Acoustic Alchemy [Greg Carmichael (nylon guitar), Miles Gilderdale (acoustic and electric guitars), Jay Rowe (keyboards), Gary Grainger (electric bass), Greg Grainger (drums)] with Julian Crampton / Dave Pomeroy (electric bass), Geoff Dunn / Bert Smaak (drums), Berthold Matschat (harmonica), Mario Argandoña (percussion)
Onside Records CDONSIDE04 [16’02”] Producers Miles Gilderdale, Greg Carmichael Engineer/Mixer Klaus Genuit Recorded at Hansahaus Studios, Bonn, Germany
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Acoustic Alchemy is now into its fifth decade and, still gigging regularly with some 16 studio albums to its credit, has opted for the EP format – familiar to an earlier generation – to release its latest music. Not there is anything at all predictable or routine about what is on offer here.
What’s the music like?
It may be just four tracks, but it certainly plays to the band’s strengths. Back to Back launches the EP in fine style with its perky tune on acoustic guitar; listen out for those brass harmonies on keyboards with a lively break from electric guitar on the outro. More down-tempo without being down-beat, Other People sounds a reflective or even ambivalent note – listen out for the softly dissonant mid-point harmonies – and Alisio (evidently a meteorological term for ‘trade winds’) brings the return of AA reggae-inspired music with its lilting back-beat then nagging rhythmic hooks. By the same token, 8,000 Miles is in a lineage of AA ‘road’ numbers with its fluid drumming and evocation of widescreen vistas through contributions from harmonica or piano, before this fades out (surprisingly?) swiftly as though in anticipation of tracks to come.
Does it all work?
It surely does. With Greg Carmichael and Miles Gilderdale interacting via a familiarity borne of respect, judicious keyboards from relative newcomer Jay Rowe, and the Grainger brothers being a rhythm-section with few equals, all the expected ingredients sound enticingly in place.
Is it recommended?
It certainly is. At a time when all previous notions of what constitutes an album have been left behind, it will be interesting to see what this band has in store as follow-up. Whether a further four-track or maybe even two more EPs, the omens for new AA music could hardly be better.
Gabriel Schwabe (cello), Sinfonieorchester Aachen / Christopher Ward
Tchaikovsky Variations on a Rococo Theme Op. 33 (1876) – original version Pezzo capriccioso in B minor Op.62 (1887) Nocturne in D minor Op.19/4 (1873, arr. 1888 by composer) Canzonetta in G minor Op.35/2 (1878, arr. 2025 by Schwabe) Valse sentimentale Op.51/6 (1882, arr. 2019 by Schwabe) Fantasy Overture, Romeo and Juliet (1870 version)
Naxos 8.574741 [56’45”] Producer / Engineer Patrick Lemmens
Recorded 14 September 2018 (Romeo and Juliet) and 23-26 May 2025 at Eurogress, Aachen
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Naxos issues its latest recording by Gabriel Schwabe, featuring Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, alongside arrangements for cello and orchestra and a first recording of Romeo and Juliet in its second version, with the Aachen Symphony Orchestra and Christopher Ward.
What are the performances like?
Although long ago published and recorded on numerous occasions, the original version of the Rococo Variations still lags behind that made by Wilhelm Fitzhagen for whom it was written, and who shamelessly pointed up those opportunities for virtuosity at odds with the essentially Classical poise of Tchaikovsky’s own conception. Opting for the original, Schwabe makes the most of its innate formal or expressive modesty while never neglecting the element of display as surfaces in the guise of a playful humour not so often associated (though hardly unknown) with this composer. In particular the eighth variation, summarily omitted by Fitzhagen, has a genial animation that makes for a far more fitting segue into the coda – hence seeing through to its close a work whose keen lack of pretence is out of all proportion to its musical rewards.
Tchaikovsky finished one other piece for cello and orchestra, Pezzo capriccioso veering from moodiness to recalcitrance with its deftness much in evidence. Also here are his arrangement of the Nocturne from the Op. 19 piano pieces, pensive and soulful, together with Schwabe’s idiomatic takes on the Violin Concerto’s Canzonetta and wistful Valse Sentimentale from the Op. 51 piano pieces. Odd, however, that Tchaikovsky’s cello arrangement of the Andante cantabile from his First Quartet has been omitted as there was more than enough room for it; as there was for two song transcriptions – namely Legend, the fifth of his Op. 54 set, and Was I Not a Little Blade of Grass?, the seventh of his Op. 47 set – the composer also devised and which would have helped to place what is heard here in a wider, more balanced perspective.
What has been included is the second version of the fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet with (surprisingly?) its first commercial recording. Those familiar with the 1869 original will find this much closer to the third and definitive version from 1880 with the masterly introduction now in place (albeit its climax slightly underscored) then a very different lead-in (not a little akin to Balakirev) to the coda, which here seems rather over-protracted next to that of eight years later. All the right pieces are here, just in a different and ultimately less effective order.
Does it all work?
As a programme, it does. Certainly the Rococo Variations is much more effective a creative entity as Tchaikovsky conceived it, so making his reluctance to overrule Fitzhagen the more perplexing, while the other pieces with cello afford ready-made encore material Schwabe no doubt includes in his own concerts. Ward and his Aachen forces accompany sympathetically, before coming into their own with Romeo and Juliet – a fascinating intermediate version that, for all its failings, was worth making available to Tchaikovsky afficionados in this recording.
Is it recommended?
Indeed so. The performances are never less than well-attuned to the music and lack nothing in conviction, enhanced with weightily immediate sound and insightful booklet annotations. Those attracted (and why not?) to this programme should not hesitate to acquire this release.
Naresh Sohal Aalaykhyam Ia; Chiaroscuro Ib; Kavita Ic; Surya (all 1970)d; Hexade; Night’s Poet (both 1971)f; Aalaykhyam II (1972)g; Poems of Tagore II (1976)h; Inscape (1979)I; The Unsung Song (1993)j; Foray (2006)k
Heritage Records HTGCD122-3 [2 discs, 151’36”] English texts included Remastering Engineer Paul Arden-Taylor
Live performances and broadcasts (London unless stated): d20 April 1971, St John’s Smith Square e13 July 1971, Goldsmiths College; c1 February 1972, Queen’s College, Birmingham; g 1 May 1973 and a 25 September 1974, Queen Elizabeth Hall, b 5 January 1977, BBC Studios, Manchester; h 22 August 1977, Purcell Room; f 8 February 1978, Wigmore Hall; i 18 November 1979, The Round House; j 28 November 1993, Du Maurier Theatre, Toronto; k 16 June 2006, Wilton’s Music Hall
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Heritage continues the extensive series of archival recordings of Naresh Sohal (1939-2018) with this double album featuring vocal and instrumental works, most heard in their premiere performances by a roster of artists synonymous with contemporary music during this period.
What’s the music like?
Although previous issues on this label have tended to focus on those large-scale pieces which established or consolidated Sohal’s reputation, his output abounds in works with more modest dimensions or forces. This release collates various of these in parallel vocal and instrumental sequences as amount to a representative overview of their composer’s career. These underline the continual evolution of his idiom, whatever its stylistic changes, while also making the case – if such were needed – for their revival in what has now become a very different music scene.
To a poem from Tagore’s The Gardner (set a half-century before by Zemlinsky as the opening movement of his LyricSymphony), Kavita I allows Sohal’s aural imagination free-rein with its fraught instrumental movements leading into the eloquent vocal setting. Surya sets texts from the Shakuntalam and Rig Veda in music dense and evocative, charged and incantatory. Night’s Poet draws on Tagore’s The Fugitive as it veers from the speculative to the ecstatic before an alluring close; Poems of Tagore II also draws on that collection in sensuous music with cello as much a vocal element as the two mezzos. Inscape has recourse to Tagore’s Lover’s Gifts in its hieratic aura with fastidiously variegated choral textures, then The Unsung Song draws on Tagore’s Gitanjali in an ethereal exploration of the beyond necessarily remaining unresolved.
As to the instrumental selection, Aalaykhyam I proceeds in starkly contrasted episodes and a disjunction eschewed in Aalaykhyam II with its subtle but never anodyne evolution of motifs that evoke a more inviting ‘abode’. Coming between these chronologically, Hexad favours a methodical yet cumulative unfolding across six movements such that the furtive anticipation of the first meets the assertive fulfilment of the sixth; while Chiaroscuro I turns brass quintet into a succession of overlapping, often conflicting gestures that merge into a vibrant if short-lived recessional. From here to Foray is to jump ahead some 35 years with music of greater expressive focus, distilled into an Adagio then Allegro as might equate to ‘song’ and ‘dance’ were it not for a shifting of ideas and moods across what amounts to a most unlikely diptych.
Does it all work?
Pretty much throughout. Part of the fascination with Sohal’s output are the ways he tackles – and almost always solves – different considerations in successive works, taking the solutions through to the next project so that a consistency of method becomes evident alongside those of form or expression. The performances lack for little in conviction and have been expertly remastered to make them sound more than adequate. More than this, however, it extends the discography of musicians whose contributions to the cause of new music cannot be gainsaid.
Is it recommended?
Indeed it is. The booklet features insightful (if occasionally contentious) notes on each piece by Utsyo Chakraborty along with a detailed biographical overview by Janet Swinney. What has already proved an invaluable series hopefully has several further instalments still to run.
Kreutzer Quartet [Peter Sheppard Skærved and Mihailo Trandafilovsky (violins), Clifton Harrison (viola, Quartet no.3), Morgan Goff (viola, Quartet no.4), Neil Heyde (cello)]; Peter Sheppard Skærved (violin, Sonata)
Robert Saxton String Quartet no.3 (2009) String Quartet no.4 (2018) Sonata for Solo Violin ‘Reflections in Time’ (2023)
Métier Records MEX77138 [73’23”] Producer Peter Sheppard Skærved Engineer Adaq Khan
Recorded 2019 at St. George’s, Headstone, Harrow (String Quartet no.3); 2024 at Hastoe Village Hall, Tring (String Quartet no.4, Sonata for Solo Violin)
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
The enterprising Métier Records label continues coverage of Robert Saxton on a release featuring his Third and Fourth String Quartets, with his Solo Violin Sonata, in readings by Peter Sheppard Skærved or the Kreutzer Quartet who had commissioned and premiered two of these pieces.
What’s the music like?
String quartets range across the greater part of Saxton’s composing, but that once designated his ‘First Quartet’ from 1982 was long ago withdrawn and its place taken by the Fantazia of 1993. His second quartet, 1997’s Songs, Dances and Ellipses was written for the Chilingirian Quartet’s 25th anniversary while recorded by the Kreutzer for its miscellany Northern Lights (Métier MSV28507). Subsequent quartets were written for and premiered by the Arditti and Kreutzer quartets, with which latter Saxton’s collaboration stretches back over three decades.
Comprising five movements, the Third Quartet is a telling example of the interplay between serial and tonal practices characterizing Saxton’s music these past two decades. Departure and Return traces its methodical trajectory away from and back to the note D, with Winter Light a varied intermezzo before the animated scherzo Dance; after this, Sea Ground is a passacaglia whose sustained build-up and gradual subsidence makes way for Continuing Journey – a finale such as revisits the opening movement in a spirit of purposeful renewal.
Its seven movements on a larger scale, the Fourth Quartet is described by its composer as a ‘‘Creation/Life cycle’’ as inferred by the opening Wavebreak, its motivic constituents duly intensified in the passacaglia Time Spiral while etherealized in Nightscape. Finding their respective cues in Siegfried Sassoon and T. S. Eliot, the ensuing sections are akin to scherzo and slow movement. Hymn then becomes an extended introduction to the final Daybreak, revisiting previous material though now with an unforced yet affecting sense of affirmation.
Between these pieces, Reflections in Time is a sonata for solo violin whose five (untitled) movements take inspiration from landscapes and seascapes as drawn by Sheppard Skærved, the work’s commissioner and dedicatee; his residing on the opposite side of the Thames also influencing this music as regards the eddying of its textures and the temporal (though never scenic) vistas effected by the five pitch-centres heard during its course. For all its technical intricacy, this is music as vivid or as imaginative in its evocation as any Saxton has written.
Does it all work?
It does. While it would be naive to suggest the relationship between tonal and serial facets of these pieces as equating to that age-old duality between ‘heart’ and ‘brain’, there could be no doubting the expressive spontaneity which arises out of their formal cohesion. A balance that, achieved by (surprisingly?) few composers from Saxton’s generation, makes his more recent music (at least) as appealing as it is engrossing. Sound leaves nothing to be desired, with the composer’s pithy annotations complemented by the violinist’s more discursive observations.
Is it recommended?
It is. Anyone who has enjoyed such recent pieces as the symphony Scenes from the Epic of Gilgamesh) will find these three works no less representative of Saxton’s maturity, and one looks forward to more recordings of what has become an individual and fascinating output.
Thurlow The Will of the Tones (2004) Bussey Floreat Coll. Reg. (2021) Burrell Pentecost (2017) Homage to Haydn (2009) by Tim Watts, Colin Riley, Cecilia McDowall, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Michael Zev Gordon and Jeremy Thurlow Riley Joplin Jigsaws (2018) Percy Chop and Change (2018) Spicer Two Pieces for James (2010) Briggs Willows and Jitterbug (2014)
First Hand Records FHR181 [83’03”] Producer Simon Weir Engineer Ben Connellan
Recorded 2-4 December 2022 at Menuhin Hall, Stoke d’Abernon, Surrey
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
First Hand Records issues this latest recital from Matthew Schellhorn, a collection of pieces by present-day composers with whom he has collaborated (often extensively) that amounts to an inclusive overview of his musical preoccupations and sympathies – odd or otherwise.
What’s the music like?
This album opens at the beginning with Schellhorn’s first large-scale commission – a scintillating while demanding workout by Jeremy Thurlow that wrests musical cohesion out of pianistic fragmentation prior to its subtly conclusive coda. By contrast, Martin Bussey contributes a brace of pieces drawing repose from a tribute to author Philip Radcliffe and a lively coranto with that to conductor Philip Ledger. Diana Burrell’s work is the most substantial, utilizing the plainchant Veni Sancte Spiritus as cantus firmus for this three-movement sequence – the opening one a little too discursive in its unfolding, but the central panel distilling meditative calm then the finale building to a powerful apotheosis before subsiding into limpid serenity. Very different in every sense is Homage to Haydn, a six-piece sequence – intended to be played in the order here – that was written to commemorate the bicentenary of Haydn’s death in 2009. The constituent pieces are however no less revealing of the personas of their respective writers; an anthology saying much about how this totemic figure is regarded by a representative sextet of British composers with notably different idioms and aesthetics.
One of these pieces being by Colin Riley duly leads into his own commission – six brief yet resourceful pieces taking their cue from four distinct rags by Scott Joplin: suffice to add that these latter can feel more oblique in their allusions than their anagrams. The work by Robert Percy started out very differently from that heard here – Schellhorn and its composer having refashioned it into a sequence of mobiles (eight out of a potential 10 included) fastidious of texture and elusive in content: there being evidently more than 40,000 possible permutations at least means it need never sound the same way twice. There could be nothing less arbitrary than birthday-tributes to the Reverend James Potts by Paul Spicer, a lively jaunt followed by a pensive pavane that underlines the love of both composer and recipient for the clavichord miniatures by Herbert Howells. Finally to Roger Briggs, the American composer whose harmonic eloquence then rhythmic energy are gratefully seized on for what is a wholly apposite conclusion to this programme.
Does it all work?
Pretty much throughout. Listeners will inevitably prefer one or other composer to another, but there is no doubting the respect in which they hold Schellhorn, nor of the conviction which he brings to all this music. It helps that his instrument (not specified in the booklet) has been so faithfully captured, its tonal definition enhanced with the spacious surround-sound mix made possible by Dolby Atmos. As these pieces are either world premiere recordings or first commercial recordings, a substantial amount of new piano repertoire is made available herein.
Is it recommended?
Indeed it is. Schellhorn contributes detailed and highly personable annotations, and one looks forward to more such anthologies from this source. No doubt he includes many of these pieces in his recitals, though there is no reason why other enterprising pianists should not follow suit.
Arcana.fm 