Lyrita Recorded Edition releases British Piano Concertos on 2 May 2025, with music by John Addison, Philip Cannon and Francis Chagrin, performed by soloist Simon Callaghan with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by William Boughton (SRCD.444)

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: ‘Concert goers 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.

Simon Callaghan performs internationally as a soloist and chamber musician, in parallel with a highly successful career as a recording artist. A favourite performer at the internationally-renowned Husum Festival of Piano Rarities in Germany, Callaghan’s recent sell-out concert was praised by VAN Magazine as a “cleverly curated recital full of discoveries” and by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “technically brilliant”.

Callaghan has developed a wide following and appears on a regular basis in the UK’s major concert halls, and on tours to Asia, North America and Europe. Recital partners have included Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Nicholas Daniel, Adrian Brendel, Feng Ning, Samuel West, Prunella Scales and Timothy West. BBC Young Musician of the Year Finalist Coco Tomita and Callaghan have a successful duo partnership which saw their first record released in 2022 on Orchid Classics. He is also a founding member of the London Piano Quartet, joining colleagues from the renowned Piatti Quartet to showcase the repertoire for piano quartet with a particular focus on revivifying works that have fallen into obscurity.

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Lyrita Records releases British 'Cello Works Volume Three with music by William Hurlstone, Felix Swinstead, Doreen Carwithen and Frank Bridge, with Lionel Handy, 'cello and Jennifer Walsh, piano, on 7 February 2025 (SRCD 441).

William Hurlstone’s Cello Sonata in D major (1899) was written for the noted cellist and composer May Mukle. In his review of the score, Havergal Brian opined that Hurlstone’s sonata ‘shows ripe and mature musicianship... The Adagio Lamentoso is unusual in its sustained eloquence... the slow movement and the lovely final Rondo standing out in a rare and attractive work’.

The manuscript of Felix Swinstead’s Cello Sonata was discovered by the pianist Clive Williamson, while he was clearing the house of Vivian Langrish and his wife Ruth Harte, Swinstead's friends. It is possible that this F major Sonata might have been written just before the composer’s death and never performed in public. According to Lionel Handy, Ruth was ‘a second study cellist and Swinstead may have thought a run-through, if not a performance, might be possible, but there is no record of any performance nor date of composition as yet’.

Doreen Carwithen’s 'Cello Sonatina (1944) draws upon the stringed instrument’s sonorous, lyrical qualities. The often-striking piano material is crucial to the unfolding narrative, rather than offering mere accompaniment and creates a genuine dialogue between the two protagonists.

Frank Bridge’s two-movement Cello Sonata was begun in 1913, but not completed until 1917. Bridge always looked fondly upon the Cello Sonata, which has proved to be one of the composer’s most popular chamber works and remains the most regularly played of all his substantial pieces for two players.
 
Lionel Handy
 
“Lionel Handy was principal cellist at the Academy of St Martin for ten years with whom he recorded and toured extensively throughout USA and Europe... As a soloist he has played as guest principal cellist with many of the UK’s leading orchestras including the Philharmonia, LSO, RLPO, LPO, ECO and Halle.”  © Royal Academy of Music
 
Jennifer Walsh
 
“Jennifer Walsh is a collaborative pianist and duo coach who performs across the UK and internationally.  She has given recitals at venues including Wigmore Hall, Sala Verdi Milano, Oslo Opera Housel and Xinghai Conservatory, China.” © Jennifer Walsh, 2023

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Lyrita Records releases a double album of Gavin Higgins, The Fairie Bride,  with Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Roderick Williams, The Three Choirs Festival Chorus and BBC National Orchestra Orchestra of Wales conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and Horn Concerto and Fanfare, Air and Flourishes for solo horn, with soloist Ben Goldscheider, and the BBCNOW conducted by Jaime Martin, on 7 February 2025 (SRCD 440).

Gavin Higgins’ music is bursting with authenticity. Everything he writes speaks in some way of where he comes from, of the land, of the community, of the family which formed him. He grew up in a working-class former mining community in the Forest of Dean, a borderland between England and Wales with its own dialect, a liminal place where Welsh songs and stories as well as English are in the air. It’s a place where brass band music is the chief legacy of the coalmines, the last of which closed a decade before Gavin was born and where the forest, with its sounds, its colours and its stories was a constant presence. Gavin has spoken evocatively - and perhaps romantically - about the music of the forest which surrounded him: sounds of foxes and deer mingled with brass bands, church choirs and occasional illegal raves. Nature and music, he says, are powerfully linked in his mind. © Gillian Moore
 
Horn Concerto
“… the pieces on this disc which feature the French horn -Horn Concerto and Fanfare, Air and Flourish- mark the first time that he has highlighted his own instrument in the solo slot. As ever, it was a personal connection which sparked the idea of the Horn Concerto - an approach from the horn virtuoso Ben Goldscheider, made in the full knowledge that this would reunite Gavin with his younger self. The Horn Concerto connects to the past in other ways. It’s written in E-flat, the key of famous Horn Concertos by Mozart and Strauss. It also amplifies and expands the sound of the solo horn by giving it a prominent relationship with the quartet of horns in the orchestra, calling to mind Robert Schumann’s blazing Konzertstuck from the middle of the 19th century and Gyorgy Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, written at the turn of the 21st.”

The Faerie Bride
Gavin looks west ward from the Forest of Dean to a Welsh tale from the Red Book of Hergest, an important mediaeval manuscript of Welsh history, poetry and stories. The legend of The Lady of the Lake tells of a water spirit who emerges from Llyn y Fan Fach in the Brecon Beacons and marries an earthly man, having insisted on a clear prenup agreement: if he strikes her three times (she uses the curious and ambiguous phrase ‘heart’s blow’ which suggests mental rather than physical cruelty) she will go back into the lake and take everything she has brought to the marriage with her. Tales of watery spirits who take human form to lure men to doom are abundant in European culture… but, Gavin says, ‘The Welsh myths are empowering, with strong female characters who set their own agenda. There is no coercion, theft, or kidnap but rather misunderstandings and cultural differences.’

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Lyrita releases its Chamber Music of William Busch album on 3 January 2025, with members of the Piatti Quartet, Simon Callaghan and Ashok Klouda (SRCD 439).

Three Pieces for Violin and Piano were written as individual works: as such, they can be presented separately or, if given collectively as a suite, played in any order. Busch wrote his Passacaglia for violin and viola in 1939: the score takes the form of a decisive, four-bar theme followed by thirty variants upon it. These mini variations range widely in character, from trenchant and forceful to airy and smooth.

A Memory for 'Cello and Piano was written for Elizabeth Poston. Busch subtly conveys the idea of a reminiscence suggested by the title with simple, lightly sketched ideas presented with an air of hazy nostalgia. Eventually, the feeling of distance and reserve created in the opening portion of the work is replaced by a more troubled mood. The music ends in sorrow with a heartfelt, steeply descending sequence for unaccompanied cello followed by the merest hint of the opening material.

The Quartet for Piano and Strings is the most substantial of William Busch’s chamber pieces. Although the composer’s lyrical gifts are much in evidence, the four movements are also rigorously concise. Considerable dramatic rewards are gained from the creative tension between the music’s unforced expressivity and the formal rigour with which Busch’s powerful themes are worked out.

The Suite for 'Cello and Piano is among Busch’s most searching and variegated instrumental works. In a postwar assessment of the score, The Times’ critic noted that its four pieces ‘reveal a sensitive and interesting mind’.

Elegy for 'Cello and Piano exploits fully the stringed instrument’s lyrical qualities and capacity for rich, autumnal colours. The work begins with an extended soliloquy for unaccompanied cello and the cellist continues to preside over the entire opening section, which features only a couple of brief interjections from the piano.  © Paul Conway

'The performances here are excellent. The members of the Piatti Quartet, violinist Michael Trainor, violist Zahra Benyounes and cellist Jessie Ann Richardson are joined by pianist Simon Callaghan and 'cellist Ashok Klouda. ... The recording in the Concert Hall, Wyastone Leys has been well judged and the notes, as mentioned, are in the best of hands – Paul Conway’s. Busch is a composer with a gift for expressive intensity.'
Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International, 25 November 2024

'This is wonderful and original music, superbly performed.'
Gary Higginson, British Music Society, 26 November 2024

'Aquest disc és per a nosaltres una revelació. La música serena de William Busch, interpretada impecablement pel Piatti Quartet, ens duu a un desenllaç emocionant i desafiant.'
Marçal Borotau, Sonograma, 29 December 2024

'William Busch (1901-45) whose Three Pieces for Violin and Piano (1943-44) and Passacaglia for Violin and Viola (1939) are among the gems of little-known English music. ... Confirming his reputation as an interpreter of 20th-century English music, pianist Simon Callaghan gives an impressive projection of Busch’s music. ... Full marks, too, for members of the Piatti Quartet: Michael Trainor, violin; Zahra Benyounes, viola; and Jessie Ann Richardson, cello — all beautifully recorded in the famously rich acoustic of the Wyastone Leys Concert Hall.'
Stuart Millson, Quarterly Review, 4 January 2025

'I have been most impressed by the music and performances here, and I live in hope that this composer enjoys the recognition that he truly deserves. ... Also to be commended are the accompanying notes and the excellent sound recording. I highly recommend this disc.'
Geoff Pearce, Classical Music Daily, 5 January 2025

'... die Symbiose aus ausdrucksvoll gezeigter spielerischer Linie und plastischer Ausarbeitung der Strukturen.'
'... the symbiosis of expressive, playful line and vivid elaboration of the structures is successful.'
Pizzicato, 9 January 2025

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William Busch (1901-45)  'developed a passion for music and took piano lessons at an early age, though he harboured no ambitions of a professional career as a pianist until his teenage years.' (Paul Conway). During many years he studied music with France Woodmansee and A. W. Lilienthal, piano with Leonid Kreutzer and Benno Moiseiwitsch, harmony with Hugo Leichtentritt, and composition with leading British composers Alan Bush, John Ireland and Bernard van Dieren.

'As the 1930s progressed, Busch began to focus increasingly on composition and soon forged his own personal creative language. This decade saw the first of his many songs, a widely acclaimed Piano Concerto, and on 1 June 1935, his marriage to Sheila, with whom he had two children, Nicholas and Julia. His life was cruelly cut short when he died of an internal haemorrhage at Woolacombe, Devonshire on 30 January 1945, robbing British music of one of its most promising and versatile talents.' Paul Conway

Lyrita Records releases its Graham Hair Piano Music album on 1 November 2024, performed by Martin Jones (SRCD 436).

Composer Graham Hair writes: “I met pianist Martin Jones as a consequence of writing the Concert Study Wild Cherries and Honeycomb as a test-piece for the Scottish International Piano Competition, in 1998. Martin heard about this piece from the chairman of the competition jury, Bryce Morrison, and this eventually led to my writing more Concert Studies over the next fifteen years, as well as the other works on this album.

Twelve Transcendental Concert Studies on Themes from the Australian Poets, refers specifically to the post-Lisztian Tradition of virtuoso pianism (including such figures as Australian pianist Percy Grainger), which has always seemed to me a corecomponent of Martin Jones’s pianism. The titles are all drawn either from specific poems or from specific passages within those poems.

Two other commissions are also represented: Dances and Devilment and Sunlit Airs, commissioned by the Australian pianist Michael Harvey in 2000, and Under Aldebaran, commissioned much earlier, by the Sydney International Piano Competition, during the mid-1980s. All of the other works were written between 2008 to 2024.

Étude-variations: Under Aldebaran is also a Concert Study, based on the poem by Australian poet James McAuley, but is very different from the collection of the ‘Transcendental’ 12. It’s the only atonal piece in this album, and by far the most complicated in its detail, and was written many years earlier.

Rococo Fantasies is a set of 11 bagatelles. Each moves from one tone-centre to another: often via ‘chromatic mediant’ harmony (a major or minor third above or below the tone-centre). Book One contains 6 of them. They endeavour to create a variety of idiosyncratic rhetorical characters by swerving between multiple metrical, thematic and textural ideas rapidly in the course of a few measures in some of the pieces, but beavering away at just one or two (over rapidly modulating harmonic changes) in others.

Passacaglia on the chorale ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’ by J.S. Bach is based on a chorale melody derived from the famous plainsong hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. This is the ‘ground bass’ on which this Passacaglia is built. However, like many Passacaglias in the Canonic Repertoire, the theme often strays into the upper voices of the texture, and because of the relative length of the theme, it has something of the sense of a set of variations as much as of a Passacaglia.
 
…During recent times (2008-2024), I have completed more compositions than in all the previous periods put together, though in some cases that has meant completing projects started earlier: in a time characterised by the decay, and in many cases the collapse, of the institutions which have dominated political, social, economic and cultural life and practice during the three post-war generations (1950-2024). The subtitle of my forthcoming book, The Scottish Voices Reader, puts it thus: Cultivating the Classical Traditions in the Age of the War on Everything.”   © Graham Hair

'A revelation of 21st-century pianism, both in Hair’s writing and in Jones’ playing.'
Maureen Buja, Interlude, 23 December 2024

Martin Jones has been one of Britain’s most highly regarded solo pianists since first coming to international attention in 1968 when he received the Dame Myra Hess Award. The same year he made his London debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and his New York debut at Carnegie Hall, and ever since has been in demand for recitals and concerto performances in Europe, Russia, Australia, Canada, North & South America. He has made over 90 recordings with Nimbus Records exploring music that is not often played including the complete works of 18 composers.

'Martin Jones is a skilled and sensitive artist with an imaginative response that is faultless.' Gramophone

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Lyrita Records releases its George Lloyd Violin and Piano Works double album on 1 November 2024, with Tamsin Little, Martin Roscoe, Ruth Rogers and Simon Callaghan (SRCD 424). The album is part of Lyrita's 2024-25 George Lloyd Signature edition.

George Lloyd started to learn the violin at the age of five and he was a pupil of the violinist Albert Sammons for six years. In his youth, Lloyd’s talent as an instrumentalist allowed him to participate in local musical events from formal concerts to more convivial gatherings: a 1930 newspaper report of a ‘social in the Zennor schoolroom’ observed that ‘Mr George Lloyd played the violin and dancing was indulged in’.

Looking back on his formative influences, Lloyd singled out Sammons as having the most lasting effect on his burgeoning creativity, identifying the latter’s ‘instinctive, freely expressive playing’ as having a direct bearing on the kind of music he began to write. In this regard, Lloyd’s description of the sound of Sammons’s playing as ‘gorgeous’, with ‘a lyrical quality’ in which ‘every note seemed to sing’ chimes with the composer’s own essentially lyrical approach to musical lines and phrases.

Despite his facility in playing the violin and the importance he attached to his lessons with Albert Sammons, Lloyd was relatively slow to compose works for his own instrument. It was not until 1970 that Lloyd wrote Violin Concerto No. 1, his first piece with a leading role for his own instrument, but this achievement seemed to stir his enthusiasm and during the next seven years he completed a number of pieces for violin and piano, a fully-fledged sonata and a second concerto. The Seven Extracts from The Serf for violin and piano (1974) were published in 2024, and are here recorded for the first time.
© Paul Conway

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Lyrita Recorded Edition releasesGeorge Lloyd's Violin Concertos and 'Cello Concerto album on 5 July 2024. The Violin Concertos are performed by Cristina Angeleschu and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by David Parry; the 'Cello Concerto with Anthony Ross and the Albany Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Alan Miller. The Concertos' printed scores (SRMP 0066, 0070 and 0074 and associated sheet music) will be published on 2 August.

'George Lloyd started to learn the violin at the age of five and he was a pupil of the violinist Albert Sammons for six years. Despite his facility in playing the violin and the importance he attached to his lessons with Sammons, Lloyd was slow to compose works for his own instrument. It was not until 1970 that Lloyd wrote Violin Concerto No. 1, his first piece with a leading role for his own instrument, but this achievement seemed to stir his enthusiasm and during the next seven years he completed a number of short pieces for violin and piano, a fully-fledged sonata and a second concerto. Violin Concerto No. 1 was written in 1970 and remained unperformed until the recording featured on this release took place in the summer of 1998. Seven years elapsed before Lloyd wrote a second concerto for the violin. One of Lloyd’s purest, most directly communicative melodies graces the Largo third movement.

The solo instrument’s poetic qualities are to the fore in music of supplicatory spirit. In a couple of ear-catching passages, the soloist’s scrunchy, dissonant chords have the raspy nostalgia of a squeeze box. Lloyd completed his 'Cello Concerto in July 1997, a year before his death at the age of 85 and in this autumnal piece, one can discern a wistful, valedictory quality, with feelings of sorrow and regret surfacing repeatedly. The solo instrument’s inherently lyrical aspect is suited to the composer’s expressive needs, and the one-movement format allows the musical narrative to ebb and flow naturally so that this work has a strong claim to be regarded as Lloyd’s most formally successful concertante piece. A small orchestra is required, consisting of double woodwind, three horns, modest percussion (for one player) and strings.' © Paul Conway
 
'These two works were recorded during the week before George Lloyd died on July 3, 1998. He was supposed to conduct these performances, but David Parry stepped in at the last minute with the wonderful Romanian violinist Cristina Anghelescu and members of the Philharmonia Orchestra to complete the project. The recording was made in Henry Wood Hall. George was even too ill to attend the sessions, but he was making suggestions as to the best placement of the players to achieve just the recorded sound he wanted 48 hours before his death. This beautiful recording is a fine and lasting memorial to this composer whose music brings such passionate joy to so many music lovers all over the world.' Presto Classical

'Those familiar with Lloyd's warm, spacious, big-hearted, sumptuously orchestrated symphonies won't be disappointed with his violin concertos.' American Record Guide

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Lyrita releases Charles Villiers Stanford, Te Deum and Elegiac Ode (SRCD 435) on 5 July 2024 with the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, sopranos Rhian Lois and Samantha Price, tenor Alessandro Fisher and baritone Morgan Pearse, conducted by Adrian Partington.

'By the time Stanford had received a commission from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival to write a choral work for them in 1884, he had, aged 32, already begun to assert himself as one of Britain’s leading composers. The Elegiac Ode was, however, his first mature foray into the world of major British choral festivals. Some of the Elegiac Ode had been sketched three years earlier in 1881, but after the Norwich commission, Stanford grasped the opportunity to complete it in July 1884. The words were taken from the last part of Walt Whitman’s elegy, ‘When lilacs in the door yard bloom’d’, written after President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. (Stanford’s pupil, Gustav Holst, would use the same text for his Ode to Death after the First World War in 1919.) Taking the seven verses of the burial hymn, Stanford divided his chosen text into four parts, creating a four-movement musical structure more akin to a choral symphony with its substantial and thematically related choral outer movements flanking two shorter inner essays.

Stanford’s large-scale setting of the Te Deum Op. 66 was first sung at the Leeds Festival on 6 October 1898: its ambitious, opulent dimensions were a fitting commemoration of the  accession to the throne by Queen Victoria (its dedicatee) sixty years earlier, as well as a tribute to the full-bodied, well-trained Leeds chorus of 350 singers. A particular feature of the Te Deum is the grandeur of much of its choral writing. Though also dramatic, a dominating feature of the Te Deum is its prominent use of the chorus, and the many fulsome sonorities Stanford was able to draw from the magnificent ‘instrument’ of the Leeds voices.' © Jeremy Dibble                        

'A beautifully authoritative recording.'
Maureen Buja, Interlude, July 2024 (Album of the Week)

'The performances on the disc have a sophistication and vigour that does full justice to the music.'
Planet Hugill, 24 July 2024

SRCD 382: Stanford, Mass 'Via Victrix':
 'Rescued from obscurity nearly a century after its composition, Stanford's largescale post-war mass is definitely worth checking out. Impassioned performances here.' BBC Music Magazine

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Lyrita Records releases George Lloyd's A Litany and A Symphonic Mass, conducted by the composer, on 3 May 2024, with Bounemouth Symphony Orchestra/Brighton Festival Chorus, soprano Janice Watson and bass Jeremy White, and Philharmonia Orchestra with Guildford Choral Society (SRCD 2419).

‘I just write what I have to write’. The artistic credo of George Lloyd conveys the directness and emotional honesty of his music, which is distinctive and written with integrity. He was fortunate enough to discover his individual and versatile musical voice at an early age. The deceptively artless quality of his scores stems from a thorough grounding in composition techniques.

Lloyd wrote in a traditional idiom enriched by a close study of selected models, Verdi and Berlioz chief among them. There is a remarkable consistency to his output, most of which was created spontaneously and without the incentive of a commission. Conceived on a grand scale, Lloyd’s late choral works build fruitfully upon his previous experience in other genres. They share with his operas an innate lyricism, natural affinity with the human voice and feeling for the long line, while their structural balance, intensive working out of motifs and rich orchestral palette owes a significant debt to his prolific symphonic output.

Chris de Souza writing in The Independent, 1998, described the Brighton Festival commission of A
Symphonic Mass as ‘perhaps the climax’ of Lloyd’s ‘astonishing career’. In his review of the original
release of the present recording, Ivan March was moved to describe the Mass as ‘one of the finest pieces of English choral writing of the twentieth century’.

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Lyrita Records releases George Lloyd's Requiem and Psalm 130 on 3 May 2024, with the Exon Singers, countertenor Stephen Wallace and organist Jeffrey Makinson, conducted by Matthew Owens.

‘I just write what I have to write’. The artistic credo of George Lloyd conveys the directness and emotional honesty of his music, which is distinctive and written with integrity. He was fortunate enough to discover his individual and versatile musical voice at an early age. The deceptively artless quality of his scores stems from a thorough grounding in composition techniques.

Lloyd wrote in a traditional idiom enriched by a close study of selected models, Verdi and Berlioz chief among them. There is a remarkable consistency to his output, most of which was created spontaneously and without the incentive of a commission. Conceived on a grand scale, Lloyd’s late choral works build fruitfully upon his previous experience in other genres. They share with his operas an innate lyricism, natural affinity with the human voice and feeling for the long line, while their structural balance, intensive working out of motifs and rich orchestral palette owes a significant debt to his prolific symphonic output.

Lloyd produced the final score of his Requiem a month before his death in 1998. It is inscribed ‘to the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales’. Compassionate, reassuring and even, at times, joyful, this is a conscious leave-taking on the part of the composer. His compact and cogent setting of Psalm 130 constitutes, arguably, his most fluently effective use of a cappella choral writing.

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To coincide with the centenary of 100th anniversary of Kenneth Victor Jones's birth, Lyrita Records is releasing an album containing five première recordings on Friday 3 May 2024, performed by soloists from the London Mozart Players (SRCD 434).

Jones, who also composed a substantial catalogue of film scores, wrote music in neo-classical style: direct and energetic, he stretches the boundaries of tonality without breaking them. The language is familiar - Françaix and Shostakovich come to mind - engaging, playful and immediately graspable.

Kenneth V. Jones's “love of music began at the age of ten, when he started composing hymn tunes. He began his musical career as a chorister at St. Nicholas’s College of Church Music, Chislehurst, under Sir Sydney Nicholson, and received his first newspaper review in 1935 for his participation in a children’s opera by Nicholson.

The Times’ critic observed that ‘Master Kenneth Jones must be mentioned for his playing of the harpsichord at an age when most of us did not know there was any such thing’… In 1947 he enrolled at the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition, theory, piano, organ and conducting… In his final year, he won the Royal Philharmonic Prize for composition with his Concert Overture, premiered at the College in November 1950. Only eight years later, in 1958 he became Professor of Music at the Royal College of Music and was also appointed an examiner to the Associated Board.” © Paul Conway
 
London Mozart Players principal cellist Sebastian Comberti writes:
“My first encounter with Kenneth V. Jones was in 2016 when our family moved to the village of Bishop stone in the Sussex Downs. Over the course of several months, I was able to learn more of Kenneth’s musical life. As soon as he mentioned having once written a string quartet, it was decided to programme the work during the following Season of Seaford Music Society, of which Kenneth was a long-standing member and whose programming I had recently taken on. Such was the warmth of the reception upon hearing the work that it was decided to explore more of Kenneth’s chamber music output, and thus the idea for this album was born.

We have Kenneth to thank for the fact that the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music made the decision, at his suggestion, to include contemporary compositions in their graded examination syllabuses. Several of the short character pieces that Kenneth wrote for the ABRSM remain in the syllabus to this day, and a selection of these is included on this recording. It gave me huge pleasure to be able to present to Kenneth the first edit of the current album, just a few days before his death in December 2020. He was absolutely thrilled.”

Maureen Buja,Interlude, 10 June 2024

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LYRITA PUBLISHING
                                                               
Kenneth V. Jones: Sonata for Pianoforte | Wind Quintet No. 2 | Quinquifid (1980) | String Quartet (1950) | Piano Quintet (1967)

Sheet music for all the works on SRCD.434 awre also published as individual volumes by Lyrita Publishing on 3 May 2024 (SRMP 0164 - SRMP 0168).