from the British Music Society
News, reviews & features
English Music Festival moves to Dartington Hall
After 19 years The English Music Festival is embarking on a new chapter as it prepares to welcome audiences in the spectacular setting of Dartington Hall in Devon…
Music news in brief
A round-up of music related news from January 2026 including an award to a distinguished musician and the closure of a cathedral school…
Trust launches national choral music campaign
The Cathedral Music Trust has launched a national campaign to secure UNESCO Living Heritage recognition for English sacred choral music…
New album features Welsh composer Robin Stephens
An album of orchestral music by the Welsh-born and Manchester-based composer Robin Stephens is being released by Toccata on 6 March. The compositional career of Robin Stevens, who was born in 1958, is divided into two periods, separated by a period of illness. The...
Prayer for Peace
Manchester-based Prima Facie Records has launched an interesting album Prayer for Peace featuring of music for strings, recorder, voice and piano featuring British composers including Thomas Pitfield, Rhona Clarke and Sasha Johnson Manning. The idea of putting...
ELGAR: Light out of Darkness
The great joy of this disc is threefold. Firstly, we are treated to some pieces of Elgar that one rarely encounters, such as the three early settings of O Salutaris Hostia…
HUW WATKINS: Symphony No. 2 | Fanfare for the Hallé
The Concerto For Orchestra again opens with the familiar…rippling woodwinds, and throughout, the sound world is identical to that of the Symphony – bursting with the same tricks of orchestration and rhythm…
OVERTURES FROM THE BRITISH ISLES, VOLUME 3
With such a smorgasbord of preludes, this disc is best sampled sparingly, but everything here is finely played and cleanly recorded. Many of these scores are little-known…
WILLIAM SMETHERGELL: Six Overtures Op. 2
In his very full notes on the music contained in this recording, Jürgen Schaarwächter makes the point that almost all Haydn’s contemporaries in Britain have largely been forgotten…
COLIN RILEY: Along the Line
Colin Riley is Reader in Composition at Brunel University. His music draws on a range of elements including new technologies, improvisation, song-writing and large-scale classical form…