Christopher Guild

Christopher Guild – Johnson: 12 Preludes & Fugues (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:07 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Divine Art

Dr David Charles Johnson (27 October 1942 in Edinburgh – 30 March 2009 in Edinburgh) was a Scottish composer and a scholar of 18th-century Scottish music. Johnson was “an internationally recognised scholar” whose work significantly contributed to rediscovering and redefining 18th-century Scottish music within its historical context. His research focused on the music and social life of lowland Scotland during the 18th century, exploring influences, tastes, and key musical figures of the era.

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Christopher Guild – William Wordsworth: Complete Music for Solo Piano (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:21:06 minutes | 2,50 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

The reputation of the Anglo-Scottish composer William Wordsworth (1908–88), great-great-grandnephew of the poet, has recently been restored by a series of Toccata Classics albums of his orchestral music. His piano music, too, was poorly known before now, none of it recorded since a handful of pieces appeared on LP 60 years ago – though his epic Piano Sonata is a work of major importance. This first ever complete recording reveals an honest, unfussy approach to the keyboard akin to that of two other major symphonists, Sibelius and Rubbra: like them, Wordsworth’s primary concern seems to have been the expression of deep feeling – which makes the gentle story-telling of his miniatures for children all the more surprising.

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Christopher Guild – Ronald Stevenson: Piano Music, Vol. 6 (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:17:38 minutes | 2,55 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

The personal generosity that made the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson (1928–2015) such a warm and vibrant character extended also to his writing-desk: around a quarter of his enormous output is given over to transcriptions, mostly for piano, of music by other composers. Here he pays homage to three earlier colleagues whose music he particularly esteemed: Purcell, Delius and van Dieren. Stevenson described his version of Van Dieren’s String Quartet No. 5 (1931) as ‘transcribed as a piano sonata (which B. v. D. never composed)’ – and thus it became the piano sonata which Stevenson himself never composed. The album ends with Stevenson’s brief but achingly beautiful harmonisation of Purcell’s The Queen’s Dolour – as exquisite an example of the transcriber’s art as anyone could wish.

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Christopher Guild – Stevenson: Piano Music, Vol. 5 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:55 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

The personal generosity that made the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson (1928–2015) such a warm and vibrant character extended also to his writing-desk: around a quarter of his enormous output is given over to transcriptions, mostly for piano, of music by other composers. Here he pays homage to three earlier colleagues whose music he particularly esteemed: Purcell, Delius and van Dieren. Stevenson described his version of Van Dieren’s String Quartet No. 5 (1931) as “transcribed as a piano sonata (which B. v. D. never composed)” – and thus it became the piano sonata which Stevenson himself never composed. The album ends with Stevenson’s brief but achingly beautiful harmonisation of Purcell’s The Queen’s Dolour – as exquisite an example of the transcriber’s art as anyone could wish.

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Christopher Guild – Ronald Stevenson: Piano Music, Vol. 4 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:14 minutes | 1,12 GB | Genre: Classique
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

This fourth volume in Christopher Guild’s ongoing survey of the piano music of the pianist-composer Ronald Stevenson (1928–2015) – a major figure in the cultural life of twentieth- century Scotland – presents works inspired by the human voice, where Stevenson was concerned above all to make the piano sing, to allow it to express human feeling as naturally as possible. That concern can be heard both in his own pieces and his many transcriptions of music by other composers, which balance sophisticated craftsmanship and a refreshing emotional directness.

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Christopher Guild – Stevenson: Piano Music, Vol. 3 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:19 minutes | 2,27 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

This second album of piano music by the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson (1928– 2015) focuses on several strands of his musical personality: his engagement with the folk traditions of Scotland and with Scottish cultural history, his concern to write rewarding music for young pianists, and his creative friendships with other musicians.

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Christopher Guild – Moonie: Instrumental & Chamber Music, Vol. 1 – Music for Solo Piano (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:22:57 minutes | 2,61 GB | Genre: Classique
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

The music of the Edinburgh composer William Beaton Moonie (1883–1961) is as good as unknown. This first-ever album devoted to his piano music reveals a figure downstream from Schumann, Brahms and Grieg, writing in a conservative Romantic idiom coloured by echoes of the folk-music of his native Scotland. Many of these pieces, indeed, are concerned to evoke images of the Scottish countryside or suggest aspects of Scottish history.

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Christopher Guild – Francis George Scott: Complete Music for Solo Piano (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:19 minutes | 1,21 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics

Among the few who know his music, Francis George Scott (1880-1958), a son of the Scottish Borders, is admired for having written some of the best art-songs by any British composer. In this first recording of any of his piano music, a handful of lyrical early pieces contrast with the 58 Bartókian miniatures that constitute Scott’s Intuitions – brief but atmospheric distillations of Scottish song, dance and landscape – and a set of virtuoso transcriptions of eight Scott songs by Ronald Stevenson (1928–2015), the major Scottish pianist-composer of the past century.

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Christopher Guild – Van Dieren: Complete Music for Piano Solo (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:41:47 minutes | 1,51 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Piano Classics

The most comprehensive survey ever made on record of the piano output by a highly individual figure on the Dutch and English music scenes of the early 20th century, featuring two world-premiere recordings.

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