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Guitarist Stephen Gordon shares with us the collaborative relationship between Stephen Dodgson and the Prussia Cove International Guitar Seminar across a number of works, a relationship which led to the commissioning and recording of his work The Selevan Story.

"All the performances are absolutely splendid and quite beautifully recorded and balanced, with a pleasingly wide sound stage. The piano sound in particular is exemplary. Booklet notes are by John Warrack and are models of their kind.

Toccata can be proud of this generously-filled offering which is a very worthwhile and welcome addition to the discography of an unjustly neglected composer."

"Toccata continues its excellent mission to propagate the music of Stephen Dodgson whilst Naxos has also done the composer proud with its disc of 24 Inventions for Harpsichord. Everything here is a premiere recording....

The performances are uniformly splendid and the church acoustic has been well judged. John Warrack’s notes are similarly first-class... The recording quality is excellent. Let’s hope there are many more such excellent discs before the centenary of Dodgson’s birth in 2024."

"The music is complex yet approachable, always with a spicy twist to the harmony. I found the musical language rather reminiscent of that of Kenneth Leighton with the combination of melodic fragments and toughness...

The performances from Evva Mizerska and Emma Abbate are excellent, with the two demonstrating the sort of balanced partnership which the music presupposes. Both bring out the lyricism, fascination and challenge of Dodgson's music."

Once the music reveals its secrets, it becomes intensely appealing... Five Occasional Pieces, like the other works on the album, are the products of an original, highly distinctive, consistently surprising voice, making what is now the collection devoted entirely to Dodgson’s music long overdue.

Late last month I joined a throng of excited parents and music-lovers attending a delightful concert at St Mary’s church, Barnes, which featured the music of Stephen Dodgson. The concert was part of the fifth Barnes Music Festival. The Dodgson works, all on the subject of London, rivers or the Boat Race, interwove the festival’s theme of ‘Music & Place’ as well as being superbly timed ahead the actual 2017 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race a week later. The concert, set against a backdrop of an exquisite photography exhibition of nature and people around the River Thames and other locations, brought together […]

In January this year, Marie van Rhijn performed several movements from Stephen Dodgson’s two Suites for Clavichord as part of her ‘Time Machine’ concert at the Handel House in London. Here, she tells us about performing these works. “On 10th January, I was delighted to perform several works by Stephen Dodgson at a recital for the British Clavichord Society and the British Harpsichord Society at the Handel and Hendrix House. I was lucky to play a beautiful clavichord by Peter Bavington. From the first suite, I chose first the ‘Plaint’, then the ‘Tambourin’. To me, those two movements really connect […]

We’re very pleased to announce the release of the recording of 24 Inventions for Harpsichord by Stephen Dodgson (Sets 1-4), recorded by Ekaterina Likhina on Naxos. For more about the Ekaterina’s style and approach, and the recording process, see the earlier blog about the Inventions CD. The official blurb: “Stephen Dodgson won Royal Philharmonic Society prizes for his early compositions, which signalled his emergence as a significant figure in British musical life. Though he composed in most genres he wrote with particular distinction for guitar and harpsichord and his sets of Inventions for harpsichord span a period of almost forty years. Scarlatti remained his inspiration […]

A gratifyingly insightful and complimentary review of the Stephen Dodgson ‘Complete Music for Cello and Piano’ by Jonathan Woolf in this month’s British Music Society newsletter: “Since Stephen Dodgson was fond of the medium of chamber music and as he wrote so well for the voice it’s not surprising that his cello works should be so infused with lyric-vocal qualities. The Cello Sonata of 1969 shows a fine conception of equals in a clearly structured three-movement work that reveals echoes of Bartókian Nocturne and a spare call-and-response between the instruments. There’s a certain refined introspection to Dodgson’s writing and an […]