The first concerto has been recorded before -
http://www.scottishmusiccentre.com/db/CART/product_details.php?product_id=3821, but the second hasn't.
From the website of the Erik Chisholm Trust:
The Piobaireachd Concerto [No.1]: First performed in 1935 with the composer at the piano. Quotes from reviews of early performances show it was very well received.
“Erik Chisholm as a composer has never been at a loss for ideas and the score of the concerto is marked by steady application on the part of all concerned. Interest is properly shared by orchestra and soloist, the ideas are often happily treated and variety of colour and effect has been carefully provided. The Scherzo worked up towards the close to a brilliant climax. The finale also finished brilliantly and included plenty of vivacity” Glasgow News, 1935.
“Undoubtedly one of the most ambitious attempts at a large scale work in a Scottish idiom from the pen of a native composer. Of Erik Chisholm’s originality there can be no question. The concerto is no mere stringing together of snatches of idiomatic Scottish phrases, but a skilful piece of workmanship in which the resources of the full orchestra and the solo instrument are well exploited” Evening Times, 1940.
“The concerto was full of Scottish character. The composer himself played the solo part in brilliant style” The Scotsman.
It took 60 years for this work to return to the concert platform. Read in Archive Section of the performance at the RASMD Glasgow in 2000.
In August 2000 Murray McLachlan played the concerto with the Kelvin Ensemble conducted by Julian Clayton at a NAYO festival concert in Glasgow.
Piano Concerto No. 2 ['Hindustani']The Piano Concerto No.2 was first performed in Cape Town in 1949 and in the following year was broadcast on the BBC Radio Third Programme. It was enthusiastically received by the critics, Ernest Newman writing of it ’I was particularly intrigued by the skill with which the composer has managed to fuse Hindustani modes of expression and European ways of thought and factors of design into a single organic whole. I was greatly intrigued by it’.
It had many performances and broadcasts in the composer’s life time but after his death, was not heard again until 2007 when it was specially recorded for broadcast one evening in ‘Scotland’s Music”, a BBC Radio Scotland’s series of weekly programmes.
John Purser, writer and presenter of the series which ran for a year, comments ‘The Concerto emerges as a major achievement in terms of over-all conception, technical innovation and brilliance and superb handling of the orchestra’
The soloist, Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam, said of his experience “It is a great privilege to be working on such a wonderful Concerto! I have completely fallen in love with the piece. The work is definitely challenging, but the wealth of musical ideas, the refinement of the slow movement, the humour and boisterousness of the finale make one forget that at times fingers need to be scraped off the keyboard’.
As yet a full broadcast has not taken place and no commercial CD is available but the Erik Chisholm Trust has a copy of the BBC SSO recording, which it is pleased to lend out to interested listeners.
