This refreshingly intimate, vocally undemanding SATB setting of the Preces and Responses is a most welcome addition to the Anglican choral evensong repertoire. Emma writes: ‘I approached the text as prayer, considering not only the words themselves, but the circumstances in which a person might be moved to such prayer.’ ‘St. Pancras’ refers to the original name of the Hooglandse Kerk in Leiden, the Netherlands, where Emma is presently composer in residence.
Composer:Emma Brown Publication date: April 2024 Instruments: SATB Format: Choral score Duration:c.9' Pages: 16 ISMN: 979 0 708213 11 6 Code:HH596.CHS Price: £6.00 more information
Born in or near Kassel, Frederick Fisher (1711/12–1760) lived for several years in Holland, teaching music from 1741 to 1745 at the university of Leiden, before emigrating to England. After spending about two years in London he settled permanently in Cambridge, where he taught music to members of the local music society. His Op. 2 set of trio sonatas is externally very similar to its Op. 1 predecessor (Edition HH, 2003) in its combinations of movement types and musical language, but now has an added spaciousness and audacity born of greater maturity. Everything is wonderfully blended: the fugal movements are melodious; the ‘singing’ allegros are harmonically rich and contrapuntally charged; the dance-like movements, full of happy surprises, fizz and purr. Op. 2 appeared in print only in the year following Fisher’s death. Surprisingly in the circumstances, the level of accuracy in the engraved parts matched the high standard set by Op. 1. This would have gratified the composer, who was so evidently a perfectionist in all he undertook.
VOLUME 1
Composer:Frederich Ernest Fisher Editor:Michael Talbot Publication date: April 2024 Instruments: Two violins, violoncello and basso continuo Format: Full score and parts Series:Baroque Pages: x/26 + 4 x 12 ISMN: 979 0 708213 01 7 ISBN: 978 1 914137 51 8 Code:HH586.FSP Price: £33.00 more information
Composer:Frederich Ernest Fisher Editor:Michael Talbot Publication date: April 2024 Instruments: Two violins, violoncello and basso continuo Format: Full score and parts Series:Baroque Pages: x/25 + 4 x 12 ISMN: 979 0 708213 02 4 ISBN: 978 1 914137 52 5 Code:HH587.FSP Price: £33.00 more information
Stanley Sadie’s opinion (1963) that two of Fisher’s twelve trio sonatas — divided equally between Op. 1 (c. 1751) and Op. 2 (c. 1761) — were ‘among the finest of their time’, while some of the others were ‘remarkably inventive and original’, almost sells the composer short. Every single one of these works, scored for two violins, cello and harpsichord, is masterly and deserves a permanent place in the repertoire.
Chaos in fourteen lines Cast in two parts, Timothy Raymond’s cycle of seven songs represents a kind of musical portrait of an American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose reputation as a master of verse, and of the sonnet in particular, was offset by her adventurous – even notorious – personal life. A ‘Counting-out Rhyme’ (the genre of the children’s ‘One potato, two potato …’ game) opens the sequence and recurs in fragments as a kind of Mussorgskyan link (like the ‘Promenade’ in Pictures) both between and within a few of the songs. As in some counting-out games, the rhyme might partly be understood as a metaphor for something of a quasi-fatalistic nature.
Part I explores themes of love, regretting its loss and sometime futility. Part II, opening with the lightest song in the work, rapidly darkens to a nightmarish mood and concludes with the sonnet (fourteen lines) that, paraphrased, gives the work its title. Its succinct expression of the philosophical and technical dilemmas of the poet, as she struggles to put the violent and demonic tyranny of existential Disorder into the Order of the poem, is reminiscent of the age-old conflict of Dionysus and Apollo — the archetype that has underpinned so much artistic endeavour.
Chaos in fourteen lines was commissioned by Canadian pianist Margaret Bruce.
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Composer:Timothy Raymond Publication date: March 2024 Instruments: Soprano and piano Format: Full score Duration:c.10' Pages: vi/26 ISMN: 979 0 708213 17 8 Code:HH602.FSC Price: £15.00 more information
The ten motets (Concerti sacri) Op. 3 by Giuseppe Aldrovandini (1671–1707), for solo bass voice, violins and continuo, are among the composer’s most attractive works. Published in Bologna in 1703, they stand on the borderline between seventeenth-century bel canto and the progressive trends represented by Alessandro Scarlatti and, later, Antonio Vivaldi. The two motets published here (the concluding concerti of the set) delight through their euphony and the sheer swagger of Aldrovandini’s vocal writing.
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Composer:Giuseppe Aldrovandini Editor:Michael Talbot Publication date: March 2024 Instrument: Bass, two violins and basso continuo Format: Full score and parts Series:Baroque Pages: xi/37 + 2 x 4 + 2 x 8 ISMN: 979 0 708213 05 5 ISBN: 978 1 914137 55 6 Code:HH590.FSP Price: £24.00 More information
Den lille danserinnen (‘The Little Ballerina’) evokes a charming, gracious, light-footed dancer, while Nocturne makes the piano sing in the romantic tradition. Both these delightful short pieces would be ideal encores!
Composer:Christian Hartmannn Publication date: April 2016 Instruments: Piano Format: Performing score Duration:c.4' Pages: iii/4 ISMN: 979 0 708146 15 5 Code: HH398.SOL Price: £7.95 More information
Music example (pdf)
Recedant Lacrimae (pdf) 
