Chamber and Instrumental Music and Songs, Vol. 4

This fourth Toccata Classics album of the chamber music of Gerard Schurmann – born in the former Dutch East Indies in 1924, naturalised Briton and now a resident of Los Angeles – adds two major song-cycles (one of them written for Britten and Pears) and works for flute and piano to the mix, in a distinctly personal language derived from influences as distinct as Javanese gamelan to Bartók and Britten. Schurmann’s music somehow manages to blend elegant intensity and touching lyricism, with a result balanced between strength and sensitivity.