The composer and organist Herbert Murrill (1909–1952) studied at the Royal Academy of Music with York Bowen and Alan Bush, later becoming Professor of Composition at that same institution. His teaching and composition were interrupted by the Second World War, and he joined the Intelligence Corps at Bletchley Park, where he conducted the Bletchley Park Musical Society in performances of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and invited such illustrious musicians as Peter Pears and Myra Hess to perform. Following the war, he succeeded Steuart Wilson as Head of Music at the BBC, although his tenure was cut short by his cancer diagnosis in 1951.

As a composer, Murrill’s output includes two film scores and incidental music for plays by W. ⁠H. Auden as well as several choral and organ works, but his most notable compositions are the second Cello Concerto, dedicated to Pablo Casals, and the String Quartet of 1939. Much admired by Vaughan Williams, who thought it “full of invention and imagination with extravagance”, the Quartet was dedicated to the Leighton Quartet, of which Murrill’s second wife, Vera Canning, was the cellist.

EM Records is thrilled that this wonderful work, voicing as it does Murrill’s unique musical language in all its colour and intensity, is to form the centrepiece of a new recording. Drawing together four world-class musicians specially for the project, including the violinist Rupert Marshall-Luck and the cellist Raphael Wallfisch, it represents a very special opportunity to re-discover the music of a composer whose output has almost completely faded from public consciousness.

Murrill’s String Quartet will be complemented on the disc by two works by Robin Milford, a composer whose remarkably wide-ranging output is now beginning to find new audiences after falling out of favour during the 1950s. His Miniature String Quartet in G is full of zestful energy, the buoyancy of the writing and the youthfully vigorous textures making this an immediately accessible and attractive work. The single-movement Fantasia in B minor is more overtly dramatic and emotionally intense whilst still displaying an unwavering clarity of musical thought and purpose.

Armstrong Gibbs’s String Quartet in G minor, op. ⁠99 (“Kenilworth”) completes the disc. Dedicated to the violinist Arthur Catterall (also the dedicatée of Moeran’s Violin Concerto), it was composed in 1941 and received its first performance the following year. Never published and never before recorded, its presence on this recording will enhance Armstrong Gibbs’s already considerable reputation as a composer of chamber music.

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EM Records is delighted to announce a new recording — the debut issue from the brilliant young Flutes and Frets duo — of English music from the sixteenth century until the present day. With each work performed on historically appropriate instruments, this disc will present a huge variety of tones and colours from flutes and fretted instruments, and captures sound-snapshots of the evolution of British music over the past six hundred years. Highlights include a new folk-inspired commission for flute and guitar from British composer Seth Bye; an arrangement of one of Henry Eccles’s many violin sonatas for traverso and theorbo; and lute songs by Renaissance court musician Nicholas Lanier, amongst many other gems.

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Alan Rawsthorne (1905–1971) was a significant composer of his generation (which also included Tippet, Alwyn and Lambert). Although coming later to music than his contemporaries, having briefly studied both architecture and dentistry, he developed a very personal and unmistakable harmonic language together with a markedly constructive approach to form. Of the fine corpus of chamber music published during his lifetime there are only two works for violin and piano: the “Concertante” (the first work of his to be published, in 1937) and the masterly Sonata of 1958.

Two early, unpublished sonatas were composed for the violinist Jessie Hinchliffe, who Rawsthorne married in 1934. Both are in two movements. The shape of the violin melody and the harmonic implications at the opening of what is evidently the earlier are at once entirely characteristic. Its second movement displays an unbridled, youthful exuberance with even a hint of jazz. The first movement of the later sonata is a theme and variations, Rawsthorne’s earliest essay in a form that was to run like a thread through his entire compositional output, and already displaying his original approach to it. The second movement (which includes a passage already present in the earlier sonata) became, in a revised version, the “Concertante” mentioned above.

Despite some hints of compositional immaturities in both works, John McCabe observed the sudden emergence of thematic material from which the Rawsthorne was later to draw limitless inspiration, and how much of the mature composer is already present.

Also composed for Jessie Hinchliffe, at about the same time as the sonatas, is “Pierrette”. Subtitled “Valse Caprice” it is a delightful character piece, totally unlike the sonatas, and evidence of a versatility later revealed in Rawsthorne’s film music. In orchestrated form it was included in the score for “Uncle Silas”. The version with piano remained unpublished until 2008.

A significant composition of Rawsthorne’s early maturity is the Theme and Variations for Two Violins, written in 1937. It was first performed by Jessie Hinchliffe and Kathleen Washbourne early that year, and their performance at the Festival of the International Society of Music in London in 1938 received early critical acclaim important in establishing his career. Decca released a recording of the 1938 performance, the first commercial recording of his music.

Bringing early, previously unrecorded works together with those of Rawsthorne’s established repertoire makes this an important and fascinating release.

Please click here to download a subscription form for this disc as a PDF; or follow this link to subscribe to the disc online.