Featuring 4 works receiving their world premiere recording, Signum Classics are proud to annouce the new album ‘Dorothy Howell: Orchestral Works’ conducted by Rebecca Miller with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Until now these works have rarely been performed, and the majority of works are unpublished and only exist in manuscript form. “I hope this album can help to revive Dorothy’s music, to help her live on, to finally have the recognition she deserved and never received, and to secure this music’s rightful place in the centre of the classical music repertoire” – Rebecca Miller

This is a major release–a recording of Verdi's original version of Macbeth, composed in 1847, instead of the one we know, i.e., the 1865 revision. About a third of the score is different from the usually performed version, with Lady Macbeth singing a far more showy coloratura aria where "La luce langue" was later placed, a vastly different take on Macbeth's third-act delirium with the witches, a more conventional chorus than in 1865 to open the last act, and a final scene which is a more vivid confrontation between Macbeth and Macduff. There are also minor changes along the way which fans of the opera will enjoy comparing with Verdi's later thoughts.

Nottingham-based Senegalese composer and kora player Seckou Keita is proud to present African Rhapsodies: an epic project created in collaboration with Italian composer and musician Davide Mantovani, released via Swiss label Claves Records. African Rhapsodies is an enchanting, kora-led work, enhanced by the power of the BBC Concert Orchestra.

When we recorded this album, in March 2022, no-one could have imagined that it would be Bramwell Tovey’s last recording. Chandos Records would like to dedicate this recording to the memory of Bramwell Tovey, with whom the company had collaborated for over a decade; a versatile musician highly accomplished as both a composer and a conductor, immensely personable and humorous, who possessed an innate understanding of the qualities of his fellow orchestral musicians and quickly earned their respect and devotion. He shall be very sorely missed.

This marks the final offering from Opera Rara's laudable restoration of BBC broadcasts from the 1970s and '80s of Verdi's first thoughts on specific operas, and it is quite up to the standard of the series. It differs only in being given without an audience, and was broadcast two years after the recording.

Les Vêpres Siciliennes is one of Verdi’s misunderstood operas. It is usually presented to audiences today as I vespri Siciliani - that is, in a clumsy and pedestrian Italian translation and as such gives a false representation of Verdi’s original concept. This opera was composed for the Paris Opera to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, one of the greatest poets of the day and Charles Duveyrier. Verdi embraces the French idiom – the musical forms, the orchestration, the vocal writing – with the same grandeur and sense of occasion as Rossini and Meyerbeer before him. Certainly to give an opera in translation is no crime but to continually deprive the public of this particularly beautiful marriage of text and music is close to criminal. This is the third in the Verdi Originals series and this BBC recording of the opera finally restores the original French libretto.

It was The Bach Choir (under Sir David Willcocks) which played an important role in helping rehabilitate the Missa Sabrinensis, and this fine recording with David Hill marks a significant new chapter in the work’s performance history.

Chandos has been offering some interesting scores in the Movies series, but this differs in their having had to combine two composers on one CD since neither one scored enough films to have an album entirely to himself. Lambert and Berners were close friends, and William Walton was part of their circle as well. All three of them tried to separate their music from the strictly English style and to be more cosmopolitan. Lambert even called music of the English pastoral tradition "cow pat." The first of Lambert's scores was for a documentary about the Merchant Navy - which, being made in 1940, had a scene of a ship being torpedoed. Lambert was considered something of a Russian specialist in music and got the job for the Russian drama on Anna Karenina, released in 1948.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to present a revelatory collection of orchestral songs by Sir Edward Elgar (on double slimline selling as a single disc), performed by two of today’s most exciting young singers – mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge and baritone Henk Neven – accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth. The Hills of Dreamland takes its title from a line in Elgar’s well-known setting, beautifully still and beseeching, of Arthur L Salmon’s Pleading. Historically the least regarded part of Elgar’s output, his songs contain a treasure-trove of vocal gems and here receive performances of insight, imagination and emotional directness.

Originally intended as an opera for television, Malcolm Arnold’s collaboration with film-maker and librettist Joe Mendoza, The Dancing Master, Op. 34, was considered too racy for viewers in the 1950s and subsequently rejected for broadcast and largely forgotten. Conductor John Andrews, with the BBC Concert Orchestra and a stellar cast, breathes new life into this operatic gem, here receiving its first recording. With its cast of larger-than life Restoration caricatures – the trapped heiress, the scheming maid, the over-protective guardian, and the handsome rake – the opera showcases Arnold’s taste for exuberant satire and tender Romanticism in equal measure.