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17th September 2025, 5:02:18 pm |
Summer update: publications added, many more recordings added, new entry for Ennio Caironi
- Added my own new audio recording of the première of Peter Thompson: Prelude for Orchestra: “Stress” and retained the previous synthetic recording but demoted it from the details table. I hope to produce a new video of the première, using my own video footage and that of David Robinson, when I can find time.
- Linked Peter’s new video of Peter Thompson: Suite no 8: ‘Nameless Days’, III: At the Collyweston River Bridge to the product page.
- Added a very nice new live recording of Peter Thompson: Romance for Viola and Piano.
- Added some new review quotations (the first in several years!) relating to the At the Open Door CD.
- Applied one of the review quotations to Peter Thompson’s A Red, Red Rose (even given that the version for sale on this site is the choral setting rather than the solo song as recorded). Also added a new video to this page and rationalised the page content in general.
- Similarly, added a review quotation to Carey Blyton’s Lyrics from the East and Lyrics from the Chinese.
- Linked Peter’s new video of Peter Thompson: Four Swinburne Pictures, II: Lines from ‘A Match’ to the product page.
- Increased postage cost to £4 per disc for CDs; an inevitability of recent Post Office price rises. (Also a tedious update to have to make, since every one of the currently 25 CD entries on PayPal must be edited individually!)
- Published Chinese Lantern Music by Peter Thompson.
- Published Hogarth’s Delight by John Mitchell.
- Published The Heart of Man by John Mitchell.
- Published Songs Without the Words by Sir Arnold Bax, arranged by Ennio Caironi.
- Published String Quartet no 8 by Peter Thompson.
- Published Collected Poems • 1979–2025 by P. F. Owen. (As with the previous two editions of this collection, this is a ‘stealth publication’: published in the catalogue but not announced in the news.)
- Published On the Quarterdeck by Kenneth J. Alford, arranged by John Mitchell.
- In the Music > Instruments section, added a new entry for Harpsichord/Clavichord music, initially with two recent publications as entries (one for each instrument).
- Added a special composer page about Ennio Caironi, which (like John Mitchell’s page) lists all the very many keyboard performances he has provided for the site.
- Added to Ennio Caironi’s composer page his new première recordings of Granville Bantock’s Twelve Dramatic Poems, Empire March, Melody in E flat, Reverie and The Witch of Atlas.
- Added Ennio’s new recording of Warlock arr. Mitchell: Songs Without the Words, Volume 2, complementing the recording of Volume 1 that he provided earlier in the year.
- Made a number of significant improvements to the tables of recordings on John Mitchell’s composer page, bringing it in line with the similar tables on Ennio’s newly created page. Previously, every entry in every recording table was a link to the related page. This was (and remains) necessary for tables in which the entries are all, or mostly, links to different pieces. However, for tables in which the entries are movements of the same piece, it’s more efficient (and looks better) to remove the link from each line, and instead just have one link to the overall collection in the table header. So this has been done for all applicable tables. Additionally, there is now a ‘Volume’ column to indicate (and link to) volumes 1 and 2 of the Warlock Songs Without the Words.
- Corrected a couple of small errors: since Ennio’s recent recording of the complete Sketches & Fancies has become the primary recording of that work, John Mitchell’s existing recordings of four movements were ‘demoted’. However, this meant that the links to these recordings on John’s own composer page had become outdated, and were now pointing at Ennio’s new recordings of those movements! Those links have now been updated so that John’s own tracks are once again played on his own page. Also, the second minor error was the lack of a ‘clear’ declaration to end the floating tables before the auto-generated page content that comes after the tables of recordings. Such a ‘clear’ is not necessary under WebKit, which is why I failed to notice a problem. However, it turns out to be needed for Firefox; so it has been added and now all is well across browsers.
- Added a composer page for Kenneth J. Alford. Although this name is actually a pseudonym of Frederick Joseph Ricketts, we won’t make use of the site’s alias/pseudonym facility, but instead just list him as though Kenneth Alford were his real name.
- Added all the audio tracks for the Martin Read – A Celebration CD, and used them to add audio tracks to all the Martin Read pieces from the CD that are published in the Fand catalogue.
- Now that Ennio Caironi has his own composer page, several references to him in News and Friends of Fand stories have retrospectively been turned into links leading to the new page.
- Wrote Friends of Fand items about the première of Stress and the new Ennio page listing all his recordings and his new Bantock premières. Obviously, also put together a major news announcement about all the new publications etc.
- Belatedly discovered I’d forgotten to number the movements (I, II, III) of the Bax Piano Sonata in E flat. Corrected.
- Found and reported a bug in the Mozilla rendering engine which causes some tables not to display correctly in Firefox. (The vertical-align: baseline; CSS property used in product tables is incorrectly implemented; the distance by which text is shifted is not accounted for by extra space in a table cell, which means that the bottom line of text can overflow over the cell border.) My report was acknowledged within hours as being a reproducible error in the latest releases, so with luck a fix will follow before long.
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25th April 2025, 9:18:10 pm |
Easter update: publications added, creator database improvements, CD cross-references greatly expanded
- Published (posthumously) six new works by Martin Read: Before History, Death, be not proud, Mary Rose Songs, The Death of Colonel Boles, Four Interludes from The Death of Colonel Boles and Troper Fragment. These are to coincide with a newly issued CD of music by Martin Read.
- Published Theme and Eight Variations by Gary Higginson.
- Added the new At the Open Door CD to the catalogue.
- Added the new Martin Read – A Celebration CD to the catalogue.
- Published Aspects of Miracle by Peter Thompson.
- A notable improvement is that many music publication pages now have graphical links to CD pages on which recordings of them appear. And conversely, for every piece of music published by Fand in CD listings, the work title now links back to the page about the publication, so it’s easy to just click on a piece title and end up on the page about the piece, to find out more about it and perhaps buy a copy.
- Although this isn’t by any means a very visible change, nevertheless, a lot of previously missing information has been added to the database of composers and writers in terms of their birth and death dates. Both dates are now supplied for all the entries for which they could be discovered, which is the vast majority of them. This is largely for completeness and potential future expansion of the catalogue, but most composer and author pages will now show a date range against the name at the top, with far fewer gaps.
- Also in relation to the database of creators, the site no longer links to blank pages about composers and writers whose works are not published by Fand. Previously, this applied to a lot of composer names in CD listings in particular: clicking the composer names would go to a page showing that name with dates but nothing else (because there was no further information available and no works published by Fand). Now, following this latest update, all such composer names no longer appear as links, so it’s no longer possible to go to those blank pages by clicking names. The only names that remain clickable are the ones that actually lead to valid pages containing useful information.
- Updated and corrected a few pages: a small error in Friends of Fand (The Happy Forest was not arranged by John Mitchell!); a conflation of two movement names in Autumn Sketchbook (Twilight Leaves + Twirling Winds = Twirling Leaves; should have been Twirling Winds!), and linked to a video; also linked to a video for Burlesque.
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21st February 2025, 4:31:08 pm |
More recordings etc.
- Added a link (in the news announcement) to the page relating to Fand’s latest award, announced at Christmas.
- Added new recordings by Ennio to the following existing publications:
- Added a small Friends of Fand item to link to the new recordings.
- Added new videos from Peter to the following existing publications: Mitchell: Eynsford Days; Bax: Legend; Thompson: May Song; Thompson: Sestina.
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18th January 2025, 5:30:05 pm |
Eynsford Days and more Ennio
- Published John Mitchell’s Eynsford Days, with an accompanying performance by Ennio Caironi.
- Added new recordings by Ennio to the following existing publications:
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24th December 2024, 5:36:28 pm |
Bumper Christmas bundle of sound additions
- Added new piano recordings by Ennio Caironi of all of Peter Thompson’s remaining Piano Suites. Ennio had already recorded numbers 5, 7, 10 and 13; now he has filled in all the blanks. Here is the complete list:
- Ennio has also recorded lots of other Thompson miniatures, with the result that he has now completed recording all of Peter’s solo piano music. The newly added works are: Three November Poems, Three Inventions, Sidlesham Quay, Waltz (from The Fand Left-Hand Piano Album), June Tune, The Player and The Aspirant (from The Fand Grade 5 Piano Album), March Hares, Three Pieces and Two Wildflowers.
- Added a new Meccanico rendition of Antique Dreams, but then had to scrap it and replace it with a last-minute new genuine recording (on the harpsichord) from Ennio. This new recording contained a weird blip at the start of movement 3; I’ve edited it out of the audio files here on this site, but it remains in the original video on Peter’s channel.
- Also added new Meccanico renditions (along with Peter’s YouTube video versions) of Symphonietta Doppio (a slightly enhanced new version replaces the previous rendition), Roundels and String Trio.
- Finally, Ennio Caironi has also recorded John Mitchell’s volume of piano arrangements of songs by E. J. Moeran, Songs Without the Words.
- Wrote a Christmas news story about the new recordings and a new award that Fand has just picked up.
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4th December 2024, 10:35:08 pm |
Winter publications added
- Published Peter Thompson’s October and Antique Dreams, and Julian Farmer’s The Safe Return (arr. Peter Thompson). The Farmer also gets an audio rendition. These were actually made live on the site a week ago (on 25th November), but I didn’t have time to produce a news item announcing them until today.
- Catalogued John Mitchell’s Eynsford Days. This is currently hidden from view, though, awaiting is centenary-anniversary publication date of January 2025.
- Corrected a couple of tiny errors in database entries.
- Lots of work on new recordings from Ennio, to be added to the site very shortly, is ongoing.
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29th October 2024, 5:49:51 pm |
Sound additions
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22nd September 2024, 4:53:04 pm |
Stressful awards
- Revised the entry for Peter Thompson’s Prelude for Orchestra: “Stress” to link to a new audio rendition. Also took the opportunity to add new sample pages: previously we just had the first page, but now the first five are provided.
- Added a news item and related graphics about Fand’s second Music Publisher of the Year award from CorporateLiveWire, and linked to the page making the announcement.
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7th September 2024, 10:38:07 pm |
Arnold ebook, and another award
- Revised the pages relating to The Doggy Tales of Arnold (Carey Blyton). Now there are twice as many sample pages to view, with four pages from each story. Also, having derived a distributable PDF from the hi-res printable version we recently received, an ebook version is now available once again. We don’t have the original epub file for Kindle, but a PDF is a good alternative and more widely compatible.
- Fand has once again won Music Publisher of the Year from CorporateLiveWire, this time for 2024/25! I don’t yet have any details to link to, but I’ve received some graphics, so I’ve amended the heading line and replaced the second copy of the 2023/24 award graphic with the new 2024/25 logo. A news item will follow as soon as proper information is released.
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14th August 2024, 3:54:02 pm |
More Mitchell Music
Added two new works by John Mitchell to the catalogue, one of which includes his own recording of it: Barcarolle Blanche for piano solo and another new song cycle, this time to words by Edward Shanks: Summer’s Hue.
- Internal note: with this update, I changed the Grade field in the site database to be BINary rather than SMALL INTeger format, which is the explicit representation of how the field has always been conceived. It makes no practical difference to the workings of the site, but will make the Grade entries much easier for me to maintain in future, as I can now see and edit the individual bits/flags. The only reason I ever used SMALL INT previously was because of a software bug in Sequel Pro that affected the editing of BIN fields, and it now appears to have been fixed in Sequel Ace.
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