Martyn Mystere

Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra perform one of the mightiest of first symphonies ever written. Vaughan Williams's setting of Walt Whitman creates a very special sense of occasion. The coupling is Vaughan Williams's later, virtually unknown, setting of Whitman's ''Darest thou now, O soul'' for chorus and strings.

Solid Air (whose title track was written for John Martyn's friend, songwriter Nick Drake) is one of the defining moments in British folk, in the same league as Fairport Convention's Liege & Lief, Richard & Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights, and Michael Chapman's Rainmaker. Martyn stepped out of his comfort zone to record and produce it, including not only jazz and blues but rock and plenty of sound effects, and featuring Rhodes piano on some of its tracks, dismaying some fans while winning a ton more for its genre-blurring presentation. A number of its cuts – such as the title track, "Over the Hill," "I'd Rather Be the Devil," and "May You Never" – remained staples in his live sets until the end of his life. [This edition includes a live performance of "I'd Rather Be the Devil" as a bonus track.]

‘Essential listening’ … ‘fabulously assured’ … ‘unequivocally excellent’: just a few of the critical superlatives earned by Martyn Brabbins’s magnificent Vaughan Williams symphony cycle. In this, the penultimate release of the series, two of the late symphonies are coupled with more rare RVW.

Two late, great Vaughan Williams symphonies: with the ‘Antartica’ and No 9, Martyn Brabbins and his BBC forces complete a cycle enthusiastically acclaimed by Radio 3 Record Review as ‘unmissable’.

Music in Germany in the later 19th century found itself divided into two camps; the modernists, led by Liszt and Wagner, and the traditionalists who took Brahms as their model and who upheld the values of the classical period and Beethoven in particular. Fuchs and Kiel are very much in the later camp and both spent their lives in academic posts, as so often befits such establishment figures. They each wrote only one piano concerto and, as one might expect, these are not vehicles for empty virtuoso display but rather 'symphonic' concertos, both written in the traditional three movements, the first of which is a weighty sonata form allegro.

In 2022 we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vaughan Williams, and there is no better way to do so than with this album of brass band music. The album includes the composer's three pieces for brass band - Henry the Fifth Overture, Prelude on Three Welsh Hymns and Variations for Brass Band. In addition we hear the brass band version of the Tuba Concerto and many new arrangements of popular pieces by Paul Hindmarsh (who curated and produced the album) and Phillip Littlemore.

Over the ten years that the Romantic Piano Concerto has been running one of the projects most often requested by the many fans of the series has been a recording of the complete Lyapunov works for piano and orchestra. Well finally here it is!

Smaller concertos for piano and modest orchestral forces were a feature of British composition in the first half of the 20th century. Often they were written for a special occasion, and typically vanished into oblivion thereafter. During the COVID period we were looking for things to record with small numbers of players, and stumbled across this treasury: short concertos written for entertainment that don't outstay their welcome.