This new series from Toccata Classics presents the music of a composer-conductor from Victorian England who has entirely disappeared from music history. Henry Cotter Nixon (1842-1907) turns out to have been one of the most accomplished English composers of his generation, with a style that takes in elements of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Verdi and Brahms. This series of three albums presents all his surviving orchestral music in its first-ever recordings. Nixon labeled his five-movement Palamon and Arcite a symphonic poem, and indeed, it is one of the first by a British composer, but in fact, it is more of a programmatic symphony, of the sort then being written by composers such as Goldmark and Raff.
