Prevailing Wind

Noise, the fury of war, the unleashing of madness, and tyrannies marked the twentieth century as a time of shadow. The elements of metal and steel, combined with emotions of hate and death, painted a backdrop many wished to leave behind.

For a brief time, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan and trumpeter Art Farmer were the frontline of the Horace Silver Quintet. This CD reissue finds the group (which also includes bassist Teddy Kotick and drummer Louis Hayes) performing five of Silver's lesser-known originals and the standard "Ill Wind." The lyrical Farmer and the up-and-coming Jordan have plenty of fine solos, as does the influential Silver, whose funky, witty style stood apart from the prevailing Bud Powell influence of the era. Although none of the newer songs caught on as standards, this set (which has plenty of mood and groove variation) holds together very well and still sounds fresh 50 years later.

The ten symphonies of Louis Spohr span a period of forty-six years which saw music move from the Classical dominance of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to the Romantic era of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. Spohr himself was an important link in this development, through his exploitation of chromatic harmony, his formal experiments and his four programmatic symphonies. When Spohr composed his first symphony in 1811, Beethoven still had to write his seventh, eighth and ninth, but by the time of Spohr’s final one in 1857 the entire symphonic output of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann had come and gone, and all three of these composers were dead.
Keith Warsop

Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, born in 1955, received most of his training in the West, studying with Isang Yun and Klaus Huber in Germany and at the Darmstadt Institute, and he brings a Japanese aesthetic sensibility to the techniques of modernism. Most of the music on this album is notable for its somber, atmospheric tone, a prevailing sense of virtual stasis, and its delicate, finely calibrated scoring. Three of the four pieces feature ……

Stephen Eddins @ AllMusic.com

The earlier issues on Brilliant Classics of works by Gilardino have shown a highly individual composer whose musical roots are planted around the Mediterranian, breathing its perfumes, colours, rhythms and harmonies. This new recording presents Gilardino’s guitar concertos, evocative and atmospheric music, in which the guitar is in constant dialogue with instruments of the orchestra, as skilfully written as only a guitarist himself can write.

Released in March 1978, the album featured the song “Northern Lights”, a Top Ten hit single in the UK and Europe, and was a successful hit album in the UK, USA and Canada. By the late 1970s the line-up of highly gifted vocalist Annie Haslam, Michael Dunford (acoustic and electric guitars), John Tout (keyboards, vocals), Jon Camp (bass, acoustic & electric guitars, vocals) and Terry Sullivan (drums, percussion) had recorded a series of acclaimed albums that fused classical music influences with progressive rock and had earned a loyal following in Europe and had enjoyed wider success in the United States and Japan.

Haydn wrote little music for solo winds, alone or in chamber music. He did compose a flute concerto (now lost) in his earliest days at Eisenstadt, when he was trying to impress each of his musicians, but flutes as solo winds appear only in works commissioned for the instrument. All came from London, where the flute was apparently popular, and most of those pieces (lacking only six divertimentos, Hob IV:6–11) appear on this disc. The trios with fortepiano were written in 1790, the others in London in 1792.