Furrer / Haft / Fried / Trio Catch - Chamber Works - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sommer / Trio Image - Chamber Music [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/03/2017

British composer Michael Head (1900-1976) initially studied piano with Jean Adair, a student of famous Clara Schumann, and vocal performance with Fritz Marston. It was only in 1919 that he began studying composition in the class of Prof. Frederick Corder after he had been admitted to the Royal Academy of Music in London as a Sir Michael Costa scholarship holder. After completing his education, Head lectured at that university for many years. Peter Hope, born in 1930, is another representative of the British school of composers on the present album, also known under the pseudonym William Gardner. He gained fame as an outstanding arranger (he worked with the BBC Concert Orchestra on a number of occasions and orchestrated pieces by composers linked to the American film industry, e.g. John Williams, James Horner, or Laurence Rosenthal). Despite the fact that he has dealt mainly with arrangements and transcriptions throughout his career, his compositional output can be considered impressive. André Previn (1929-2019), an American artist, is mainly associated as a world-famous conductor, pianist, and promoter of outstanding violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. In this context, his compositional out-put seems to be unjustly forgotten. An international composer, Daniel Baldwin's music has been performed around the globe in Canada, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, Belgium, and Australia, just to name a few. His music is published exclusively by Imagine Music Publishing, through which he is the editor of a band/orchestra/choir series titled InchThe Pathways SeriesInch.

Since the 1960s the Danish composer and musician Anders Koppel, born in 1947, has being developing his musical creativity in every conceivable way, ranging from jazz, rock, Balkan music to chamber works, ballet music, film music and more than 40 solo concertos for every conceivable instrument. He was born into a musical family as a son of the pianist and composer Herman D. Koppel (1908-1998), one of the leading figures in Danish music in the 20th century. All Herman D. Koppel's four children became prominent musicians, and in the two following generations great new talents have still been emerging from the artistic Koppel family. Anders Koppel has with considerable energy preserved the luxuriance which was in the air, when in the 1960s he began to unfurl his life as a musician. Since the 1990s he has worked not least on compositions in classical forms, but without giving up his many concerts improvising music of all kinds played on his particularly favorite instrument, a Hammond B3 organ. Koppel's imagination and fecundity of ideas give his music a character of joie de vivre, curiosity and playfulness. Combined with his profound experience with written-down music it gives a wonderful sparkle to his works in classical forms which are unmistakably founded on the improviser's sharp ears for fertile ideas and the ability to create gripping music.