Dvorak / Arenas / Ishii - Cello Works - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Dvorak - Cello Works [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/10/2014

Respected as both a soloist and chamber musician, Ashley Sandor Sidon is the Briggs Endowed Professor of Cello at Drake University and Executive Director of the Zenith Chamber Music Festival. As an invited performer and clinician, Sidon's credits include international solo performances across China, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, and Brazil. Nationally, her performances as a chamber musician and as an orchestral soloist have taken her to the leading universities, chamber music festivals, and concert stages from Maine to California. On her new , all of the works but one have been arranged by Sidon. Pieces include works ranging from Dvorak and Bruch to contemporary composers David Popper and Miguel del Aguila.

Philip Cannon's Concertino for piano and strings (1951) dates from his formative years. It was written for the Petersfield Festival, where it was premiered on 27 January 1951 by soloist Joseph Cooper, with the Petersfield Orchestra conducted by Kathleen Merritt. This lively, neo-classical piece has achieved over a thousand performances internationally. Though John Addison's Concertino for piano and orchestra is, for the most part, couched in a light-hearted language, it is the product of a serious, and unfailingly inventive, approach to keyboard and orchestral writing. Speaking of the work to Lesie Ayre of the London Evening News, the composer remarked that, 'it is a real concerto in the full sense of the word I would not be ashamed to show the work to any first-class pianist'. Francis Chagrin maintained an intensely practical and unpretentious attitude towards his own craft, observing that, 'My music is not for first performances - it is just to be played'. His Piano Concerto was first performed by soloist Franz Osborn, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer, at an SPNM Experimental Rehearsal held at the Royal College of Music on 4 February 1944. Conversation Piece by John Addison was written in 1958 to a commission from the BBC Concert Orchestra for that year's British Light Music Festival. John Addison felt that, by the late-1950s, too great a divide had opened up between serious and light music 'Concertgoers think contemporary music is so alarmingly serious that when confronted with a mildly witty turn of phrase, they assume something has gone wrong. I remember the astonished sigh of relief when, in the course of introducing one of my chamber works, I told the audience I would not mind if they smiled'. In Conversation Piece, Addison exploits to the full his talent to amuse and divert.