DAVID HACKBRIDGE JOHNSON
Orchestra Music, Volume Four (Toccata Classics)
Two new releases from the Toccata Classics label showcase the variety in their output. After hearing his Blaze Of Glory live in both 2023 and 2026, David Hackbridge Johnson is on another new Toccata album, this being the fourth of his orchestral music. His Piano Concerto No.3, After Bruno Schulz, was quite the surprise: with nods to the Polish writer, there is dab after dab of jazz, Stravinsky, cabaret and tinges of avant-garde flutterings. Ravel might just be a through line as well.
This concerto is fun and jaunty, though appears to be the last recording from the elastic pianist Jonathan Powell, who died at the end of last year; his playing has the mousetrap irony and jumpscares the piece insists upon. Also on the album is Johnson’s Symphony No.18, a pleasant English idyll. With many nods to landscape paintings of England, the musical palette is also of the land, with Britten and Vaughn Williams. The atmosphere of soothing brass at the start, after the spiralling strings, might be my favourite passage. Conducted by Johnson himself with the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, I doubt this could have been better conceived.
MARC’ANTONIO INGEGNERI
Volume Six: The Teacher And His Disciples
The Teacher And His Disciples, meanwhile, is a huge tonal shift, and a new discovery for me. Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (c. 1534/36-92) a once-forgotten composer of the Italian Renaissance, has gotten several outings with Toccata. This album would channel numerous pieces looking at Christ and his relationship with his disciples, all rather fittingly in twelve motets.
The Choir of Girton College, Cambridge have some really lovely singers and Gareth Wilson as director is equally as committed with these precious works, recorded for the first time. The Western Wyndes offer gentle ensemble touches on organ and brass, adding to the glory, and leader Jeremy West is another faithful captain on command. These are soft motets, very safe territory to those familiar with choral music of the era; while there’s a purity to it all, I wonder if it needed just a little more spice. My heart did admittedly skip a beat when track 13 crashed the web browser I was listening on. Scary!
words JAMES ELLIS
