Music For Summer

Ritual music populated by angels and demons, mystical incantations, unheard-of percussions and supernatural harmonies, the work of American composer George Crumb is a spectacular experience that remains etched in the memory of its performers and its listeners. With Black Angels and Music for a Summer Evening, B Records brings together in one album two great moments of the 2021 Deauville Festival and a host of renowned artists: pianists Théo Fouchenneret and Philippe Hattat, artists from the Hanson Quartet and those from the Trio Xenakis…

This precious collection of piano-four-hands works from the foremost musical minds of Portugal in the 20th and 21st centuries can serve as a welcome introduction to the classical music of Portugal for those who may not know it. But there is a greater significance and added value to this thoughtful recital programme, in that it traces back the genealogy of modern Portuguese classical composition – and pianism! – to roots firmly planted in German Romantic soil. It links the living composers to their teacher and inspiration, the great composer–ethnographer Fernando Lopes-Graça who undertook research into Portuguese folk music on a par with what Vaughan Williams and Bartók & Kodály did in their own nations, and then links Lopes-Graça back to his piano professor, the great virtuoso and music educator Joseì Viana da Mota, himself a pupil and disciple of Liszt.

Experience a staple of the Oxford calendar in this set of works inspired by the May Morning tradition, with music spanning from the traditional to contemporary. Starting with The College Clock welcoming in the sunrise, this special recording displays The Magdalen College Choir in radiant form, shining in the glorious acoustics of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Oxford.

During the 1930s, Bliss, Britten, and Berkeley all contributed major works to the repertoire for string orchestra, following in the footsteps of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. They are joined on this album by Frank Bridge whose Lament was composed during the First World War. Bliss composed Music for Strings after he had completed the film score for Korda’s Things to Come, driven by his desire to compose a piece of ‘pure music’, expressing his own ideas rather than those of others.Commissioned in May 1937 by Boyd Neel for the Salzburg Festival that summer, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge was composed at great speed, and helped to establish the young composer’s international reputation. Dedicated to his teacher, Frank Bridge, the theme is taken from the second of Bridge’s Three Idylls for string quartet. Lennox Berkeley composed his Serenade for Strings at Snape Maltings, where he was living with Britten in 1938 and 1939. By the time of its completion the nation was at war and the music seems to reflect the composer’s anxious mood as the world faced an uncertain future.The front cover features a painting by Edward Wadsworth of Bliss’s house, Pen Pits, built for him in 1935.

Lawrence Power makes the second of his appearances in this month’s release lists, this time with his regular pianist partner Simon Crawford-Phillips in the chamber music of Shostakovich. The centrepiece is the Viola Sonata, Shostakovich’s last completed work, premiered posthumously, on what would have been the composer’s sixty-ninth birthday. Its ravishing slow finale reworks the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata—a tribute to a composer he revered. Shostakovich the film composer also takes a bow, in the form of The Gadfly, with its famous ‘Romance’ beloved of violinists everywhere. That this works just as compellingly on the viola is triumphantly displayed in the arrangement made by Vadim Borisovsky (founding violist of the Beethoven Quartet), one of the Five Pieces he recast from Shostakovich’s original. Shostakovich’s 24 Piano Preludes have also proved irresistible to transcribers and here we have the seven brilliantly reworked by a pupil of Borisovsky, Yevgeny Strakhov.