It was a few short weeks before our recording of piano concertos by Amy Beach, Cecile Chaminade and Helen Hopekirk with the BBC Scottish Symphony, when suddenly the Hopekirk Foundation withdrew the recording rights, leaving us with a large hole in our album. Panic ensued. Repertoire lists were checked. Calls were made. Scores were perused. But this panic turned into our greatest fortune, for it was then that we discovered Dorothy Howell.

One slight hitch - to get recording permission from the Howell Estate, we needed to meet Dorothy Howell’s niece and nephew (keepers of Dorothy’s estate) - in person only. Off we trotted to Bewdley, Worcestershire, where we met Merryn and Collumb Howell in their quaint, dusty Victorian home. We shared lunch and an afternoon of colourful tales and affectionate anecdotes of ‘Auntie D’. And so a wonderful friendship began - with Merryn and Collumb, and with Dorothy herself.

After recording Dorothy’s wonderful piano concerto (Hyperion, 2015), I returned to Bewdley, passionately seeking more of Dorothy’s orchestral creations. Merryn had rescued all of Dorothy’s scores from her deathbed, where the composer wished to burn them - ‘No one is interested’, she’d said. Merryn was delighted to indulge me – she brought out paper packages, wrapped up in string, which I unwrapped eagerly. Beneath the dust, I discovered incredible ‘page-turners’ – original scores with Henry Wood’s blue pencil markings, with handwritten notes from Dorothy (stuck inside with yellowed Sellotape), which oozed character – underlines and exclamation marks, preaching about ‘proper’ castanets and technique. I was amazed that these works hadn’t seen daylight in over eighty years.

Her music jumped off the page – it was evocative, bold and imaginative, overflowing with fantastic colours and character, and skilfully and uniquely orchestrated. Dorothy’s strong character, illustrated so vividly by her relatives, shone through these fraying manuscripts. I was determined to bring this music back to life, for the public to hear Dorothy’s voice once again, and baffled how this wonderful music and fallen into oblivion.

Few composers capture the national imagination these days, but in 1919, a young graduate of the Royal Academy of Music certainly did. Dorothy’s tone poem, Lamia, dazzled Sir Henry Wood so much that he programmed it five times in the 1919 Proms season, and subsequently again in five more seasons. Dorothy was critically acclaimed and was hailed ‘The English Strauss’. And so began a glittering career that produced more than 130 compositions. Sadly today, however, the name Dorothy Howell is all but forgotten, despite being one of the most celebrated composers of her time. After Lamia’s initial success, the critics turned increasingly vicious – the press was especially hard on female composers at the time. This weighed heavily on Dorothy, who found it harder to bounce back each time, and sadly she eventually abandoned orchestral works altogether.

In 2019, on the centenary of Dorothy’s career launch, I organised a Dorothy Howell Study Day with the Southbank Sinfonia, at which we aired four Howell orchestral works not heard since the 1940s. The audience were blown away and aghast that the music had lain hidden for so long. I was thereafter determined to record the pieces, and I am delighted that it has finally come to fruition. I hope it will help to revive Dorothy’s wonderful music and her powerful voice and character, and to finally secure this music’s rightful place in the centre of the classical music canon. I hope listeners will love these colourful, characterful, skilful works as much as I do, and that they will also become enthralled with Dorothy Howell’s ferocious talent and fascinating story.