Category Archives: Chamber music

On Record – Francesco Celata, Roger Benedict & Daniel Herscovitch – Peripheral Visions: Australian Clarinet Trios (Heritage Records)

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Francesco Celata (clarinet); Roger Benedict (viola); Daniel Herscovitch (piano)

Margaret Sutherland Trio in C major (1935)
Peter Dart Peripheral Visions (2021-22)
Roger Smalley Clarinet Trio (1992-99, rev. 2001)
Andrew Schultz Stick Dance no.2 Op.22b (1989)
Richard Vella Tango (1990)
Brett Dean Night Window (1993)

Heritage Records HTGCD119 [71’25”]English texts included
Producer David Kim-Boyle Engineer David Kinney

Recorded 27 & 29 November 2023, 14 & 15 April 2025 at Verbrugghen Hall, Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Heritage releases an enterprising anthology of pieces for clarinet trio from three generations of Australian composers that, in the process, demonstrates a stylistically varied while always imaginative approach at the forefront of these consistently assured and committed recordings.

What’s the music like?

Thanks to recent revivals (not least her tone poem Haunted Hills at last year’s Prom season), the importance of Margaret Sutherland in the context of Australian music is well established. Unheard for eight decades, her Clarinet Trio typifies the unforced Classicism of her maturity – whether in that modal tinge of its restrained opening Allegro, winsome poise of its central Adagio or the amiable impetus of its closing Allegro giocoso. It certainly provides a telling contrast with Stick Dance by Andrew Schultz which, as reworked from his earlier piece for larger ensemble, leaves a distinctive impression through often disjunctive contrasts and an ominously visual quality doubtless emanating from its inspiration in Indonesian puppetry.

At the forefront of new music in the UK and subsequently Australia, Roger Smalley latterly found a productive rapprochement with the musical past as demonstrated by his Piano Trio. Its concise sonata-form design is overlaid with that of variations in what becomes a process of continual development away from then back to that melodic fragment from the finale of Brahms’ Clarinet/Viola Sonata in E flat. From the intrinsically musical to the overtly visual – Peripheral Visions finds Peter Dart referencing poems by W. G. Sebald or drawings by Jan Peter Tripp as it unfolds from stealthy dialogue in ‘Reflections and Shadows’, via contrasts of darkness and light in ‘Above the Somme’, to emotive effects of colour in ‘After Cézanne’. The no less visual (and theatrically derived) immediacy of Richard Vella’s Tango makes for an ideal upbeat to Night Window, Brett Dean’s engagingly oblique take on the piano trio as genre or medium. Here an ‘Introduction’ of cadenzas for bass clarinet and viola leads into a ‘Fast, vigorous’ movement, with piano making its presence felt in music incisive and agile. There follows ‘Variations’, on a chorale-like theme whose otherness is as pervasive on the brief first four of these as on a more extended fifth variation that crystallizes the expressive essence overall. It only remains for ‘Return’ to bring about closure, its capricious progress drawing salient motivic facets from across the work into purposeful and inevitable accord.

Does it all work?

Very much so. What comes across most tellingly throughout this recital is a lack of inhibition, shared by these composers, when it comes to writing for a medium already much favoured by those in France and Germany during the previous century. The highly distinct nature of these three instruments is inevitably exploited; so too their timbral or textural similarities for what can equally become an ensemble unified as to its overall sound and conception. In touching on both premises, these three musicians convey the potential of all six pieces in full measure.

Is it recommended?

It is. Sound could hardly be improved on for clarity or definition, without sacrificing warmth, while the booklet note features succinctly informative commentaries by five of the composers as part of an overview that in itself segues unobtrusively between description and biography.

Listen / Buy

You can explore purchase options at the Heritage Records website

Published post no.2,902 – Saturday 30 May 2026

On Record – Naresh Sohal: Vocal & Instrumental Music (Heritage Records)

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cfJane Manning (soprano); hMargaret Cable, jElizabeth Turnball, hSarah Walker (mezzo-sopranos); fAlan Hacker, fEdward Pillinger (clarinets); hkRohan de Saram (cello); fPeter Seymour (perc); kAnanda Surkalan (piano); aLondon Sinfonietta, dAmbrosian Singers, gEnglish Chamber Orchestra / Sir Andrew Davis; iSingcircle / Gregory Rose; eLondon Contemporary Players / Elgar Howarth; cNash Ensemble / Justin Connolly; jNew Music Concerts / Robert Aitken; bNorthern Brass Ensemble / Lionel Friend

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 Lyric Symphony), 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.

Listen / Buy

You can explore purchase options at the Heritage Records website. Click on the name to read more about composer Naresh Sohal

Published post no.2,898 – Tuesday 26 May 2026

On Record – Kreutzer Quartet, Peter Sheppard Skærved – Robert Saxton: String Quartets & Solo Violin Sonata (Métier Records)

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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.

Listen / Buy

You can explore purchase options at the Métier Records website. You can click on the link to read Arcana’s review of Saxton’s Scenes from the Epic of Gilgamesh & The Resurrection of the Soldiers, or click on the names for more on the Kreutzer Quartet, Peter Sheppard Skærved and composer Robert Saxton

Published post no.2,897 – Monday 25 May 2026

On this day in 1946 – Charles Ives premieres

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by Ben Hogwood. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

On this day, 80 years ago, an important concert featuring premieres by Charles Ives took place at the McMillin Theatre, Columbia University, New York City.

Three works were given their premieres by a group of graduate students from the Juilliard School – two short pieces for orchestra, The Unanswered Question and Central Park In The Dark, and the String Quartet no.2. Listened in sequence they give insight into Ives’s originality as a composer, which shines as brightly today as it did then:

Published post no.2,884 – Monday 11 May 2026

On this day 90 years ago – the first performance of Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’

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by Ben Hogwood. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

On this day in 1936, the first performance took place of Prokofiev’s much-loved Peter and the Wolf. This piece was commissioned by the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow, and given its first performance on May 2 in the Large Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Prokofiev dedicated the work to his children.

You can enjoy the witty and touching setting below, in an arrangement for chamber ensemble at the Royal College of Music, narrated by Lucy Hollins and conducted by Sam Scheer:

Published post no.2,875 – Saturday 2 May 2026