Catalog

In his introduction, James Adler says that Reflections is “an image, a return of light or energy, a sign or result, even a thought. This album is a celebration for and a reflection upon special friends, composers, and specific works that are close to my heart.” A Curtis Reflection, commissioned by The Curtis Institute of Music for their Centenary Commissioning Initiative, is a celebration of Adler’s years of study at Curtis. Judith Clurman, conductor of Essential Voices USA said “I enjoyed hearing ‘A Curtis Reflection’ and look forward to hearing it again.” Works by Henco Espag and Paul Turok represent his friends and the Debussy and Schumann Kinderszenen are works from his heart. James Adler is a pianist who “can create whatever type of music he wants at the keyboard” (Chicago Sun-Times) and a composer who writes “with uncommon imagination” (Atlanta Journal). As a performer and composer, Adler can be heard on the Albany Records, Capstone, Navona, and Ravello record labels. He is on the faculty at Saint Peter’s University and is the recipient of the 2017 Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Flutist Stephanie Jutt with pianist colleagues Pablo Zinger and Elena Abend performs songs and compositions from Latin American and Spanish composers that deserve much greater recognition. Her lifelong love of song and dance music originated from her early musical memories listening to her grandparents sing Mexican songs. Regardless of the music's origins, whether in vocal or instrumental compositions, the flute speaks and sings -- and at times even dances. As you listen to this recording, you will likely be enchanted by the music, not thinking about whether it is original instrumental music or a song transcription. Stephanie Jutt is one of the most renowned flutists of her generation. A first prizewinner in the International Concert Artist Guild and Pro Musicis International Soloist Competitions, she has earned major grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. A graduate of the New England Conservatory, Jutt is artistic director and co-founder of the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society. On the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her recordings appear on the Centaur, GM Records and University of Wisconsin-Madison Press labels.

Korean pianist Sung-Soo Cho performs an intriguing recital of compositions by American composers that range from works with very progressive musical language to ones that integrate influences of folk and honky-tonk -- in other words, the full spectrum of modern American classical music. The oldest work on the program was written in 1967 and the most recent in 2015. John Corigliano, Michael Ippolito, John Adams, Lowell Liebermann, Steve Reich, Elliott Carter, and David Rakowski are all represented on this recording. These composers have a strong advocate in Sung-Soo Cho, who was awarded "Best American Contemporary Performance: at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition and "Best Performance of the Commissioned Work: at the Texas State International Piano Competition. An award winner of numerous international competitions, Cho has appeared as a soloist in Asia, the U.S., and Europe. A graduate of Seoul National University and Manhattan School of Music, he is currently pursuing his D.M.A. degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He is on the faculty at Notre Dame College.

This 2-CD set presents music for piano by two of the most loved and prolific composers for that instrument who have ever lived, and who just happen to have been born the same year -- 1810. Schumann's contribution contains two of his most popular sets of character pieces, three other independent works, and the mighty Sonata in G minor, while Chopin's selections comprise one example of every single-piece genre in which he worked, including many of his greatest compositions. Pianist Findlay Cockrell, trained at Harvard and Juilliard, was on the faculty at the State University of New York at Albany for 40 years and enjoyed an active performance career as well. He shares some of his favorite repertoire with these recordings.

Pianist Stephanie Bruning notes that the Indianist Movement is a title many music historians use to define the surge of compositions related to or based on the music of Native Americans that took place from around 1890 to 1920. Hundreds of compositions written during this time incorporated various aspects of Indian folklore and music into Western art music. The character piece was a very successful genre for composers to express themselves. It became a natural genre for composers of the Indianist Movement to use as an outlet for portraying musical themes and folklore of Native American tribes. Eventually this enthusiasm died out leaving a large body of piano literature collecting dust, out of print, and virtually unrecognized. Bruning offers a selection of some of these works with this recording offering a glimpse of each composer's style and a look into musical and social issues America was grappling with at the end of the century. Stephanie Bruning is a graduate of Drake University and the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music. She is on the faculty at Morgan State University and serves as a reviewer for Clavier Companion.

Lowell Liebermann is one of the most frequently performed and recorded living American composers. He has written more than 100 works in all genres and his compositions have been released on compact disc by more than 40 labels. Among his lesser-known works are those for two pianos, of which this is the first recording. Comprised of Jeffrey and Karen Savage, 88 Squared Piano Duo won first place at the 2009 Ellis Piano Duo Competition and was awarded the Abild Prize in American music. Active in commissioning and performing new works for piano duo, 88 Squared has performed around the United States, as well as in Canada and Singapore, where they presented the international premieres of Lowell Liebermann's Sonata for Two Pianos. Both pianists are graduates of the Juilliard School and on the faculty at Washington State University.

The di.vi.sion piano trio (Kurt Briggs, violin; Matt Goeke, cello; Renée Cometa Brigg, piano) was formed in 2001. Its repertoire ranges from Haydn and De Fesch to Shostakovich and Ravel. The ensemble regularly programs and commissions new works that incorporate the musical structure of division. This recording of Merrill Clark's music includes Prime Divisions, which interweaves the compositional techniques of division with the composer's own system. The other work on the recording, Eighth Avenue Tango, was written as a birthday gift for violinist Kurt Briggs. Merrill Clark (b. 1951) has written many works in a wide variety of genres, from unaccompanied solo works to large-scale orchestral works. Clark finds writing for virtuoso musicians, whose playing one admires and who are also good friends, as the most gratifying creative event possible. The performances on this recording reflect the strong connection between the composer and performers.

Albany Records celebrates composer Joseph Fennimore's 75th anniversary with the release of this two-cd set of his 24 Romances and other select works. Born in 1940, Fennimore is known not only for his compositions, but also as an extraordinary pianist and teacher. He is best known for his works for piano and chamber ensembles. The Romances were not written as a set, but rather composed over a span of 30 years, from age 43 to 73, amidst a prolific, hugely creative career. The Romances grew from ideas that periodically arose, took hold, took shape, and suited the general idea of a Romance: a short, imaginative piano work. Also included on this 2-CD set are his Fifth Sonata for Piano; Passacalle; Sonatinella; and Three Pieces for Piano. Jeffrey Middleton, long a champion of Fennimore's piano music, graduated from Juilliard and received his doctorate from Yale. His career has included chamber music, vocal coaching and accompanying, solo performances, and teaching. Middleton is on the faculty of the School of American Ballet, and was the 2010 recipient of the Mae Wien Award for distinguished faculty service.

Pianist Nanette Kaplan Solomon, Professor Emerita of Music at Slippery Rock University has long been involved with the work of women composers. With this recording, she performs the music of the legendary Mana-Zucca in the first recording devoted to her music. Born in 1885, Gussie Zuccamanov (Zuckermann) had nearly a century long career as a child prodigy pianist, musical comedy star, prolific composer, and patron of the arts. She reinvented herself via her multiple talents as the winds of change and tides of time dictated. Even her name is an invention -- switching the syllables of her last name to create the artful, but gender mysterious Mana-Zucca. The piano pieces on this disc, written at various periods in the composer's life (from youth to age 90), represent excellent craftsmanship in the handling of small and large forms, and contain lush, chromatic harmonies. Because of her prolific output, vivacious personality, ingratiating melodies, and her impact on her life and times, Mana-Zucca was often called the "Chaminade of America." Like Chaminade and other women musicians, however, her importance to the musical world during her lifetime has been somewhat eclipsed. Recordings such as this one offer the opportunity to reassess her remarkable achievements.

Matthew Quayle's varied and eclectic compositional output ranges from concert orchestral works to cabaret songs. His music has been performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Avalon String Quartet, Arditti String Quartet and eighth blackbird, among many other distinguished new music ensembles. Quayle is on the faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. He is a graduate of Oberlin, the University of Cincinnati and the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science. The 21 short pieces in this collection were written in a span of just over a decade, from 2002 to 2013. Together they amount to an homage to the joys of the piano miniature: the type of unassuming little piece that one can play through countless times, until it feels like an old friend.

Chinese-American pianist Clara Yang offers a recording of works for solo piano for her second disc on Albany Records. Folding time explores the connection between the past and the present. American composers Robert Muczynski, Timo Andres, and Phil Young have distinct compositional styles, yet their works contain elements that convey a sense of nostalgia for past musical eras — particularly the Romantic. The three modern pieces are interspersed with two major 19th century Romantic works by Chopin and Schumann. Anachronistic forays are often part of the compositional landscape today. We look back to the past, but the past is also alive in our present day. Praised for her "effortless and smooth" technique and her "devastatingly limpid and pliable" tone, Ms. Yang has performed in notable venues and series around the world. She has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Eastman Philharmonia, the Longview Symphony and the North Carolina Symphony; has presented solo recitals in numerous major conservatories, universities, and music festivals internationally and has appeared as a collaborative artist with many noted performers. She will give the world premiere performance of a new concerto by Chen Yi with the China Philharmonic Orchestra during the 2016-17 season. A graduate of Eastman, Yale, and the University of Southern California, Ms. Yang is on the faculty of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Argentinian pianist Rosa Antonelli is one of today's leading performers and a champion of Latin-American and Spanish music. She has toured extensively, with more than 1,000 concerts in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America and she is dedicated to performing and recording the works of these composers for audiences all over the world. This recording is a rich and varied sampling of this music, bringing together standard repertoire works with a few less familiar gems. While composers from Brazil, Spain, Mexico and Cuba are represented, Ms. Antonelli focuses in particular on the music from her homeland with a rich array of compositions by Astor Piazzolla, Luis Gianneo and Alberto Williams.

All of the works on this recording may be labeled character pieces, a catchall term that covers compositions that are not sonatas, variations, dances, toccatas, fantasies or fugal works. The term originated in the late 1820s and referred almost exclusively to solo piano pieces. Pianist Richard Zimdars performs 20th and 21st century compositions written by composers from Russia, the U.S., Australia, Korea, and Israel. Zimdars, recently retired from a 40-year teaching and performing career, performed and lectured in Europe, Brazil, Canada and the U.S. His extensive discography includes the complete piano music of Roy Harris (on Albany Records) as well as Charles Ives' four violin sonatas and numerous recordings of works by contemporary composers. He was artistic director of the 2011 American Liszt Society Festival and organizer of the American Liszt Society Bicentennial Composition Competition.

The music of Frank Stemper has been performed in the United States and abroad in more than 22 countries. Through his multiple artist and teaching residencies as well as guest composer appearances at international festivals, his music has maintained a presence on the world new music scene. An eclectic blending of serial and jazz influences from the middle 50 years of the 20th century, his music demands virtuosity as well as sensitive interpretation. Korean pianist Junghwa Lee is the winner of many competitions and appears regular in solo recitals, chamber concerts, and lecture recitals as well as in concerto performances. A graduate of Seoul National University and Eastman, she is currently on the faculty of Southern Illinois University Carbondale and an active member of the Altgeld Chamber Players. She is the perfect interpreter for this recording of Stemper's complete music for piano.

The young piano virtuoso Christopher Janwong McKiggan commissioned seven composers from many different cultural backgrounds (American, Canadian, Thai, Chinese, Korean and Middle Eastern) to write a work for piano based on Paganini's 24th Caprice for solo violin. The variety of the compositions that resulted is fascinating and links multiple national traditions around a central theme, while maintaining uniqueness. Born in England, McKiggan grew up in Thailand. He has studied at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Rice University, where he is now pursuing a DMA in piano performance. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Gold Medal in the Seattle International Piano Competition, McKiggan is committed to contemporary music and has performed numerous world premieres, including the Asian premiere of Robert Beaser's Piano Concerto at the 2012 Beijing Modern Music Festival.

This recording was conceived by pianist Matthew McCright by pairing music from two periods of Olivier Messiaen's compositional life that are linked by the pianist Yvonne Loriod. Messiaen heard Loriod perform the Préludes, and she became his muse for countless compositions, including Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, which was dedicated to her, and later, his second wife. McCright has performed extensively throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia and the South Pacific as a piano soloist and chamber musician. A member of the piano faculty of Carleton College, McCright has premiered numerous new pieces, many written for him, and has collaborated with such composers as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Augusta Read Thomas, and Paul Dresher, among many others. He studied at Westminster College, the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Minnesota.

Composer Jonathan Pieslak is on the faculty at the City College of New York and Graduate Center, where he teaches composition, theory, and music and radicalism. He is a fellowship winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his compositions have been widely performed and recorded. Pieslak comments that he is no exception to the stereotype of younger American composers citing the influence of pop/rock music on their own compositions. His musical roots lie in the hard rock and metal of the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as Latin and funk. He and pianist Robert Auler have been friends and musical collaborators since graduate school days at the University of Michigan and the performances on this recording reflect their close relationship. An associate professor at SUNY Oswego, Auler has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, China and Austria. A first-prize winner of the Society of American Musicians competition, Auler made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2004.

Composer James Lee III, an associate professor at Morgan State University, cites Michael Daugherty, William Bolcom, Bright Shen, Steven Mackey and Osvaldo Golijov as some of his major composition teachers. Maestro Leonard Slatkin began to champion Dr. Lee's work in 2006, performing his music with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Baltimore Symphony, among others. Lee has been commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony to compose a work on the life of Harriet Tubman and was the third winner of the Sphinx Commissioning Consortium. Dr. Rochelle Sennet, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has established herself as a well-known performer, teacher, scholar and advocate of contemporary African-American composers. She performs these world-premiere recordings of James Lee's works for piano with sensitivity and grace, ending the program with a work composed for her, the Piano Sonata No. 2.

This six-CD set documents the unparalleled artistry of pianist Howard Karp with concert recordings from 1962 through 2007. Howard Karp studied at the Oberlin Conservatory with Jack Radunsky and at Juilliard with Rosina Lhevinne. He also studied in Vienna as a Fulbright scholar at the Akademie für Musik and with Wilhelm Kempff in Positano. His 45-year teaching career at the Universities of Kentucky, Illinois and Wiconsin culminated in his appointment as Emeritus Professor of Music in 2000. As a performer, Howard Karp won acclaim for solo and chamber music recitals throughout the United States and Europe and his former students can be found on the faculties of numerous colleges and universities throughout North American and Asia.

Described as a pianist of "enormous power" by the Washington Post, Canadian Yaroslav Senyshyn is an exponent of the grand tradition of piano playing. In addition to his concert activities, he is a professor of aesthetic and moral philosophy at Simon Fraser University and publishes extensively on these topics. For this recording, Senyshyn couples well-known works by Rachmaninoff with two pieces by Atsushi Yoshinaka, who is a professor at Gakuin University and spent a year as a visiting professor at Simon Fraser University, where he and Senyshyn collaborated. His two works were inspired by a trip taken to the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia and are reminiscent of Rachmaninoff's homesickness and longing for his ancestral home.

Born in 1948, composer/pianist Steven R. Gerber studied at Haverford College and Princeton. His music has been performed by orchestras and ensembles across the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony, the National Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Louisville Orchestra. His music is especially popular in Russia and the Ukraine where there have been dozens of performances of his orchestral, solo and chamber works. His music appears on the Chandos, Naxos, Koch and Arabesque labels. This recording includes almost all of his solo piano music performed in reverse chronological order, interspersed with a riveting performance of his Duo for violin and piano by Gregory Fulkerson and Jennifer Rinehart.

The compositions of Amy Williams have been presented at renowned contemporary music venues in the United States, Australia and Europe. Her works have been performed by leading contemporary music soloists and ensembles including the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the International Contemporary, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and the California E.A.R. Unit. Ms. Williams is the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Fromm Music Foundation Commission and a Creative Development Grant from the Heinz and Pittsburgh Foundations. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. This recording, the first devoted exclusively to her music, features compositions for piano and strings, all given virtuosic performances by some of the finest performers of contemporary music including the JACK Quartet, Jeffrey Jacobs, Amy Williams and the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo.

Pianist Pola Baytelman performs works for piano by American composers Joseph Fennimore, George Crumb and Lowell Liebermann. She is joined by flutist Jan Vinci in Katherine Hoover's Medieval Suite. Born in Chile, Baytelman has studied at the University of Chile's National Conservatory, the New England Conservatory and the University of Texas, Austin. She is an active recitalist who has toured extensively in China, Europe, Hong Kong, South America and across the United States. Her recording on Centaur of Schumann's Humoreske was listed by American Record Guide as one of the top performances of the work. This is her second recording for Albany Records. The first, From Chile to Cuba (TROY1116) received high praise from the press. Jan Vinci, Baytelman's colleague at Skidmore, where both are artists-in-residence, has been hailed as an "exquisite performer" by High Performance Review. She appears on two other recording on Albany Records, including a solo recording titled Global Flutescapes (TROY947).

Composer David Wolfson enjoys a particularly eclectic and varied compositional career, which has included chamber music, musical theatre and opera. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Hunter College and his chamber and solo works have been performed through the United States and Europe. His work Story Salad, a series of stage revues for children, toured the U.S. for 13 consecutive years and was seen by more than a million children, teachers and parents. He has received awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, the Puffin Foundation and the Manhattan Cultural Arts Fund. This first recording devoted to his music includes a work for solo piano and a cello sonata.

Steven Holochwost (b. 1978) studied at Yale and Rutgers University, where he was under the tutelage of Charles Wuorinen. He has received awards and citations from the National Association of Composers, the Fisher Foundation and ASCAP. His music has been performed throughout the United States and in England, France, Austria and Japan. In addition to his career in music, Holochwost is active at the intersection of developmental psychology and public policy, having earned a doctorate from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. This first recording devoted to his music includes pieces composed between 2002 and 2010. They feature modal sonorities and lyrical melodies on their "sounding surface," which are supported by a structural architecture developed through the application of Charles Wuorinen's "nesting" method of composition — an approach that reflects the self-similar nature of musical sound and references the broader tradition of Western art music.

George Whitefield Chadwick was one of the most significant and influential composers in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although best known for his orchestral compositions, he also wrote more than 100 songs for voice and piano in a wide variety of styles. The songs included in this recording, many recorded for the first time, demonstrate Chadwick's range of styles and subjects. They are creative, playful at times and filled with a distinctive sensitivity and intelligence. Tenor Glenn Siebert has appeared with many of the world's most acclaimed orchestras and has recorded extensively. He is on the faculty of the University of North Caroline School of the Arts. Pianist Peter Kairoff is on the faculty of Wake Forest University. He has performed throughout the U.S., Europe and China and has recorded music by 19th century American composers for Albany Records.

Meisha Adderley and Stacey Holliday present a program of music for piano duo by black composers. Spanning a time frame of music written in 1935 by William Grant Still, to works by Dolores White and Hale Smith that date from the late 1960's to the most recent work by Cedric Adderley written in 2010, this recording offers a survey not only of unique compositional voices across 75+ years, but also intriguing repertoire for this ensemble. Meisha Adderley received her D.M.A. from the University of South Carolina and also studied at the University of Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Indiana State University. She serves on the faculty of Capital University Conservatory of Music. Her colleague, Stacey Holliday, also studied at the University of South Carolina as well as Furman University. Formerly on the faculty at Furman University, Ms. Holliday now maintains a large piano studio and is active as a collaborative and solo artist.

Composer Joel Hoffman writes that this collection of his chamber music is named Three Paths because each of the three works follows a distinctly unique pathway. He has explored a fairly broad variety of musical dialects over the course of his composing career and these works reflect that exploration. Hoffman's music draws from such diverse sources as Eastern European folk musics and bebop and is pervaded by a sense of lyricism and rhythmic vitality. He has received awards from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He is on the faculty at the College-Conservatory of Music of Cincinnati, a guest faculty member at the China Conservatory in Beijing and the artistic director of MusicX.

Karen Beres and Christopher Hahn, members of the CanAm Piano Duo, have been presenting innovative programs of duet and two-piano repertoire since 2002. They received the silver medal at the 2008 International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition in Boston and a distinguished ranking at the 2009 IBLA Grand Prize competition in Ragusa, Italy. As avid proponents of contemporary music, Beres and Hahn perform a varied repertoire of new works and masterpieces of the 20th century. Karen Beres is on the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and Christopher Hahn serves on the faculty at the University of Montana. The program chosen for this recording includes a world premiere of David Maslanka's This Is The World; Libby Larsen's Gavel Patter based on American auctioneering patter and concludes with Lutoslawski's Paganini Variations in an arrangement for two pianos with added percussion parts.

Here we present the last record of the nomadic pianist, Adrian Brinkerhoff, in Nepal, just before his disappearance into the deep Himalayas. Brinkerhoff played only for his friends, in settings of his own distracted choosing - power plants, shoe factories, cisterns, moving his Steinway in the dark, surrounded by muscular thugs, traveling further and further away from recognition. The twelve compositions presented here all illustrate different aspects of the day and are all in D flat. In the 675 pages of text (which can be accessed on a DVD machine in a home theater or a computer), the pianist explains the unique connotations of the key of D flat - why a composer would write in D flat rather than, say, F major. The text also includes running commentary by the producer on the recording and its tragic circumstances. 82 photographs are included, taken in Nepal by the pianist at the time of the recording. Here are some thoughts by the pianist. "I've chosen these pieces because to me they cling to that nocturnal trellis that lives only in the world of D flat. The dreams they provoke are not accidental. The moods they inspire must be similar to the same moods that brought them into the world. That is, they re-create themselves easily, assuming the pianist doesn't trip over them, but has the foresight instead to slip into the hedges and wait for thunder." This new CD, even though it is in DVD Audio, using the latest technology, will play on all current CD players.