Timothy Snyslovaquieder

Long a center for the creation and performance of new music, Oberlin Conservatory showcases the composition faculty in the recording premieres of three works performed by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and featuring alumni saxophone soloist Noah Getz '97 and soprano Olivia Boen '17.

Following a highly successful series of concerts in the summer of 2022, Francesca Dego, Timothy Ridout, Laura van der Heijden, and Federico Colli headed into the studio to record Mozart’s Piano Quartets. Whilst he may not have been the first composer to add a viola to the popular piano trio, Mozart was certainly the first to do so with such outstanding success. In his piano quartets, the strings become an equal partner to the piano, rather than mere accompaniment – much as in his piano concertos.

Timothy Ridout gives us the opportunity to discover the splendid viola version of Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto – an arrangement approved by the composer, who conducted its premiere in 1930. In addition to this deeply moving work, he gives us a powerful, poetic reading of Bloch’s all too rarely performed Suite for Viola and Orchestra, in which the Swiss composer indulged his fascination with the Orient.

French Works for Flute is the Chandos début of Adam Walker, ably accompanied by James Baillieu. The pair is joined by the violist Timothy Ridout in Duruflé’s Prélude, récitatif et variations.

Tenor John Mark Ainsley with Timothy Roberts on harpsichord, spinet & chamber organ and Paula Chateauneuf on theorbo and baroque guitar, in an award-winning recording of eighteen songs and keyboard works by John Blow (1649-1708).

Continuing Warner Classics’ multiple-award-winning Berlioz cycle (Les Troyens, La Damnation de Faust) with conductor John Nelson and the Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg. Berlioz’s orchestral song cycle on a libretto by Théophile Gautier, Les Nuits d’été, is sung by superstar (bari)tenor Michael Spyres. This is the first ever recording of the original 1856 version by one single voice – Michael Spyres sings with a bass, tenor and baritone voice. Featuring the young British viola player Timothy Ridout in Berlioz’s Harold en  Italie.

This well-planned Naxos programme is carefully laid out in two parts, each of viol music interspersed with harpsichord and organ pieces and ending with an anthem. It gives collectors an admirable opportunity to sample, very inexpensively, the wider output of Thomas Tomkins, and outstandingly fine Elizabethan musician whose music is still too known. Though he is best known for hid magnificent church music, it is refreshing to discover what he could do with viols, experimenting with different combinations of sizes of instruments, usually writing with the polyphony subservient to expressive harmonic feeling, as in the splendid and touching Fantasia for six viols. Perhaps the most remarkable piece here is the Hexachord fantasia, where the scurrying part-writing ornaments a rising and falling six-note scale (hexachord). The two five-part verse anthems and Above the stars, which is in six parts, are accompanied by five viols, with a fine counter-tenor in Above the stars and a bass in Thou art my King.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s sublime Mass in G minor reveals the composer’s absorbing interest in using the modal harmonic language and contrapuntal textures of the English late Renaissance to achieve a huge emotional and dynamic range. Undoubtedly the most technically demanding work on this disc is A Vision of Aeroplanes, a virtuosic motet for mixed chorus and organ. Several neglected works also feature here, including The Voice out of the Whirlwind, an anthem for mixed chorus and orchestra or organ, and Valiant-for-truth, one of several works based on Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Seven Up is the third studio album by German krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel and their only album recorded in collaboration with American psychologist/drug advocate Timothy Leary. It was first released in 1973.