This CD brings together three prolific but little-known British composers: Dorothy Howell (1898-1982), Pamela Harrison (1915-90), and Madeleine Dring (1923-77). Working in the same country at the same time, these composers had much in common. All studied at either the Royal Academy or Royal College of Music, and went on to have dual careers as composer-performers. They wrote tonal music in a style that would fall out of fashion in the later twentieth century, which has certainly contributed to their disappearance from concert halls. And above all, they composed with a great sense of humour. The music on this disc sparkles with wit and energy. In the mid-twentieth century the two piano combination was popular both in the concert hall and for light entertainment. It proved a perfect medium for composers who liked to bring a lightness of touch to their work, allowing them to write pieces that were fun both to play and to watch.

I set myself the challenge of writing a book of 24 preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys and I approached family, friends, and several institutions I had been associated with, to commission a prelude and fugue each, with many of the resultant commissioners asking for references to pieces of music that had a special meaning for them, a request that I tried to follow through wherever possible. Within a very short space of time, I realised just what a task I had set myself. The project took me 8 years to complete, and it was not until 2019 that I finally put the finishing touches to the concluding B minor Fugue. The score was published on my birthday in June 2020 and I received an unexpected email from Nathan Williamson, saying that he would love to learn the music, and, because of the restrictions imposed by the covid lockdowns, it might be a good time to see if a complete recording might be contemplated. To our considerable delight, Lyrita Recorded Edition agreed to take on the project that has led to the release of the present boxed set.

Baritone Roderick Williams began to establish his operatic career in the mid-'90s. A Mozart specialist at first, he has developed a varied repertory and has also written a substantial body of music for chorus and piano. Williams was born in 1965 in London. His father was of Welsh background, his mother Jamaican. He attended Oxford University as a choral scholar and then took a job as a music teacher. It was not until he was 28 that he began to study operatic singing full-time at the Guildhall School of Music in London. While a student there, he made his debut in Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia as Tarquinius, and he has continued to sing several major Britten roles regularly.

"The process of writing any piece of music really is one of discovery and the feeling I always have is that what I’m setting myself to write already exists and that what I have to do is unveil it, discover it". This characterisation by Daniel Jones of the creative process as one of exploration and excavation seems appropriate for a composer whose scores have a powerful sense of rightness and inevitability. His lifelong dedication to music meant that he was unwilling to compromise by diluting it with other work, such as teaching. When he was mischievously accused of never having had a proper job, his response was to tap his manuscript and reply, "This is a proper job". In fact he undertook a wide variety of roles during his long life, as he once wryly observed: "my career has been a very complicated one. As a matter of fact, it’s a pity I was not divided into several people".

In 1942 The Musical Times reported a ‘grave loss’ referring to Walter Leigh’s tragically early death, killed in action whilst serving in a tank regiment near Tobruk, just before his thirty-seventh birthday. Though during his lifetime he was more than once compared to Sir Arthur Sullivan, from a contemporary standpoint an equally pertinent analogy could be drawn with a composer from a later generation, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett. Both men approached film music and ‘light music’ with the same seriousness of purpose and invested it with the same impeccable craftsmanship they brought to their concert pieces.

“Although Elgar was a highly accomplished violinist, he wrote no mature string chamber music until, at the end of his creative life, he produced three major works: a violin sonata, a piano quintet and a string quartet. Both outer movements of the quartet are full of mercurial changes of mood; both end at the last minute in the major, the finale with an exhilarating display of renewed energy.

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.The works on this album travel from the innocent pastiche of Geoffrey Bush’s tribute to Arne, Edmund Rubbra’s student essay, through the Blues of Arthur Benjamin, the serial language of Humphrey Searle, the drama of Elizabeth Maconchy, and the bold humour of film composer John Addison. It is all great fun, and has never been recorded - apart from the Benjamin recorded just once, back in 1959.
Simon Callaghan and Martyn Brabbins team-up to raise a smile, enjoying the lighter side of musical life.

A fine example of Jones at his most succinct and incisive, the Twelfth Symphony (1985) was commissioned by the Civil and Public Services Association as a farewell gift to their retiring General Secretary, Ken Thomas. The Twelfth Symphony was first performed by the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra and conductor Erich Bergel at a gala concert at St. David's Hall, Cardiff on 26 September 1985. The score bears a superscription consisting of a brief quotation from Pushkin, which reads "Yet one last tale, And my chronicle is ended".

Berkeley’s first opera, Nelson, was put on at Sadler’s Wells in 1954. The others were performed by the English Opera Group which had been founded by the young Benjamin Britten, Joan Cross, Eric Crozier and Peter Pears in 1946. In the same year as the Nelson premiere Berkeley’s first one?acter, A Dinner Engagement, featured at Aldeburgh. Aldeburgh was also the scene of Ruth in 1956 and Castaway in 1967. Each work inhabits its own world, and each finds Berkeley’s musical imagination delivering new sounds to match the drama.

The music on this album dates from the composer’s later years, and are largely based on themes from his earlier successes. The inspiration for Holbrooke’s music was almost always literary; hence, the large number of symphonic poems and pieces with literary titles or subtitles in his work list. Almost all the 8 Nocturnes, Op. 121 employ material from some of Holbrooke’s most successful and popular earlier works. The music critic Ernest Newman, in an often quoted appreciation of the composer written in 1902, wrote that “…Holbrooke can do quite easily and unconsciously what [Richard] Strauss has only done half a dozen times in his career – he can write a big, heartfelt melody that searches us to the very bone…”, and these Nocturnes display Josef’s gift for lyricism.

The opera opens with a Wizard working his mystical ways and summoning the spirits of air, fire and water in the form of a brilliant ballet. His plan is to wed the Princess who is destined to select a husband that very day. An older Mother enters with a drowsy sleep-prone son in tow. The Mother is obsessed with a prophecy her son will woo and win the Princess. There is an elixir of course and once drained the man who does so will be loved by the Princess. The Wizard tries some of this on the Princess. The Mother has already switched it for pure water while administering the elixir to her yawning son. The Wizard flies into a fury promising to bring death and destruction on everyone. He departs. A troubadour and a wanderer have appeared and pay songful court to the Princess which she is having none of. When the Princess sees the Fool she falls in love with him and asks him to marry her. He answers with the word ‘No’ but the whole scenario leaves you wondering about their future. The Wizard returns with his horrors but after some stern and encouraging words from the Mother all the Wizard’s fell crew are burnt to a crisp.

Robert Simpson wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1972 in response to a commission by the London Symphony Orchestra. The first performance of the symphony took place on 3 May 1973 at the Royal Festival Hall, under the direction of Andrew Davis. Another London performance took place on 29 March 1984, again in the Royal Festival Hall, with the Philharmonia, the conductor again being Andrew Davis. In both cases audience and press reception was unanimously enthusiastic. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, in a review in the Sunday Times headed “Power of Robert Simpson”, detected “some shattering personal crisis” and observed that the 4th and 5th Symphonies “compel all but the most rigidly advanced of listeners to take a closer look at this remarkable composer.” He found the Fifth “bolder, tougher and more mysterious in substance.” Simpson’s Sixth Symphony, of 1977, was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with funds provided by the Arts Council, who later sponsored the recording of the Sixth and Seventh, and also contributed to a number of later Commissions. It received its premiere performance on 8 April 1980 at the Royal Festival Hall with The London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Charles Groves.

Alwyn's musical style is in the main of a romantic nature firmly grounded in tonality, notwithstanding some forays into modernity, calling on dissonance and freedom of from when he felt the need. This approach can be keenly felt in the works included on this disc, all of which were completed when he was aged between eighteen and twenty-five. The medium of the string quartet held a long and lasting fascination for Alwyn, which began during the earliest years of his composing career.

Nicholas Maw’s most fervent desire was to communicate directly with his audiences and produce material which performers would enjoy playing and Spring Music, written with the express purpose of diverting and entertaining an audience, finds the composer at his most uninhibited and freely expressive. Fresh, colorful and vibrant, this score has the exotic, open-hearted spirit of a curtain-raiser by William Walton or Alan Rawsthorne. In its final, slimmed-down version, it rapidly became one of Maw’s favorite pieces among his own output and he once described the long-breathed cello-led melody as ‘one of the best tunes I think I’ve actually ever written’.