The Apollo Baroque Consort’s Passiontide: Holy Week in the Courts of Europe 1600-1745 has been warmly reviewed by Paul Spicer, following its release on May 5th, 2012.

Spicer, well known as a choral conductor, composer and specialist in new English choral music praised the performances of soloist Chris Fitzgerald-Lombard and organist Joe Waggott, and the depth and richness of the choir and instrumental acoustics:

This recording is one of the most beguiling I have enjoyed in recent years. Rare, lyrical, involving music sung musically and intelligently by Chris Fitzgerald-Lombard and supported sensitively and unobtrusively by Joe Waggott makes this CD a must for any music lover. The supporting cast of singers and instrumentalists add to the colour and variety of the sound world and the generous acoustic of the wonderful Pearson church of St Alban, Highgate, Birmingham provides a suitable halo to the recorded sound which is excellent – clear, warm and present.

Waggott and Fitzgerald-Lombard state that one of the aims of the Apollo Baroque Consort (the ensemble’s name) is ‘to nurture and expose some of the vast young talent in the early music world and to give young performers opportunities to perform this music to a professional standard’. This is a laudable aim and both these young musicians from Birmingham Conservatoire demonstrate their professionalism at every turn. But, as much as anything else, the overriding and lasting impression is the love of the music and the sheer physicality of the music making which connects at every turn.

Now on my third straight through listen I expect this disc to join me on my desert island to which I would retire with pleasure in this company.

Paul Spicer
Paul Spicer is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an Honorary Research Fellow of Birmingham University, an Honorary Fellow of Birmingham Conservatoire, a Trustee of the Finzi Trust, Chairman of the Finzi Friends, Vice-President of the Herbert Howells Society, and Advisor to the Sir George Dyson Trust. A full biography, including information about Paul’s latest performances, workshops and diary, is available at www.paulspicer.com

Track listings, album information, and MP3 or disc orders are available online at www.conviviumrecords.co.uk.

# # #
Notes to Editors
Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of this work, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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Track listings, album information, and MP3 or disc orders are available online here.

The above review and article first appeared in The BBC Music Magazine December Issue 2011.
Copyright © BBC Music Magazine. All rights reserved. Used by permission. www.bbcmusicmagazine.co.uk

BBC Music Mag Dec 2011 p.91 (“Brief Notes”):

Blumenfeld

Deux morceaux etc

Jonathan Powell (piano)

Convivium Records CR009 £9.99

Felix Blumenfeld (pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and teacher of Horowitz) was a minor master.

Powell makes a persuasive case for his music’s occasional revival. (Jeremy Siepmann) ****

# # #

Notes to Editors
Jonathan Powell is a pianist and composer. He has performed widely in Europe, as well as in Russia and the US; he has also appeared on national radio of many countries and recorded about 20 CDs. Read more here.

Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of the Felix Blumenfeld: Episodes in the Life of a Dancer, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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Here’s what the International Record Review’s Mark Tanner had to say about Jonathan Powell’s album of keyboard music by Felix Blumenfeld, recently released on Convivium Records:

Felix Blumenfeld (1863-1931) was something of a polymath and pioneering spirit; the Russian pianist, conductor, composer and teacher mirrored in many ways the qualities that led to the successes of his rather better-celebrated friend Sergei Rachmaninov. Blumenfeld headed a flourishing chain of musical giants that started with his nephew and pupil, Heinrich Neuhaus, and culminated with the likes of Sviatoslav Richter and Vladimir Horowitz. When we glibly talk of the Russian school of pianism and its stunning capacity to stimulate individuality, it is to luminaries like Blumenfeld, Feinberg and Goldenweiser that we need to be doffing our caps.

Yet we must also recognize the enormous influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, who taught composition to Blumenfeld in St Petersburg; it was under his tutelage that Blumenfeld would become noticed by Belyayev, a much lauded and prominent figure without whose endorsement wider acclaim would have been an uphill struggle.

Blumenfeld¹s compositions for the piano run into three figures, and on this recording made at Durham University in 2008, Jonathan Powell selects six sets of pieces plus the Nocturne-Fantaisie, the earliest work on the disc despite being penned in the composer¹s early thirties. The music is high-octane Romantic, with comparisons easily made with Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, but there are many individual flavours to savour too, and it is surely these that attract Powell, whose CV tells of many appearances as recitalist and concerto soloist, especially in Eastern Europe.

The unidentified writer of the booklet notes (whom I am sadly therefore not able to congratulate or thank for several of the details I¹ve hitherto outlined) concentrates almost exclusively on the man, not his repertory, and in a sense this better equips the listener to arrive at personal judgements about the worthiness of the music. The Nocturne-Fantaisie, just shy of ten minutes long, is a fulsome and intense piece, and the weightiness of the material immediately draws us into Blumenfeld¹s orbit, where the whole keyboard is in play for much of the time and a conspicuous degree of pianism is needed to meet the challenges head-on. There are occasions, I would suggest, when the bravura passages become a little self-serving, but these are largely balanced out by the grande ligne that threads through the work as a whole. One is carried along by the splendid harmonies and sparkling flourishes, though the music is certainly not devoid of poetry.

The Sonate-Fantaisie, Op. 46 written in 1913, is, if anything, even more stirring and ambitious, although one wonders just how the composer will be able to sustain the succession of near operatic climaxes, having reached several apotheoses within the first third of this single-movement piece. It is to Powell¹s credit that he grapples with the virtuosic passages so manfully but also teases out the moments of reprieve with patience and poise.

Some of the more attractive music included is to be found in the Episodes dans la vie d¹une danseuse, Op. 52, three short and by no means easy pieces, dedicated to Horowitz. This is a wonderful set, written in the composer¹s later years and reflecting much sophisticated romanticism ­ it quite justifies its position as the title work for the album. Powell is on stupendous form in this piece, pushing on through the highly complex passages with great stamina and pulling out some extraordinary effects with the fingers and pedals. I also draw your attention to the Deux moments dramatiques, Op. 50, which again have immediate appeal and show the composer at the peak of his maturity, with moments of impressionism intertwining with the bolder gestures that inevitably win through; the Presto is alarmingly devilish to play but a sheer joy to behold.

The sound on the recording is very good, and Powell (who produced the disc) is to be applauded in conjunction with Adaq Khan (engineer and editor) for achieving just the right amount of bloom and edge.

Mark Tanner

Track listings, album information, and MP3 or disc orders are available online here.

The above review and article first appeared in The International Record Review December Issue 2011.
Copyright © The International Record Review. All rights reserved. Used by permission. http://recordreview.co.uk

# # #

Notes to Editors
Jonathan Powell is a pianist and composer. He has performed widely in Europe, as well as in Russia and the US; he has also appeared on national radio of many countries and recorded about 20 CDs. Read more here.

Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of the Peter Philips: An Englishman Abroad, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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Convivium Singers’ recently released album of select motets by English master composer Peter Philips has received powerful praise at review, accoladed as the “discovery and disc of the year by far” by Rhinegold Reviewer for Choir & Organ Magazine, Michael Quinn.

“The rehabilitation of Peter Philips, a prolific but until recently all but neglected RC contemporary of Byrd, continues apace with this dazzlingly sung compendium of Latin motets composed in exile from his Protestant birthplace. Most of the pieces are from the 1612 collection Cantiones Sacrae Quinis Vocibus and reveal an ear-catching facility for experimentation even within the most conservative of forms’” Quinn said.

“The satin-soft, luminous sheen of the mixed-voice Convivium Singers is exquisitely attuned to diaphanously beautiful music pregnant with the quiet promise of release in religious ecstasy and shot through by the emotional longing for home. A beautifully presented booklet with excellent notes adds to the already considerable pleasure. My discovery and disc of the year by far.”

Philips’ music is enjoying a resurgence of late both on disc and in the concert hall, valued particularly for its blend of vibrant, continental feel and more conservative English virginalist style favoured by contemporary English master William Byrd.

The album collection of Philip’s motets, released on 14-track disc and recently in digital download format, marks Convivium Record’s third return to British music this year, with a recall for Organist David Price performing alongside the label’s resident performance choir, Convivium Singers, under the direction of Alex Norman.

Track listings, album information, and copies to order are available online at www.conviviumrecords.co.uk.

The above review and article first appeared in the November/December 2011 issue of Choir & Organ. Copyright © Rhinegold Publishing Ltd; all rights reserved. Used by permission. http://rhinegold.co.uk/

# # #

Notes to Editors
Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of the Peter Philips: An Englishman Abroad, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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The album marks the label’s third installation of British choral music this year, with label residents Convivium Singers returning under the direction of Alex Norman, with David Price on organ. The 14-track discs blends a vibrant selection of choral and organ music of distinctly continental flair and style, chosen in large part from Philips’s Cantiones Sacrae Quinis set of Latin motets (1612-1628).

A master English composer, born 1560/1, exiled to the Netherlands in 1582 and separated from English choral tradition, presumably in persecution for his Catholicism, Philips owes as much of his uniquely modern renaissance writing to Italian musical styles as to his English contemporary Byrd. In his 450th anniversary year, Philips is enjoying a resurgence of following and interest on disc and in the concert hall.

“Philips has really only in the last couple of years started receiving – in my opinion – vastly overdue and just recognition and acclaim as a striking and very accessible early music English composer” says Executive Producer, Adrian Green. “In every aspect of the disc we’ve aimed for an anniversary ‘Collectors Edition’ feel true to that, packaging the album artwork with an exciting contemporary-classical twist, and staying faithful musically to Philips’ work. It’s fantastic music, and a disc we’re really proud of.”

Peter Philips: An Englishman Abroad is available to browse, sample, and pre-order now at www.conviviumrecords.co.uk, including track listings, album information and exclusive artwork previews.

Recorded at St Alban the Martyr, Highgate, February & July 2011 by Convivium Singers.
Directed by Alexander Norman and accompanied by Dr. David Price.
Engineered and edited by Adaq Khan & Adrian Green.
Produced by Andrew King & David Millinger. Executive Producer: Adrian Green

# # #

Notes to Editors
Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of the Peter Philips: An Englishman Abroad, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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For latest news follow Convivium Records:
Facebook www.facebook.com/ConviviumRecords
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Jonathan Powell’s: Episodes in the Life of a Dancer (Felix Blumenfeld) is available to browse, sample, and pre-order now at www.conviviumrecords.co.uk, including track listings, album information and exclusive artwork previews.

# # #

Notes to Editors
Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of the Peter Philips: An Englishman Abroad, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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John White: Piano Sonatas Nos. 2, 4, 7, 9, 11-14, 18, 19, 20, 23-25, 28, 30, 31 and 34,
with Jonathan Powell (piano).
Released by Convivium Records, Disc CR006 (£12.99, two discs, 2 hours 19 minutes).
Producer Adrian Green. Engineers John Lely, Adaq Khan.
Recorded dates October 28th-30th, 2006.

Martin Anderson on Adventures at the Keyboard

One would imagine that when a country has produced a composer who writes close on 200 piano sonatas, never mind a huge body of works in other genres, his seventy-fifth birthday would be the cause for a rash of concerts across the land, perhaps a Festschrift, at least an article or three in the national press. Such a man, John White, was 75 earlier this summer and yet the public celebrations were confined to a concert in the cramped but increasingly vital venue of the basement of Schotts, on Great Marlborough Street in central London, where a team of pianists, including White himself, played a selection of the 173 sonatas he so far has to his credit.

To be fair to the British musical establishment (not that it often deserves it), White has spent most of his career, as composer and performer, on its fringes, working in experimental music with composers like Cornelius Cardew, exploring minimalism in his Œsystem music¹ which generated patterns through random processes, writing electronic symphonies for early computers, and more. Such a man was never going to allow the easy pigeon-holing which precedes the ready identification that leads to general acceptance.

Of course, Britain has some of the most adventurous and enlightened independent CD labels in the world: one of them, then, will surely have released some recordings of White¹s music to mark the occasion. Not a bit: it is Convivium Records, a company I had never heard of before, and which seems to have only a handful of religious recordings in its catalogue, which has stepped forward with this generous selection of 18 sonatas. White was born (in Berlin, as it happens) on April 5th, 1936, and this double album was released on April 1st, 2011  the 155th birthday of Ferruccio Busoni, appropriately enough, given the importance of Busoni in White¹s own stylistic make-up.

Not all the sonatas are equally convincing, as is entirely to be expected with any prolific composer, let alone one like White, whose goals, influenced by his work with Cardew, have included a deliberate undermining of concert convention  not by avant-garde exaggeration but by turning the gestures of the standard forms against them, with deliberately excessive repetition of phrases and tongue-in-cheek banality. ŒSonatas¹, too, subverts the genre: taking a leaf from Scarlatti, most of them hover around the four- or five-minute-mark, although some are much longer. White also makes little attempt to hide his influences, and the habitual consonance and rhythmic predictability of much of this music give it a wide-eyed innocence at the same time as they impart a slyly ironic quality.

The works here are organized for contrast, which is as it should be, rather than chronologically; there¹s not much stylistic evolution to be found in the ten years (1957-67) covered in this selection in any case. The earliest piece here opens the second CD: the Second Sonata, from 1957, in four connected movements with a duration of 13-and-a-half minutes. The opening ŒSonata allegro¹ (marked Andantino) is angry, abrupt, Prokofievian; the second section, ŒBell Music¹, recalls Enescu¹s late evocations of distant childhood memories, out of which a darker tread emerges; a whirlwind scherzo reprises the mood of the opening movement before an angrily rhetorical rondo-cadenza with echoes of Sorabji (a novel form, as far as I¹m aware). Sonata No. 4 (1959), in four connected movements making 12 minutes of music, offers a series of gawky, ironically simplistic dances, often with a hint of something darker in the background. No. 7 (1960), two linked movements at five minutes, opens with a kind of mantra before gently morphing into a mild ballad. The seven-minute No. 9 (1960) first picks its way forward hesitantly, constantly sounding as if it really wants to launch into a fugue; a warmer Prokofievian texture temporarily pushes the idea out of earshot.

The first of the nine-minute No. 11¹s four movements, less tonally certain than most of its colleagues, is a hesitant Scriabinesque nocturne, the next is a moody tarantella, the third an aimless introspection and the fourth a proud march. No. 12, the second-shortest here at two-and-a-half minutes, has a bold, cocky, Alkanian manner, the opening fanfares giving ground to confident Busonian passagework; the three-minute No. 13, by contrast, is hesitant, feeling its way across the keyboard before finding release in a lyrical passage. White¹s unpredictability kicks in with No. 14, a 24-minute single movement which veers between obsessive repetition à la Schumann to Satiesque stasis, with jazzy riffs blowing over the background textures. The deliberate anti-development sometimes slows the music to a kind of ritual suspension of time.

No. 18 (1963), in three movements and almost a quarter-hour in length, opens over ringing repetitive chords, both hands offering ideas of seemingly deliberately banality which somehow acquire a kind of hypnotic effect; bell-like textures in the central movement point to Busoni¹s carillon-gestures; and the finale has the allegria of early Tippett. The opening of No. 19 (1963), at three-and-a-half minutes, is a beautiful questing passage that brushes past middle-period Beethoven, without losing an essential innocence and with a Busonian rush to close. The five-minute Sonata No. 20 (1963), which opens the first disc, amalgamates Chopin and Busoni, rather movingly; No. 23 (1965), a relatively spacious 11 minutes, is in no hurry to go anywhere, its ringing repeated-chord sequences and rambling passagework good-naturedly teasing the listener; No. 24 (1965), at seven minutes, takes well-nigh obsessional inspiration from the Busoni of the Fantasy after J. S. Bach; and No. 25 (also 1965), at four minutes, sends mock-Tudor arabesques around ringing chords.

No. 28 (1966), only a minute-and-a-half long, is a helter-skelter romp with Baroque echoes; No. 30 (1966) is a brief, four-minute barcarolle, rather like Alkan off-duty; No. 31 rambles agreeably around a series of repeated gestures and harmonies  as, indeed, do most of these pieces to some degree or other  which leads to a lovely chordal passage à la Alkan. Finally, for the moment, No. 34 (1967), at just over four minutes, sets up a pulsating bass while the treble hints at Prokofiev and more before the business is taken over by a repetitive folk-like figure.

These recordings reinforce Jonathan Powell¹s reputation as a crusader for the piano music that other pianists fail to notice. It would be easy to over-egg White¹s gentle irony; Powell gets the mock-innocent tone just right, maintaining its emotional ambiguity  just how seriously should we take this music? Its recurring ability to remain unarguably lovely even as its repetitions test the listener¹s attentiveness means that it never forfeits your sympathy. Another pianist-composer, Dave Smith, supplies helpful booklet notes. The recorded piano shows just a tiny hint of strain in the climaxes but is otherwise entirely acceptable.

That birthday concert opened with Powell¹s magisterial performance of White Symphony in Five Movements in Memory of Ch. V. Morhange (1961), itself a magisterial composition, 25 minutes long and yet still only part of White¹s Sonatina No. 8, which is some 90 minutes long (it was written during a period of gigantism, the composer explained). Ch. V. Morhange was, of course, Alkan, and White¹s work manages to tread the fine line between tribute and parody without losing an identity of its own. Hearing it in concert underlined just how much work the microphones have to do to catch up with White, and what rewards lie ahead if they ever do. In the meantime, this ear-opening set ought to be a mandatory purchase for anyone interested in the hidden history of the piano in the twentieth century.

Martin Anderson

# # #

Notes to Editors
Convivium Records, a private recording, production, and distribution label, based in London, UK, provides cost conscious opportunities for composers, performers, educators and students to release and market their music on disc and online globally to professional studio standard. With a range of label artists from contemporary British composers to cathedral choirs, performers and vocal ensembles, the label offers expertise across all aspects of private and commercial productions, with a team of engineers, performers, directors, producers and designers supporting projects from concept to album delivery and marketing.

Media Enquiries, Review Copies & Contact
For press enquiries, information, or to request review copies of the Peter Philips: An Englishman Abroad, please visit www.conviviumrecords.co.uk or contact John Bevan, Communications Director: john@conviviumrecords.co.uk | T. 0203 0515 835

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