Classical Explorations — September 2025

Angela Elizabeth Slater
Unravelling the crimson sky
Angela Slater is a UK-based composer, celebrated for mapping the natural world into intricate classical scores. Winner of the Gaudeamus Award and Ivors Classical nominee, she directs Illuminate Women’s Music, promoting women creators and performers across international festivals and top ensembles. Performed in 2023 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as part of the CBSO’s Sounds New project, conductor Clark Rundell brings out some brilliant detail in this amazing work. Bursting with energy from the outset, the music has a strong sense of direction with colourful interjections in brass and percussion. It’s been a pleasure to get to know Slater’s work recently with a project of our own in the making.

Henriëtte Bosmans
Second Concerto for Cello and Orchestra: iii. Molto Lento
Henriëtte Bosmans was a trailblazing Dutch composer and pianist, whose music blends passion with lyricism. She overcame the challenges of wartime Europe with creativity and resilience, leaving behind poignant chamber works and evocative songs. This concerto is beautifully heartfelt and introspective. The vocal quality of the cello is expressively played here with panache by Gemma Rosefield.

Gráinne Mulvey
Diffractions
Diffractions by Gráinne Mulvey is a striking orchestral work featured as the opener in her album The Tyndall Effect which was released last year on Divine Art. Inspired by the scientific principles of diffraction studied by 19th-century physicist John Tyndall, the piece depicts the process of light and sound diffraction into music. The piece has one of the most unique soundworld I think I’ve ever encountered. The loud, chaotic white noise texture at the opening gradually unfolds into more distinctive harmonic and rhythmic sections. I must give a standing ovation to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra for navigating a powerful and fully immersive score.

César Franck
Prelude, Fugue and Variation, Op.18 i. Prelude
César Franck was one of the greatest organists and improvisers. His gift for simple, outstanding beauty in his melody writing is second to none.  This prelude Op.18 is a fantastic example of his ability to write simply, beautifully. A piece of inward poetry, it is not at all showy and all the more impressive that it was written in his 20s. It does however reveal something of Franck’s voice: the wandering harmonies that would later grow and become a hallmark of his works.

Paul Schoenfield
Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano: i. Freylakh
Paul Schoenfield's music is deeply influenced by Jewish musical and cultural traditions. He integrates elements from klezmer, Yiddish folk songs, and Hasidic tales, combining joyous spiritual uplift with intricate Jewish historical and mystical themes. His opera The Merchant and the Pauper draws on Hasidic stories, while his compositions like Klezmer Rondos reflect traditional Eastern European Jewish modes and dances, organically merging these influences with classical forms to create a rich, hybrid musical language. This trio is a superb showpiece, brought alive by the performers. As a clarinettist myself, I doff my cap at Spanish clarinettist Pablo Barragán – what colourful and exciting playing!

Alexander Arutiunian
Theme and Variations: ii. Allegro assai
The Soviet-Armenian composer Arutiunian isn’t what I’d call a household name, but I’ve long admired his lively 1950 Trumpet Concerto, full of wit and brilliance. I was therefore delighted to see this new release this month with the superb playing of the Norwegian trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth. Written some 20 years after his Trumpet Concerto, Arutiunian's style is unmistakeable with a strong folk dance-like quality of music from Armenia. Given this track is a pre-release, we can’t yet hear the other variations. I’ll be adding this to my playlist in anticipation of a super new album!

Kevin Puts
Concerto for Orchestra: iv. Toccata
I’ve not come across the music of Kevin Puts until recently. Based in America, he has won prestigious awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for his debut opera Silent Night and a Grammy Award for his Triple Concerto for Time for Three. Inspired by Amanda Gorman’s poem The Hymn for the Hurting, Puts’s Concerto for Orchestra is full of pictorial energy. The Toccata is reminiscent of Holst’s Mercury, the Winged Messenger, but here with a much wider tonal palette, pushing brass figures to the extremities. Puts’s cinematic style of writing is clear but there is a nice balance between concert and film music styles here. A thoroughly enjoyable set of six movements if you have time to delve a bit deeper!

Arnold Schoenberg
Transfigured Night, Op.4: Pesante, Grave
Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed in 1899, is one of the most important turning points in late-Romantic music. Originally written as a string sextet, and later arranged for string orchestra, it is inspired by Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name, which tells of a woman confessing to her lover that she bears another man’s child – and of his forgiveness that transforms her guilt into acceptance. It is in this music that we hear a mashup of formality from Brahms mixed with the heavy chromaticism of Wagner. Within the next decade or so after writing this piece, Schoenberg begins to break away from traditional tonality, moving music toward atonality and serialism, which radically transformed the future of classical music.

John Ireland
Greater Love Hath No Man
Ireland became known to many as writing “English Impressionism”, following on from the famous trendsetters Debussy and Ravel in France. John Ireland’s personality was marked by acute self-criticism and a sense of loneliness shaped by a difficult childhood and the early loss of his parents. Ireland struggled with feelings of insecurity and melancholy and his homosexuality, which contributed to personal challenges including a troubled marriage and social pressures. Despite these difficulties, his imagination was strong, inspired by pagan mysticism, landscapes, and poetry. He was considered somewhat private and reflective, with a profound yearning for spiritual and creative expression through his music. This gorgeous choral work is both moving and hugely satisfying to perform, drawing on the biblical text about laying down one’s life for others. Performed here most carefully by The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, it made me realise what an awful pipe organ I had to play recently to accompany a rather fine choir!

Maurice Duruflé
Requiem, Op.9: iii. Domine Jesu Christe
Like Franck, Maurice Duruflé numbers in the great pantheon of French organists. And like John Ireland, Duruflé was a highly self-critical perfectionist, taking many years to complete each work and often revising them extensively. His body of works only numbers about 30 but my goodness me they are good! The Requiem was written in 1947 using the chants of the ancient Latin Requiem Mass. If you don’t know the work, you could be mistaken for thinking you’ll be listening to monastery chanting for 40 minutes. What Duruflé wrote is nothing short of genius. It’s also a hugely difficult organ part which is sadly beyond my technique. But I can stand in absolute awe of the work, blending smooth, naturally running passages with all I can describe as filthy dirty chords (yes you heard me right!). His ability to modulate and hit the climactic moments with earth shattering pedal notes makes my musical world shake. This recording is by far my favourite under the direction of the amazing James O’Donnell. If this work is new to you, spend some time with it, Duruflé’s meticulous crafting is worth the time, I promise you. His In Paradisum is as close to the immaterial as I think you can get with music.

Kaija Saariaho
Seven Papillons for Cello (No.1)
Kaija Saariaho’s Sept Papillons (Seven Butterflies), composed in 2000, is a work of striking delicacy and imagination for solo cello. Lasting around ten minutes, this cycle of seven miniatures explores fleeting textures and fragile sonorities, embodying the unpredictable movements of butterflies. Rather than unfolding as traditional variations, each section feels like a unique glimpse into a different atmosphere — from whispering sul ponticello threads to shimmering harmonics and sudden bursts of energy. Saariaho was fascinated by transformation, timbre, and the imperceptible boundaries between sound and silence. Here, she gives the cello a highly sculptural role, drawing out colours rarely associated with the instrument. The music almost evaporates at points, demanding an intimate listening experience. Sept Papillons has become one of Saariaho’s signature solo works, admired for its courageously subtle sound world, its ephemeral beauty, and its poetic evocation of fragility and flight.

George Crumb
Black Angels
George Crumb’s Black Angels (1970) is a powerful, avant-garde work for electric string quartet that reflects the turmoil of the Vietnam War, as indicated by Crumb’s inscription in tempore belli (in time of war). The piece, subtitled Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, is structured around the symbolic numbers 13 and 7 and uses unusual sounds like amplified strings, crystal glasses, and tam-tams. It weaves quotations from Schubert and medieval chants into its haunting, ritualistic sound world, exploring themes of good versus evil through its intricate numerology, palindromic form, and intense emotional contrasts. The work is a profound musical meditation on war, death, and spiritual struggle.

Florence Price
Concerto in One Movement 
As the first African-American woman composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra in the USA, Price challenged barriers of race and gender that had long excluded women from recognition in serious art music. Her Concerto in One Movement reflects both individuality and resilience: qualities that have only recently been more widely celebrated. Today, the concerto is increasingly performed, carrying the legacy of a composer who helped pave the way for future generations of women musicians. Unlike the traditional three-movement concerto structure, Price condensed her ideas into a single continuous movement, demonstrating innovation and confidence within the male dominated music scene. The work moves seamlessly between lyrical passages and virtuosic writing, evoking both Romantic tradition and the rhythmic vitality of Black spirituals and dance.

Antonín Dvořák
Serenade in D Minor: iii. Andante con moto
Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade is a joyful and charming piece written in 1878. Inspired by Mozart’s famous wind serenade, Dvořák penned his own wind piece. The work is full of beautiful Czech folk melodies and rhythms that give it an irresistible energy and warmth. I wanted to share this beautiful third movement, exemplifying Dvořák's ability to write such a naturally beautiful melody and infuse it with such fresh, lively character of his Bohemian homeland. Dvořák was only 35 when he wrote this work and was starting to gain recognition as one of the great Czech composers.