Ronald William "josh" Kirby

This CD celebrates the Scottish, but Blackburn born, composer Ronald Stevenson, best known for his piano music (he was himself a virtuoso pianist), but his enormous work list spans most genres except opera, and this disc includes all his works for recorder, interspersed with some of his songs in widely divergent styles with piano and instrumental accompaniment. His Scottish composer friends were legion, and this disc includes music by several of them, David Johnson, John Purser, Wilma Paterson and Eddie McGuire. His overseas friends were many, and notably included Grainger, some of whose music Stevenson arranged for various instruments. Grainger himself made two entrancing versions of the well known and much loved Country Gardens for recorders, at his friend Balfour Gardiner's house, which bookend this disc, and have not previously been heard. John Turner, March 2023.

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Dreams Melting, a revealing survey of British songs from the early 20th century by tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley.

SOMM Recordings explores one of the most significant partnerships in 20th-century British music with Façades, an album of piano-accompanied songs and music for four-hand piano by William Walton and Constant Lambert. Façades takes its title from Walton's era-defining "entertainment", heard here in arrangements for four-hand piano of its two orchestral Suites by Lambert - regarded by Walton as the definitive reciter of Edith Sitwell's nonsense verses.

Josh Johnson’s latest solo record, Unusual Object is a world of sound. Johnson’s fantastically processed saxophone and subtle samples and grooves give this work a sort of cyberpunk ambient jazz feel that occasionally crosses into realms akin to classic Warp Records and Jon Hassell’s dreamworld tonalities. But however fantastical and dreamlike Unusal Object may be, these qualities only serve to bring the listener closer to Johnson, to his breath, his sense of song. What, after all, could be more intimate than sitting inside someone’s fantasies and dreams?

Johnson executes this all with an indelible elegance, establishing him as a worthy contemporary of fellow modern avant-garde composers like Lea Bertucci, Ian William Craig, and Kelly Moran. Like the latter’s carefully considered prepared piano compositions, Unusual Object is stately, personal, and patently modern.