Poulenc Piano Music: Nimbus Rediscovered Recordings

This recording was made in June 1972, in the months after the construction of Nimbus Records first purpose built recording studio in Birmingham. The sessions included works by Mendelssohn and Brahms, both composers whose music Martin would go on to record for Nimbus in later years. Why the Poulenc was not released is a mystery. It was finished as a master for production less than a month after the recording, but has sat on the shelves for 53 years. Here is a joyful reminder of the youthful virtuosity of one of the UKs most highly regarded pianists. © Adrian Farmer

Nimbus ‘Rediscovered Recordings’

Nimbus is pleased to present the first two titles of a short series of recordings sitting on the shelves of the Nimbus archive that were ‘rediscovered’ during the 2020 COVID shutdowns. In those quiet days idle hands and minds posed the question: ‘So, do we have anything unissued that we can use to construct a release programme?’ This casual enquiry initiated a full investigation that has continued for five years and revealed more than fifty recording projects that, for one reason or another, never made it into the world. Some of these recordings go back to the founding of Nimbus in the late 1960s. There is no single reason to account for their neglect, and in every case we have found no justification for holding them back any longer.

The original analogue tapes, typically one-inch, four track, 30ips, transferred to a digital medium with no problem. We decided to archive them at 192k, thus preserving them for next generation use. Early digital tapes, from 1981/82, using U-matic cassettes, sometimes required surgical intervention to repair passages of lost signal, but having been stored in the same warm, dark room for their entire lives also transferred reliably for the most part.