British Music Society - British Music Society

IVOR GURNEY: Songs 2

Feb 25, 2025 | CD reviews

Marcus Farnsworth baritoneEric McElroy piano NAXOS 8.574599 Part of Naxos’s laudable English Song Series, this is the successor to the Gurney disc by Susan Bickley and Iain Burnside from 2009. As such, it may be considered well overdue and compels the hope that...

Letter: researching the van Noorden family

Feb 24, 2025 | Inbox

I am writing on behalf of the Carl Rosa Trust Ltd., with whom I volunteer. We are searching for information about any living descendants of the van Noorden family. I understand that Walter van Noorden died without any children, but that his brother Alfred did indeed...

John W. Duarte: ‘For the joy of it’

Feb 24, 2025 | Features

‘We made music just for the joy of it’, is a quote, describing the pre-WWII music-making by my father, the British composer, arranger, editor, writer and teacher, John W. Duarte. Jazz was his favoured style, but this was soon overtaken by an interest in the classical...

Wilfred Heaton: His Life, His Music

Feb 21, 2025 | Book reviews

Paul Hindmarsh PHM PublishingISBN 978-1-0369-0132-5 This is a remarkable story of a pioneering composer who wrote largely for brass bands, yet considered that they were, in general, not fully committed to serious music. Wilfred Heaton (1918–2000) fell between two...

New release features long forgotten Elgar recordings

Feb 18, 2025 | News

The continuing collaboration of SOMM Recordings and Lani Spahr has produced another release of long forgotten and neglected recordings which highlight Sir Adrian Boult’s life-long championing of the music of Edward Elgar. On 17 February, 1918, in wartime London,...