Fand IncWessex Press

An original version of this piece was composed in 2005 for flute and harpsichord. Entitled Gin Lane, it was a musical portrait of a street scene in Hogarthian London. The work originated in an idea for a song before becoming an instrumental piece, when it had as a provisional title Hooked on Hook, referring to James Hook (1746–1827), the style of whose song The Lass of Richmond Hill was a source of inspiration for some of the melodic material. The present arrangement of the piece for solo harpsichord was made in February 2025.

—John Mitchell, May 2025

A. E. Housman (1859–1936) was a classical scholar who is now best known for his volume of verse, A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. With their evocation of the English countryside, thwarted love and a yearning for things lost, his poems are probably still as popular today as when they first appeared. Their content and regular metres made them especially appealing to composers for setting to music, and here such prominent figures as Arthur Somervell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, John Ireland and E. J. Moeran immediately come to mind.

The five songs in The Heart of Man focus on the various aspects of pessimism and negativity that permeate so much of Housman’s verse. The first song questions whether material prosperity in later years is counterbalanced by a loss of youthful innocence, whilst in the second the narrator describes a return to a rural scene from his earlier life, only to find his former friends there have already perished. The jangling church bells in the third song sound as a metaphor for an unfulfilled life, followed by a song that asks whether there is any point in carrying on in such a hopeless situation. The final song queries whether happiness can perhaps be illusory, concluding that “…The heart of man … was never happy long.”

—John Mitchell, September 2025

This is an enterprising collection of some of Sir Arnold Bax’s greatest songs, arranged by Italian pianist Ennio Caironi. The songs of Bax are hardly the best known portion of his œuvre at present, but this volume will be welcomed by pianists (and their audiences) wishing to explore them as solo piano arrangements and so to be beguiled by their extraordinary melodic invention and harmonic subtleties.

From the Introduction…

The corpus of works for voice and piano by Sir Arnold Bax remains, to this day, largely overlooked, despite comprising more than one hundred compositions produced over the span of four decades. Bax engaged with the art song form primarily during his formative and early professional years, and seemingly often regarded his songs as experimental workshops in which to refine musical ideas not yet fully crystallised. These ideas thus often functioned as preparatory material for larger instrumental works. This substantial and significant repertoire remains virtually unknown, even among ardent admirers of Bax’s œuvre. A number of songs remain unpublished, many others appear to be lost; recordings are few, and public performances exceedingly rare. The causes of such neglect can be ascribed to manifold reasons, including the considerable technical demands and often dense textures of the piano accompaniments, which can at times overpower the vocal line. However, the opportunity to offer piano arrangements of some of Bax’s most significant songs yields the chance to rediscover a repertoire unjustly overlooked by the wider public and to appreciate the generous inspiration that Bax infused into even his most intimate works.

The selection of songs for this volume was relatively straightforward. Ten works were chosen to represent nearly the full arc of Bax’s creative life from youth to maturity, and the songs are presented in chronological order of composition, from The White Peace of 1907 to Watching the Needleboats of 1932. This collection highlights a remarkable diversity of poetic and musical registers: there are lyrical and romantic songs (Youth); pieces imbued with melancholy (Far in a Western Brookland); songs of irony and bitterness (Carrey Clavel); others with a light, folk-like character (The Market Girl); and still others with a mystical tone (Eternity and Parting). Despite the wide variety of poetic sources and expressive moods, the musical imprint of Bax’s unmistakable voice and compositional style is clearly discernible in each piece, whether in its harmonic richness and complexity or in the distinctive evolution of his melodic lines.

Peter Thompson’s String Quartet no 8, written in the spring of 2025, is a finely designed work in which the three movements form a cohesive, often joyous, whole.

Because of his twenty marches composed for military band, Kenneth J. Alford has sometimes been referred to as ‘The British March King’. His real name was Frederick Joseph Ricketts, and he adopted a pseudonym to distinguish his renown as a composer from his career as a military musician. Born in London in 1881, and after training at Kneller Hall, he eventually became bandmaster of the Royal Marines, a post he held almost up until the time of his death in 1945.

On the Quarterdeck is probably the best known of Alford’s marches after Colonel Bogey (with its fame boosted by being used in the 1957 film, The Bridge on the River Kwai). It was composed in 1917 and commemorated the naval Battle of Jutland that took place in the previous year. Although this fine march has already been arranged for piano solo, the present transcription for piano duet from the band score has allowed the countermelodies to be included, most of which were omitted from the former arrangement.

—John Mitchell, September 2025

Parts are available on request; please enquire.

Aspects of Miracle was completed in February 2025. It is a short single-movement work whose title – the composer hopes – conveys the message of the music.

Parts are available on request; please enquire.

Aspects of Miracle was completed in February 2025. It is a short single-movement work whose title – the composer hopes – conveys the message of the music.

This work can be heard on the Martin Read – A Celebration CD.