Martin Yates

This valuable new release, the third volume in Martin Yates's Widor series, shows exactly why the Goethe-inspired score enjoyed success during the composer's lifetime…it is an orchestral tour... — BBC Music Magazine, June 2015, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Martin Yates and the RSNO seem understandably swept away with the gripping music, and excellent sound helps makes this very much one of the most impressive Dutton discs to have come my way — Gramophone Magazine, April 2010 More…

Yates and the RSNO are admirably chipper exponents…Yates’s idiomatic orchestration of the composer’s handwritten piano score [for The Blue Bird] falls most agreeably on the ear…In summary, a... — Gramophone Magazine, January 2019 More…

Wright's idiom - both listener-friendly and superbly skilled, with never a wasted note - has no problems sustaining a 35-minute design. Violinist Fenella Humphreys responds to its elegiac reflection... — BBC Music Magazine, October 2012, 5 out of 5 stars More…

The rival Russian recording [of the Blumenfeld], still obtainable with a bit of shopping around, has a special sweep and aura but Martin Yates and the RSNO are more sure-footed technically and... — Gramophone Magazine, March 2013 More…

At times we miss the focused punch of one piano's combat with the orchestra…yet 20 fingers certainly bring a heightened percussive charge in the final section's 'fuga chromatica'. Either way... — BBC Music Magazine, December 2015 More…

To avoid sounding mawkish, this kind of idiom needs a really focused sound in performance: Martin Yates conjures exactly that from the RLPO string section, which responds with serious class — Classic FM Magazine, November 2010, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Written in London between 1955 and 1957 and revised seven years later, Richard Arnell's Fifth Symphony is an enormously sincere, patiently argued statement, full of rhetorical grandeur and unapologetically... — Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010 More…

Yates and the RSNO are also compelling in the vigorous Second Symphony (1882), but the highlight of the disc is the Cello Concerto. Torleif Thedeen's warm-toned playing of the solo part deserves... — BBC Music Magazine, September 2013, 4 out of 5 stars More…

The indefatigible Martin Yates has rescued and edited substantial early works by Cyril Scott, including a previously unknown Piano Concerto and Cello Concerto: Donohoe and Wallfisch show they... — BBC Music Magazine, August 2013, 4 out of 5 stars More…