

The Russian-born American pianist-composer Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) lived long enough – an astonishing 109 years – to see his music both fall into and re-emerge from obscurity. With his earliest surviving work dating from around 1905 and his last from 1990, Ornstein’s music naturally embraces a range of styles, extending on this second CD of his piano music from the Rachmaninov-like Suite Russe (1914) to the brittle but urgent Impressionism of A Morning in the Woods (1971). The meat of this disc is the extraordinary sequence of seventeen Waltzes Ornstein composed, largely in the 1960s and ’70s, which vary from the sexily languorous to the boldly tempestuous, requiring the fearsome virtuosity that Arsentiy Kharitonov brings to them here.

Leo Ornstein - Piano Music, Volume Two: Complete Waltzes No. 14: Allegro non troppo

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.

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