SOMM Recordings announces the third and final volume of the enthusiastically received One Hundred Years of British Song, with tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson.
Focusing on songs written since 1950, Volume 3 celebrates what Williamson’s booklet note describes as “astonishment at the depth of expressivity of the poetry and music”.
SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce a musical journey around the four nations of the United Kingdom with Folk Songs of the British Isles.
Celebrating the “living, breathing heritage of British and Irish folksong down the ages”, the 27-track recital features soprano Janis Kelly, mezzos Yvonne Howard and Maria Jagusz, tenors Nicky Spence and Wynne Evans, baritone Mark Llewelyn Evans, jazz doyenne Elaine Delmar and actor- singer Kevin Whately.
Fiona Kelly (flute), Jean Kelly (harp) and pianists Michael Pollock and John Wilson provide instrumental contributions with singer Caroline McCausland accompanying herself on guitar.
SOMM Recordings announces Volume 2 of its revelatory survey of One Hundred Years of British Song with tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson.
An exciting new release of American Piano Sonatas from SOMM to remind us of 20th-century America’s achievements in music as in so much else. SOMM’s new collaboration with pianist Nathan Williamson who has been steeped in American music since his years as a student of piano and composition at Yale has produced an exhilarating disc brimming with dynamism and energy.
The disc includes sonatas by four very different American composers writing under very different circumstances: Leonard Bernstein, a charismatic, ambitious all-round musician in his student years; Aaron Copland, an established master at the height of his powers; Lou Harrison, an inveterate experimentalist setting himself a new problem; and Charles Ives, a dogged individualist insisting on his own way of doing things. In each case, the composer chose not to fit his music into conventional forms, but to rethink the whole idea of the sonata. America is after all the land of the clean sheet, the fresh start – of making things fresh, exciting and new.
Nathan, who leads a diverse and varied career as pianist, composer and artistic director studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Joan Havill and Malcolm Singer, at Oxford University with Robert Saxton, and at Yale with Martin Bresnick and Joan Panetti and American composer Ezra Laderman Dean of the Yale School of Music and President of American Academy of Arts and Letters, who died last year at the age of 90. Nathan has dedicated this recording to Laderman as a tribute to a great teacher whose far-reaching influence has inspired him to study the work of American composers in great depth.
SOMM Recordings launches a revealing three-volume survey of One Hundred Years of British Song with tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Nathan Williamson.
Compiled to reflect the rich variety of British song, Volume 1 throws a spotlight on composers who made a considerable contribution to the song repertoire but whose success in other genres often led to their songs being overlooked.
All four featured composers – Gustav Holst, Rebecca Clarke, Ivor Gurney and Frank Bridge – were born in the late 1800s and lived through the horrors of the First World War and the extraordinary social, cultural and political upheaval that followed.
Following Great American Sonatas, his admired debut on SOMM RECORDINGS, pianist Nathan Williamson turns to British piano music of the 20th century in Colour and Light, a revealing exploration of how the past influences the present and the new.
A century-spanning programme from Delius’s quixotic 1887 Nocturne (more familiar as An Nacht, the Florida Suite’s finale, here in Robert Threlfall’s 1986 transcription) to Anthony Herschel Hill’s combustible Toccata of 1985 also lights on three other distinctive but highly contrasted composers.
SOMM Recordings celebrates the centenary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth in style with a remarkable 1993 live broadcast recording – never before issued and newly mastered for CD – with the Hannover Philharmonie conducted by Iain Sutherland.
SOMM Recordings announces the perfect escape from Lockdown Blues with a collection of appealing piano miniatures compiled and performed by Peter Dickinson to chase all your cares away.
“Nathan Williamson’s earlier SOMM CD of Great American Sonatas made a considerable impression and he follows that success with another disc of distinction in choice of music and performance. … Williamson raises the stakes of musical appreciation with little-known but superb music.…Williamson’s notes are excellent, a perfect complement to his admirable playing and SOMM’s fine […]
“Nathan Williamson’s Colour and Light is a memorably enterprising programme of British piano music performed with unwavering commitment and intensity, including a first recording of Anthony Herschel Hill’s Litany and Toccata. … [which] contrasts a ‘spiritual, trnascendent world’ with trailblazing brilliance… No praise could be high enough of Williamson’s performances, where, as in his previous […]