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Pianist Hamish Milne was a proponent of the Romantic repertoire, especially that of Nikolai Medtner. He performed as a soloist with major British orchestras, was a frequent performer on BBC broadcasts, gave concerts throughout the world, and was an educator and an author.

Milne was born in Salisbury, England, on April 27, 1939. He attended Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, then studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Harold Craxton. He went on for further studies with Guido Agosti at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, Italy. While there, he attended master classes by Pablo Casals, Alfred Cortot, Andrés Segovia, and Sergiu Celibidache. Celibidache left an impression on Milne, which influenced his playing for the rest of his life. Milne made his professional debut in 1963. He began to study the music of Medtner in the 1970s, and in 1975, he commenced a series of recordings for CRD Records, offering the first recorded survey of Medtner's piano music. Often performing the music of Medtner as a recitalist and orchestral soloist, he toured across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the U.S., giving special performances in Moscow for the Medtner Festival in 1995, 2006, and 2007.

Milne made his Proms debut in 1978 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Hans Zender. Milne went on to perform with many of the major British orchestras and appeared on over 200 BBC broadcasts. He was also active as a chamber musician; he was a member of the Pro Arte Piano Quartet, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble, and a piano trio with Manoug Parikian and Amaryllis Fleming. His other collaborators included Jiří Bárta, Martyn Brabbins, Konstantin Lifschitz, and Kurt Sanderling. Along with CRD Records, he recorded for the Chandos, Danacord, Decca, and Hyperion labels. His 2005 Hyperion recording of Russian Bach transcriptions earned a Diapason d'Or. In 2007, he issued the first complete recording of Medtner's Skazki, which earned a Gramophone Award nomination.

Milne returned to the Royal Academy of Music in 1978 as a piano professor; he also taught at the University of London. As an author, he published the book Bartók: His Life and Times in 1982, as well as articles on Liszt, Bartók, and Hindemith for Heritage of Music in 1989. Milne died on February 12, 2020, at age 80. ~ Keith Finke

Englishman Joseph (or Josef) Holbrooke was an industrious, working class composer whose ambitious and extensive oeuvre betrays his equally considerable obscurity. The son of an English music hall musician and teacher, Holbrooke sometimes used the name "Josef" to distinguish himself from his father, also named "Joseph." Gaining his diploma from the Royal Academy of Music in 1896, Holbrooke made his public debut as concert pianist that year; at RAM he had also met his lifelong friend and supporter, Granville Bantock. By 1897, Holbrooke was working as a teacher and musical director based out of the London suburb of Haringey, leading small groups in touring music shows. It was a peripatetic existence, but things changed dramatically for Holbrooke in the year 1900 when three of his orchestral pieces were heard; August Manns led the symphonic poem The Raven at Crystal Palace, Bantock premiered Holbrooke's The Skeleton in Armour with the New Brighton Orchestra and Henry Wood presented his Symphonic Variations on "Three Blind Mice" at the Proms. By the end of 1900, Holbrooke was regarded as one of the top young composers in England.

In 1908, Thomas Beecham premiered Holbrooke's Apollo and the Seaman -- sometimes referred to as the Apollo Symphony -- with a multimedia element in the form of magic lantern slides shown in the darkened concert hall that provided a visual narrative to go along with the piece; these got out of sync with the music and handed Holbrooke his first failure. However, the funeral march from Apollo was a favorite of Captain Robert Scott and was much played at memorials held for Scott after he perished on an ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1912. Apollo also attracted the attention of Lord Howard de Walden, who, with Holbrooke, embarked on a cycle of music dramas based on Welsh folklore -- The Children of Don, Dylan, and Bronwen -- known under the umbrella title of The Cauldron of Annwn. These ambitious works occupied both Holbrooke and de Walden from 1908 and 1920, and the collaboration also resulted in a number of smaller pieces based on Cyrmic themes. De Walden remained Holbrooke's benefactor until his own death in 1946, funding concerts Holbrooke led, frequently devoted to young British composers, supporting recordings of Holbrooke's works, publications, and the like.

While Holbrooke's Piano Concerto No. 1 (1907) -- which had been premiered by Harold Bauer -- and his light music helped keep Holbrooke in the public mind, interest in Holbrooke began to decline sharply after the end of World War I. This was in spite of the fact that Holbrooke enthusiastically adopted the rhythms of jazz into his music, writing pop fox trots and other things of the kind during the 1920s. At this time, Holbrooke began to suffer from deafness, which did not affect his musical creativity but did make more difficult for him the business of conducting and simply communicating with the outside world. With de Walden's death, Holbrooke simply drifted into obscurity, dying at age 80 the same year as his contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams. However, he left a comparable output: in addition to works already mentioned, he composed eight symphonies, a second piano concerto, additional symphonic poems, much chamber music, and no less than 35 pieces based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Holbrooke's obscurity and eccentricity, however, gained a sort of legendary status among British musicians, which may have been what Tony Oxley, Gavin Bryars, and Derek Bailey had in mind when they named their free improvisation trio Joseph Holbrooke upon its inception in 1963. Although sometimes derided as long-winded, pedantic, and old-fashioned, Holbrooke was always looking for ways to stretch the boundaries of his music -- through use of projections, thought-provoking subject matter, unusual orchestration, or other means. Nevertheless, the late romantic harmonic language Holbrooke developed in the 1890s remained a constant throughout his life; he only wrote "modernistic" music as a kind of parody of composers who did so genuinely. This and other factors continue to impede the revival of Holbrooke's music, even though there is much that seems as worthy of investigation.

The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is Scotland's national broadcasting orchestra and considered one of the leading orchestras in Europe. It is one of the five full-time BBC orchestras, and the oldest full-time radio orchestra in Scotland. While most of its performances are in studio for the BBC, it has enjoyed success performing throughout the U.K. and internationally.

The BBC SSO was founded as the BBC Scottish Orchestra in 1935 by conductor and composer Ian Whyte while he served as the first head of music in Scotland for the BBC. Originally located in Edinburgh, the orchestra moved in 1938 to its newly built home in Glasgow. Throughout World War II, the orchestra continued broadcasting its live studio performances for the BBC Home and World Services. Following the war, Whyte expanded the size of the orchestra and in 1948 began the orchestra's annual trip to perform in the Edinburgh Festival. However, the majority of its performances remained in studio.

In 1960, Norman Del Mar was named principal conductor. In 1961, Del Mar lead the BBC Scottish Orchestra, along with the Scottish National Orchestra, in the U.K. premiere of Stockhausen's Gruppen für drei orchester. The following year he would lead the orchestra in its first performance at the BBC Proms. The orchestra expanded further under Del Mar, and in 1963 was renamed the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Following Del Mar's departure in 1965, the BBC SSO had a number of principal conductors, including James Loughran (1965-1971), Christopher Seaman (1971-1977), and Jerzy Maksymiuk (1983-1993). In 2003, Ilan Volkov became the youngest chief conductor of a BBC orchestra; during Volkov's tenure, the orchestra moved to its new home at City Halls in Glasgow. He served as chief conductor until 2009. In 2016, Thomas Dausgaard was named chief conductor with a contract running through 2022.

In the 1990s, while continuing to perform for BBC programming, the BBC SSO began performing more often in public. It went on international tours across Europe, the Americas, India, and China. The orchestra also attended more festivals, including the Cheltenham Festival and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

Alongside its live broadcast performances, the BBC SSO has released a multitude of commercial recordings, with a majority on the Hyperion label. The BBC SSO under Dausgaard released a recording of Sibelius' Kullervo in 2019 on Hyperion. ~ Keith Finke

Haydn Wood is best remembered for his substantial body of orchestral works in the light classical vein. He produced 15 suites, 9 rhapsodies, 8 overtures, and numerous other compositions in the orchestral genre, including concertos for piano and violin. Wood also wrote solo works for violin, piano, and organ. Though he did compose a symphony (ca. 1908), he seems to have abandoned it, having never seriously pursued publication. Wood also composed 180 songs, the most popular of which are probably Roses of Picardy (1916), written for his wife, soprano Dorothy Court, and A Brown Bird Singing (1922). He also produced several scores for musical plays or musicals, including Tina (1915), probably his greatest success in the genre. Wood, then, can clearly be seen as a sort of early example of a crossover artist, not unlike Leonard Bernstein. Wood arguably reached Bernstein's level of fame in England during his lifetime, both from his compositions and from numerous concert appearances and broadcasts. Today, Wood is regarded as a major figure in the realm of British light music, and recordings of his works are widely available.

Haydn Wood was born in Slaithwaite, England, on March 25, 1882. He grew up in Douglas, Isle of Man, where his older brother taught him on the violin. From age 15 Wood studied violin, piano, and composition at the Royal College of Music in London.

After graduation he toured Great Britain as part of a retinue of musicians accompanying Canadian soprano Emma Albani. While a student at the RCM, Wood met his future wife Dorothy Court, whom he married in 1909. From 1913-1926 he toured Britain with her and a pianist playing concert fare that mixed songs (mostly his) and violin/piano repertory. Typically, the three, Wood on violin, would give two concerts per day, including Saturdays.

Despite this heavy schedule Wood was busy as a composer during this period, scoring modest successes with the aforementioned Tina, as well as for Cash on Delivery (1917). Wood concertized as a violinist less frequently after 1926, though he regularly conducted various orchestras for BBC broadcasts, often in concerts featuring works commissioned by the BBC. Wood remained quite active in composition during the war and in the postwar era. Among his better known late works are the orchestral rhapsody Mylecharane (1946) and Serenade to Youth (1955), also for orchestra. Wood died in London on March 11, 1959.

Not a celebrity conductor, Britain's prolific Martyn Brabbins has rediscovered a striking amount of neglected music and presented it in convincing performances. Early on, he made a significant mark through recordings of contemporary Scottish composers and as one of the main conductors involved in Hyperion's extensive Romantic Piano Concerto series.

A self-described late starter, Brabbins was born on April 13, 1959. He attended Goldsmith's College and played in brass bands but had little other performing experience before studying conducting with Ilya Musin at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1986 to 1988. Upon his return to England, Brabbins won the 1988 Leeds Conductors Competition. His professional debut came that year as a last-minute substitute with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Within a few years, Brabbins had guest-conducted all the BBC orchestras and major and minor ensembles throughout England and Ireland. From 1994 to 2005, he was the associate conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and later added to his schedule the job of principal conductor of the contemporary music group Sinfonia 21. Brabbins expressed particular enthusiasm for "anything after Beethoven," especially such Russian composers as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. He has also landed many opera engagements, mainly with England's lesser houses, conducting works ranging from Mozart standards to Bliss' The Olympians and Tchaikovsky's The Slippers.

Brabbins' debut recording came on Hyperion in 1994, on Vol. 7 of the Romantic Composers Series, backing pianist Marc-André Hamelin on a recording of music by Adolf Henselt and Charles-Valentin Alkan. In 1997, he conducted the first commercial recording of Korngold's Die Kathrin. Brabbins served as the artistic director of the Cheltenham Music Festival between 2005 to 2007. From 2009 to 2015, he was the principal guest conductor of DeFilharmonie (Royal Flanders Philharmonic) and was the chief conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic in Japan from 2012 to 2016. Brabbins was named the music director of the English National Opera in 2016, resigning his post there in 2023 in protest against budget cuts at the organization.

Brabbins has made more than 150 recordings for labels such as Chandos, NMC, and Deutsche Grammophon, along with Hyperion. His recorded efforts include a disc of Cyril Scott works with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (2004), Bax (2004), and Britten on Film (2009). He made numerous recordings with both the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the main BBC Philharmonic, often devoting his efforts to unfamiliar repertory from both Britain and continental Europe. His recording pace increased as the new century went on, and the year 2011 saw no fewer than eight Brabbins recordings. In 2020, he was heard on six releases, including a pair of Hyperion albums -- one offering music by Vaughan Williams, the other music by James MacMillan -- and a BIS album containing works by John Pickard. Brabbins paused only slightly during the COVID-19 pandemic, returning in 2023 with six recordings once again, one of them a performance of Charles Villiers Stanford's Requiem with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Brabbins has taught as a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music. ~ James Reel & James Manheim