David Hackbridge Johnson: Orchestral Music Vol.4 – Jonathan Powell

David Hackbridge Johnson, born near London in 1963, is an all-round musician — not only a prolific composer but also a conductor, violinist, singer, pianist, jazz drummer and poet. Both works in this album, recorded under the baton of the composer, have extra-musical stimuli. The Piano Concerto evokes the Kafkaesque fantasy world and tragic fate of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, a victim of Nazi oppression — and it also marks the early death of another uniquely gifted individual, since it was written for Jonathan Powell, whose last recording it became. The Symphony, taking its lead from earlier composers like Bax, Britten and Vaughan Williams, is a response to the English landscape, as seen through the paintings of a number of artists whose work Hackbridge Johnson esteems — its colours and moods changing as kaleidoscopically as nature itself.