Geoffrey Berwer

A work with a name like this can only be unusual. The opus in question is a three-part solo piano epic, lasting a shade under four hours and of a complexity to match. Combine an all-night raga sequence with Bach's Art of Fugue and you're getting close. Is it worth the listen? Yes, if you want to give your heart and mind–not just your brain–a real workout. For all his outsize demands, Sorabji was a front-rank pianist, who understood technique as a physical end to spiritual means. There are stretches of manic complexity here, but also passages of real poetry: try the lengthy "Interludium primum" which opens Part 2, or many of the 81(!) variations which follow the magisterial "Passacaglia" in Part 3. It's music which cries out for transcendental virtuosity, and Geoffrey Douglas Madge gives it just that. He gave four performances over six years and this Chicago one from 1983 assumed mythic status among those who heard it. Remastered for CD release, it is awe-inspiring in its grasp of what's gone into this music: the audience clearly living it with the pianist every step of the way. Hear it for yourself, then why not run the marathon or climb Everest for relaxation?

This is a very unusual and rather experimental CD. The actual artist for the album is listed as Geoff Downes and the New Dance Orchestra. The liner says that the music the group performs is designed to bring tone and color to the stereo sound spectrum. It lists their further goals are to simultaneously retain "a deep musical foundation, upon which are built a series of images to stimulate the listener in his or her own domain." High ideals indeed, but does the music live up to it? Well, this music is strictly instrumental and quite electronic, but it does contain some very potent sound imagery and power and majesty. Among the other unique qualities the disc possesses is the fact that each of the five main pieces on the disc are divided into separate sections, for a total of 33 tracks.

Respighi’s colourful music could have been written with the clear, full-bodied Chandos sound in mind. Following on from where Geoffrey Simon began for the label in the Eighties, Edward Downes is now exploring the more symphonic side of Respighi’s output, showing there is more to him than the Roman trilogy (if not that much, qualitatively). The present disc includes two of his four concertante works for piano and orchestra, the extended Toccata (according to Tozer’s booklet note, the longest such work in existence) and the quirky Slavonic Rhapsody, with its humorous sideswipe at Dvorák. More characteristic of Respighi is the concert overture derived from his opera Belfagor, about the exploits of a Till Eulenspiegel/Don Juan figure, portrayed with suitably colourful sound-painting. All these, together with the Bachian Three Chorales, are played with marvellous verve and commitment – the BBC PO under Downes has a way with this out-of-the-way repertoire that few can equal. The sound quality on this disc is nothing short of stunning.

At a time when Schoenberg and Stravinsky were thought of as opposite poles, Roberto Gerhard was combining the density of the one with the dynamism of the other in a wholly personal synthesis. You can hear this in the Piano Concerto's mood swings from the dark and brooding to, in the finale, a Spanish take-off that Chabrier would have thought off the wall. Gerhard's 1960s music is in-your-face modernism that holds you in its grasp, embracing sound with an enthusiasm that remains inspirational today. Listen to the tape part of the Third Symphony–a cut-and-paste job that trounces most of the computer-music generation in its imagination and feeling for what's possible. Epithalamion features material originally intended for, of all things, Lindsay Anderson's film This Sporting Life. Not that its impact is any less than coherent; the percussion writing alone has a fantasy that will keep you entranced. Well prepared performances, superbly recorded. This is still music of the future.

One of the most versatile trumpeters in the classical world, Simon Höfele, releases a new album “Nobody Knows” together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Geoffrey Paterson and Ilan Volkov. On his 4th album on Berlin Classics he plays the trumpet concertos by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Christian Jost and Toshio Hosokawa, spanning an arc from the 20th to the 21st century and proves once again that the trumpet can do more than just "shine". “These three works are really important to me. I have played all three before and I was always fascinated by their darkness.”, he explains his choice of repertoire. “This is heavy, almost depressive music, and that applies to all three of these works. This is heavy music in two respects: loaded with gloom, and also not at all easy to play. The is a definitive political message to “Nobody Knows de Trouble I see”, which makes it even more fascinating.”

After the end of Yes, Downes and Horn resumed working on a second Buggles album, Adventures in Modern Recording, released in 1981. The same year, Downes founded Asia with fellow former Yes member Steve Howe, former King Crimson member John Wetton, and former Emerson, Lake & Palmer drummer Carl Palmer. The weak commercial performance of Adventures in Modern Recording, associated with Downes being busy with Asia and Horn wanting to be focusing on being a record producer, led to the disbanding of The Buggles. Yes subsequently reformed in 1983, without them, but with Horn producing.

Solo album of instrumental covers by the former member of The Buggles, Asia & Yes. Geoffrey "Geoff" Downes is an English rock songwriter, record producer, keyboardist, icon. Downes created The Buggles with Trevor Horn in 1977. After three years of songwriting and recording process, their first album, The Age of Plastic, was released in 1980. Now recognized as a highly influent album and a landmark of the electropop era, it also spawned the single "Video Killed the Radio Star", that was No. 1 on the singles charts of sixteen countries. The same year, both Horn and Downes joined Yes and recorded the album Drama as a part of the band. The following year however, Yes disbanded.

The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 3 is rarely heard, though it is a finely crafted work worth greater attention. It has suffered alongside the magnificent and superior Second and the ever-popular First. Moreover, it is not a bona fide concerto at all, the composer having completed only the first movement before his sudden death in 1893. Contrary to the suggestion of a few, it is highly unlikely he intended to produce a one-movement concerto. Tchaikovsky wrote two other piano pieces the same year bearing the titles "Andante" and "Finale," respectively. Following his death, Taneyev orchestrated these and attached them to the Concerto, though Tchaikovsky had left no indication they were to be a part of it. But the pair did share something in common with the completed first movement: a theme source – the incomplete Symphony No. 7. In any event, the opening movement of this Concerto is the most compelling, featuring an exuberant main theme whose first two notes are the central melodic element. An attractive slow melody is soon presented, followed by a theme of great vivacity and rhythmic drive.