Timothy Mccranor

Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), a great genius of the viola, is little known to today’s public. Timothy Ridout pays tribute to this key figure in his instrument’s history with a flamboyant programme featuring music by Tertis’s friends, teachers and students alongside some of his own original works and transcriptions. A marvellous musical journey, rich in discoveries.

In their debut recording for harmonia mundi, the young viola prodigy Timothy Ridout and his musical accomplice Frank Dupree celebrate the power of love, with selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, performed in Borisovsky’s popular arrangement, and with their own transcription of Schumann’s Dichterliebe. The voice of the heart and the soul of candour, here the viola displays an astonishing range of emotions and expressive colours – from boisterous to tender or introspective in the Prokofiev excerpts, while also mirroring the myriad nuances of Heine’s poems in Schumann’s sublime musical love letter to his Clara.

The concept that led to The Oberlin Concertos was initially hatched in a conversation between pianist and educator Xak Bjerken and a former student, Oberlin Conservatory composition professor Jesse Jones. It was Jones who suggested writing a chamber concerto to be premiered by his friend and mentor, and it was Bjerken-a former longtime member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet and a veteran soloist with the L.A. Philharmonic and other ensembles-who was immediately hooked. Their plan gave rise to another commission-for the chair of Oberlin's Composition Department, Grammy Award-winner Stephen Hartke-and then another, for fellow composition faculty member Elizabeth Ogonek. The resulting works were recorded in three sessions over a two-year span, with Bjerken joining forces with Oberlin's Contemporary Music Ensemble and conductor Timothy Weiss in the conservatory's Clonick Hall studio, in addition to presenting the world- premiere performance of each piece on campus.

Crepuscolo is the final song in Ottorino Respighi’s song cycle Deità silvane (‘woodland deities’), but as an album title it also stands for the twilight during the interwar years of everything that Respighi represented, as various trends such as atonality, spiky neoclassicism and futurism flourished. In reaction to these developments, Respighi in 1932 famously signed a manifesto calling for music with a ‘human content’ – something which his songs certainly live up to: as Elsa Respighi, the composer’s wife, once said it was to his songs that he ‘entrusts his heart’s hidden secrets, when he lets his soul sing freely.’

Timothy Hopkins, born in 1995, is a German/American cellist living in Germany. A special interest for him lies in performing arrangements and transcriptions of pieces from other instrument’s literatures to the cello. Examples are his own arrangement of the Chaconne from the second violin Partita by Johann Sebastian Bach, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Camille Saint-Saëns, Scherzo-Tarentelle by Henryk Wieniawsky, as well as numerous transcriptions for different cello ensemble constellations.

The organist and harpsichordist John Worgan (1724–90) was one of the most highly respected musicians in the London of his day: Handel admired his playing, and Burney described him as ‘very masterly and learned’. All that survives of his harpsichord music are a ‘New Concerto’, an independent Allegro non tanto and two collections, one of six sonatas and the other of thirteen teaching pieces, but they encompass an eclectic variety of styles and a surprising range of emotions – proud, spirited, witty, impulsive, touching, vivacious – making Worgan sound something like an English Domenico Scarlatti.

This is Timothy Richards’ first solo SACD. This Welsh tenor has been enchanting the European opera public for the past ten years and is currently at the Comic Opera in Berlin and the Semper Opera in Dresden. He began his professional career as a rugby player but eventually studied singing at Royal Northern and made his debut as Alfredo in La Traviata at the Welsh National Opera.