Four Centuries of Great Music October 25, 2026 Recent Classical Music Releases in the Month of October

Four Centuries of Great Music- October 25, 2026 New Classical  Music Releases for the Month of October

Benjamin Britten:  Missa brevis, Op. 63  -I. Kyrie
Benjamin Britten:  Missa brevis, Op. 63 - II. Gloria
Benjamin Britten:  Missa brevis, Op. 63 - IIIa. Sanctus
Benjamin Britten:  Missa brevis, Op. 63 - IIIb. Benedictus
Benjamin Britten:  Missa brevis, Op. 63 - IV. Agnus Dei

RIAS Kammerchor · Marcel Andreas Ober · Justin Doyle · 
Winter Tales: The Britten Christmas Album
Deutsche Grammophon

Franz Joseph Haydn:  Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Hob. VIIb-1 - I.  Moderato
Franz Joseph Haydn:  Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Hob. VIIb-1 -  II.Adagio
Franz Joseph Haydn:  Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Hob. VIIb-1 - III.Finale: Allegro molto
Steuart Pincombe, cello; Philharmonie Austin, Mark Dupere, conductor
BEETHOVEN-HAYDN
Navona Records

Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat major, Op. 10
Sergei Prokofiev
Eliane Rodrigues, piano; St Petersburg Philharmonic, Edward Serov, conductor
SCYTHIAN & STEPPE
Navona Records


J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 Transcribed for Horn

J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Prélude
J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Allemande
J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Courante
J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Sarabande
J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Minuetto I
J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Minuetto II
J.S. Bach:  Solo Cello Suite No. 1, BWV 1007 - Gigue

Denise Tryon, horn
Borrowed Bach:  CELLO SUITE I-V TRANSCRIBED FOR HORN
Navona Records


Now composers like Haydn, Bah Britten and Prokofiev are all failure names to you, but I a sure that not many of you have heard of Doreen Carwithen.

English composer Doreen Carwithen was born on November 15, 1922, in the house attached to her father's bakery and grocery.  As a child, she received her first music lessons from her mother Dulcie, an aspiring concert pianist who gave up her wider ambitions to become a music teacher after her marriage in 1921. Doreen studied both piano and violin with her from the age of four. At the age of 16, she began composing by setting Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" for voice and piano and she began taking cello lessons.  1941, at the age of 18 she entered the Royal Academy of Music and played the cello in a string quartet and with orchestras. It is here that she first studied composition.  She graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in 1946 and promptly received the first J. Arthur Rank Film Scholarship.  Winning the scholarship gave Carwithen an immediate foothold in a heavily male-dominated industry. She spent much of the next 15 years working out of the Rank studios, composing and orchestrating scores for both feature-length films and documentaries.  She gained a reputation in the film industry for her professionalism and speed under pressure.  As an example her score for Elizabeth Is Queen, the official film of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, had to be completed in just three days.

Her younger sister Barbara Carwithen, born 1926 received a similar education to Doreen and also became a talented musician and composer.

In addition to her work on over 30 film scores, she was an active “classical music” composer in all areas.   Her first orchestral work, the overture ODTAA (One Damn Thing After Another), was premiered at Covent Garden by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Boult on March 2, 1947.  
She also wrote a Violin Sonata (1951) and two award-winning (Clements Prize, 1948 and Cobbett Award, 1952) but little-known string quartets, as well as seven solo songs, composed early in her career.

Carwithen was an accomplished pianist herself, as is evident from the piano writing in her 1948 Piano Concerto. The piece was premiered by soloist Iris Loveridge at the Proms in 1952, the only work by a woman to be featured that season. And it is this work that we will be listening to today.

As Leah Broad writes about Doreen Carwithen’s Concerto for Piano and Strings:  Carwithen’s talents as a film composer are evident in her Concerto for Piano and Strings. At its first performance in 1952, The Stage called it a ‘forthright piece, not afraid of a big tune in the late-Romantic vein.’ This is pictorial, evocative writing. There’s something almost industrial about the opening movement: both piano and strings hammer out chords that melt into a smooth, fluid theme passed between soloist and ensemble. The slow movement sounds like a benediction, nearly a duet between the piano and first violin. The concerto closes with a punchy finale, which gives the soloist ‘as exciting an evening’s adventure as any of the nineteenth-century virtuoso show-pieces,’ as The Times put it.

Doreen Carwithen (1922–2003)
Concerto for Piano and Strings
1. Allegro assai
2. Lento
3. Moderato e deciso ma con moto

Alexandra Dariescu piano and the Manchester Camerata, John Andrews conductor
Resound: Music by British Composers
Resonus Records