Robert Matthew

Emma Johnson & Friends – the ensemble led by the outstanding clarinetist and one of the UK’s best-selling classical artists – returns to SOMM Recordings for an entertaining programme of chamber music led by Beethoven’s magisterial Septet. The group’s second release for SOMM follows 2016’s well-received coupling of Schubert and Crusell, when MusicWeb International noted: “With an hour and a quarter of delightful music in first-rate performances, this album is a winner”. Composed in 1800, Beethoven’s Septet is one of the cornerstones of the chamber repertoire. Caught on the cusp between the Classical era and fast-emerging Romanticism, as Robert Matthew-Walker’s booklet essay notes, “it abounds in felicitous light fancy and delicious invention… standing apart as a work of unquestionable independence of expression, already looking towards the initial decades of the new century”.

This is the first truly interdisciplinary collection devoted to the legacy of Richard Wagner to merge insights from Musicology and Music Theory with explorations of the composer’s vast socio-cultural impact from such fields as History, German, and Disability Studies. The wide ranging topics include Glenn Gould’s piano transcriptions, the value of naming musical themes in the music dramas, the status of Wagner in Israel, and the assignment of “Jewish” characteristics in both Wagner’s music and polemics and, in recent years, to his descendant, musicologist Gottfried Wagner. Contributors include Robert Gauldin, Warren Darcy, Marc Weiner, and Paul Rose.

History is re-claimed with two significant archive recordings, newly restored and re-mastered, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra of a master British symphonist in his early prime on Somm Céleste. The first appearance on disc of Edmund Rubbra conducting the wartime premiere of his own Fourth Symphony (taken from an off-air recording of the live broadcast) is coupled with a live 1954 BBC radio broadcast – considered ‘quite stupendous’ by the composer – of the Second Symphony conducted by the work’s dedicatee, Sir Adrian Boult. On the strength of his first four symphonies, the musicologist and composer Arthur Hutchings described Rubbra as ‘first and foremost, a symphonist’.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the centenary of the birth of Ruth Gipps with "Dedication", featuring five premiere recordings of chamber works inspired by her clarinettist-husband, Robert Baker.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the centenary of the birth of Ruth Gipps with "Dedication", featuring five premiere recordings of chamber works inspired by her clarinettist-husband, Robert Baker.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to release Hail Caledonia – Scotland in Music, a musical salute to their homeland by conductor Iain Sutherland and the City of Glasgow Philharmonic Orchestra. Recorded live in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall in 1995-96 and newly remastered, these vivacious performances also feature the City of Glasgow Pipe Band, City of Glasgow Chorus, and bagpipers David Wotherspoon and Iain McDonald.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to release Hail Caledonia – Scotland in Music, a musical salute to their homeland by conductor Iain Sutherland and the City of Glasgow Philharmonic Orchestra. Recorded live in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall in 1995-96 and newly remastered, these vivacious performances also feature the City of Glasgow Pipe Band, City of Glasgow Chorus, and bagpipers David Wotherspoon and Iain McDonald.