Gramophone Magazine names Kathleen Ferrier In New York the February 2020 Reissue/Archive Editor’s Choice! “A treasure, to be sure. Four years before Bruno Walter’s celebrated, indeed classic Vienna recording (1952) with Kathleen Ferrier, the man who conducted the world premiere of Mahler’s pantheistic symphony with voices takes his newest discovery from the Edinburgh Festival to […]

“[Peter Donohoe] and SOMM’s recording team return to the Birmingham Conservatoire and to a Bechstein piano that sounds ideal in this music — beatuifully sonorous… Donohoe takes each work at face value, keeping shifts of tempo and impromptu ornamentation to a minimum but still playing with the sensitivity that was palpable in Vol. 1. … […]

“[This] is an important addition to Ferrier’s discography, and she is indeed marvellous in it, singing ‘Esurientes implevit bonis’ with that unique, indescribable tone and expressive sincerity that characterises her finest work. She also, one notices, exercises a steadying effect on some of her colleagues. … This is grand-manner Bach…Playing and choral singing are both enthusiastic… […]

“First recordings of two sets of piano pieces by Arnold Bax and Harriet Cohen (his charismatic muse and lover) adorn this latest helping of home-grown fare from the excellent Mark Bebbington. Cohen’s four Russian Impressions prove a charming find, the first two especially winning Bax’s approval. Bebbington lends them atmospheric and deftly affectionate advocacy, as he […]

“this recording reappears on Somm 20 years later, tying in with José Serebrier’s 80th birthday. Its main points of interest concern the conductor’s splendid orchestrations of the three piano Preludes. The first stands out for Serebrier’s witty and unpredictable use of brass instruments and his ingenuously varied cymbal fills when the main theme recapitulates. … […]

“Plenty of charismatic playing here, in a programme clearly planned to entertain. … This sequence was taken live from a concert in 2017 and the audience’s delight in it is audible… [a] splendid time…is clearly being had by all. … Johnson’s reimaginings of the two closing Strauss numbers are as frothy as a glass of […]

Explore “…Dutch baritone Henk Neven and mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge… are excellently supported in turn by Barry Wordsworth and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Liverpool-born Rudge is in refulgent voice for the darkly passionate Op 60 diptych of 1910, while it’s hard to imagine more sheerly beguiling renderings of either ‘The Wind at Dawn’ (1888) or ‘Pleading’ […]