Somm

the performances on this recording are all unfailingly musical and enjoyable. — BBC Music Magazine, June 2014, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Britten's last quartet has been lucky in its recordings… With the Coull there's a sense of searching and effort, which suits the pain of the music more than the complete technical assurance... — BBC Music Magazine, September 2007, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Mark Bebbington's… approach to the brooding and combative Piano Sonata is to give the harmony time enough to breathe, in order to go more intensely into its emotional life. The depressive aspects... — BBC Music Magazine, October 2008, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Some of the songs are set in an almost epigrammatic fashion, so that the listener’s attention is never allowed to waver. A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad has often been set to music, but Somervell... — Fanfare, Nov/Dec 2020 More…

The main work here is the grim and haunted Sonata (1921-24), Bridge's painful and profound response to the Great War. This is an epic performance, making the most of the work's mingled violence... — BBC Music Magazine, September 2006, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Never for a moment do you hear the smart metropolitan aplomb of an over-seasoned concert pianist. It is as if she is sharing a special love with a small circle of intimate friends. How memorably... — Gramophone Magazine, March 2013 More…

Sonatas Nos 1 and 4 benefit from the expressive eloquence of Rachel Brown's flute, and in the opening Andante of the B minor, she and Adrian Butterfield converse with flirtatious suppleness... — BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2009, 4 out of 5 stars More…

One would now be surprised to find such a first-half sequence as Bax’s London Pageant, Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No 2, a Handel aria and Beethoven’s Fifth,... — Sunday Times, 20th July 2008, 3 out of 5 stars More…

The playing, both individually and collectively, is impeccable and the result is a very significant recording indeed. — Early Music Review More…