Catalog

Milos Raickovich, composer and conductor, has lived and worked in Belgrade, Paris, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Hiroshima and New York. He writes music in a unique style -- "New Classicism" -- that has been described as "...a combination of the American Minimalist style with European Classical and Romantic music." (John Schaefer, WNYC's "New Sounds") Love, passion and longing are the recurring themes in all the works on this disc. FAR AWAY includes six pieces, each based on a different type of scale, including various 3, 5, 6, and 7-note scales. The opening piece is the energetic and primal Flying Trio, for violin, cello and piano. The Romantic-sounding Sonata and Three Romances are works grounded in the Minimalist approach. A meditative, Asian influenced film score "El contorno" Variations is also included, as well as B-A-G-D-A-D, played by the RTS Symphony Orchestra from Belgrade. (Three other arrangements of the same piece are included in Milos Raickovich's antiwar CD B-A-G-D-A-D, Albany Records.) FAR AWAY concludes with the nostalgic Winter Waltz.

The nine recordings of Ezra Laderman's chamber music on Albany Records are now offered in a slipcase edition at a special price. Included are his string quartets, music for piano, and chamber works for various instrumental ensembles. Performers such as the Cassatt String Quartet, violinist Erick Friedman, and flutist Ransom Wilson offer critically acclaimed performances of this distinguished American composer's music. Taking 10 years to complete, this series offers a comprehensive survey of Laderman's solo instrumental and chamber music.

The distinctive character and originality of Bernard Rands' music have been variously described as "plangent lyricism: with a "dramatic intensity" and a "musicality and clarity of idea allied to a sophisticated and elegant technical mastery." Through more than 100 published works and many recordings, Rands has been firmly established as a major figure in contemporary music. The recording include "now again" -- fragments from Sappho, a work commissioned for the Network for New Music, the brilliant ensemble based in Philadelphia with a 25 year history of adventurous and innovative programming.

The Palisades Virtuosi (Margaret Swinchoski, flute, Donald Mokrynski, clarinet, Ron Levy, piano) lays claim to a special achievement with this recording. Their mission of commissioning and recording works for the instrumentation of their ensemble has resulted in more than 40 new pieces, six of which are heard on their third recording in this series for Albany Records. No other ensemble has done as much to enhance the repertoire for flute, clarinet and piano. Their musical and heartfelt approach coupled with their dazzling virtuosity has endeared them to audiences and composers alike.

A graduate of Harvard and Yale, Martin Boykan counts Walter Piston, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith as his composition teachers and Eduard Steuermann as his piano teacher. He founded the Brandeis Chamber Ensemble and was pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has written for a wide variety of instrumental combinations including four string quartets, many trios, duos and solo works, song cycles as well as instrumental ensembles and choral music. His music is widely performed by ensembles like the New York New Music Ensemble, Earplay, Music Viva, Collage New Music and Speculum Musicae, to name a few. The recipient of many awards and commissions, Martin Boykan is an Emeritus Professor of Music, Brandeis University and was Composer in Residence at the Composer's Conference in Wellesley and the University of Utah. His music appears on the CRI and BMOP record labels.

Violinist Mark Rush offers a contemporary program of music for violin and percussion assisted by the Arizona Percussion Ensemble and percussionist Norman Weinberg. With Michael Daugherty's Lex, based on Superman's most vexing foe, Lou Harrison's innovative concerto mixing "junk" percussion instruments with traditional European one, Craig Walsh's work for violin and percussion based on ecobiological ideas expressed in purely abstract musical ways, and Kevin Puts' work for violin, clarinet and marimba, we have exciting music for a non-traditional combination.

Albany Records in cooperation with the Center for Black Music Research is initiating a series undertaking to document the musics of the African diaspora. This first volume features two orchestral works Ñ one by Mary Watkins, who is an eclectic composer and pianist of the classical and jazz traditions and the other by Olly Wilson, one of the most distinguished composers of his generation. Watkins' work swings, grooves, and hearkens to the roots of African-American musical expression. Elements of jazz, traditional African music and popular forms are merged with contemporary techniques and colorful orchestrations. A veritable tour de force, Wilson's multimovement song cycle features three vocal soloists and a chamber ensemble that highlights extensive percussion. Drawing from sources such as spirituals and African-American poets, Wilson uses musical and textual emblems from African-American poetry in inventive ways that both surprise and entice.

Clarinet trio CDs aren't the most mainstream kind of CDs around. However there are always clarinetists like the distinguished artists from Chicago performing on this recording who are always searching for fun, interesting new music to perform. The music was selected with these criteria in mind and the hope is the listeners will find the "fun" in this music -- four works of which were written specifically for this ensemble.

Born in New York, Peter Ivan Edwards studied at Northwestern University and at the University of California, San Diego. His work has been performed throughout the world by numerous ensembles and at major international festivals. He is assistant professor at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore where he teaches composition and theory. His music is influenced by two strands of music thinking -- the American experimentalists and the European avant-garde. Edwards takes many different things from these traditions and creates an original music that builds off their discoveries.

Although the six pieces that make up this program were not composed with this purpose in mind, each work explores different ways to combine the sounds of flute and percussion. Two of humanity's oldest instruments, they remain favorites of contemporary composers. Stylistically, the pieces on this recording vary greatly, but they also complement each other by showing manifold possibilities that flute and percussion duos offer.

Morris Rosenzweig was born October 1, 1952 in New Orleans, where he grew up among the tailors, merchants, and strong-willed women of an extended family that has lived in southern Louisiana since the mid 1890s. His works have been widely presented throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Japan, Argentina, Mexico and Israel. His recorded compositions are available on Albany Records Centaur, and New World/CRI. Mr. Rosenzweig has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Argosy Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and support from the Alice M. Ditson Fund. Presently Professor of Music at the University of Utah, he has formerly held positions at Queens College and New York University. He was educated at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University.

The six compositions on this recording by the Armenian-American Hayg Boyadjian, cover a six-year period of his compositional output. Each was written for and is dedicated to specific musicians, although not all of them figure as performers on this recording. The musical language reflects Boyadjian's diverse background. Born in Paris of Armenian parents, he grew up in Buenos Aires and then relocated to the United States. He has drawn musical inspiration and materials from all these different cultures. Inspired by Boyadjian's interest in astronomy, the last work on the recording (Pleiades) was written for James Pellerite, who has dedicated himself to the native American flute.

Modern brass chamber music is dominated by quintets and the relative scarcity of trio performances is belied by the number of outstanding compositions for that ensemble, some of which are presented on this recording. Worth noting is the daunting challenge inherent in the ensemble itself Ñ the transparency of the three voices demands that even secondary lines project with identity and color. When performed on a high level, as on this disc, there is a deeply gratifying intensity to the experience, shared by the listener and the performers.

Radical, traditional, original, archetypal, Cindy Cox derives her "post-tonal" musical language from acoustics, innovations in technology, harmonic resonance, and poetic allusion. Naturally unfolding through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes, her compositions synthesize old and new musical designs. This is the second disc of Cox's chamber music to appear on Albany Records. Cindy Cox is the Evelyn and Jerry Chambers Chair Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 40 by Johannes Brahms reigns as one of the supreme works of chamber music that includes the French horn, and it is often thought of as the model for all of the succeeding works composed for this trio. The instrumentation is certainly unique, as there were no precedents of note in the major chamber music oeuvre. Paired with the Brahms on this recording are two rarely performed and previously unrecorded horn trios from the beginning of the last century. All three performers are internationally acclaimed and give exceptional performances of this repertoire.

This second recording of chamber music by Armand Qualliotine on Albany Records features music for piano, vibraphone and marimba. Qualliotine (b.1954) earned his degrees from the Hart College of Music, SUNY-Stony Brook and Brandeis University. His post-doctoral work included studies with Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt. He is now a professor of composition at Berklee College of Music. He has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, and the Paul Jacobs Commission for orchestral composition from the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra.

With the exception of the Six Valses Caractéristiques, these are the first recordings of these compositions by Edward Joseph Collins. Born in Illinois, Collins studied piano with Ganz in Chicago and composition with Bruch and Humperdinck in Europe. Collins was hired in 1914 as an assistant conductor for the Bayreuth Festival, a brief engagement ended by WWI. After the war, his music attracted the attention of Frederick Stock, who conducted many of his orchestral compositions with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The Scott/Garrison Duo consists of clarinetist Shannon Scott and flutist Leonard Garrison, has performed together since 1988, with a long commitment to American music. They have been featured at five conventions of the National Flute Association and were winners of the NFA’s Chamber Music Competition. This recording features nine delightful works for this wind duo, exploring works by American, French and Swiss composers.

This recording allowed composer Dalit Hadass Warshaw to feature and reconcile diverse aspects of her musical identity -- composer, pianist, and thereminist. The music runs across a broad harmonic spectrum with music ranging from solo instrumental works to string quartet to voice. It also highlights Warshaw's mission to integrate the theremin with acoustic ensembles as her music for this instrument features the more lyrical, vocal and expressive capacities of this unusual instrument. The theremin used for this recording belonged to Clara Rockmore and was customized for her by its inventor, Lev Theremin, in the early 1930s. A prolific composer and active performer, Ms Warshaw's music has been widely praised for its lyricism, its unique orchestral palette, its sense of drama and emotional intensity.

William Matthews began studying and performing music as a flutist in Springfield, Ohio, then studied composition formally at Oberlin, the University of Iowa, the Institute of Sonology and the Yale School of Music. He has taught at Bates College since 1978. His creative time is divided between acoustic and electro-acoustic compositions and both types are represented on this first recording devoted to his music.

The music of John Allemeier has been described as having a "sweet sense of mystery." His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe in chamber concerts and at international festivals. A graduate of the University of Iowa, Northwestern University and Augustana College, he also studied at the Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. He teaches composition and music theory at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This CD presents four premiere recordings of his music for various chamber ensembles. Each of these pieces resulted from commissions and collaborations with education and and artistic organizations between 2007 and 2010.

The recording of James Willey's String Quartets Nos. 3, 7 and 8, marks the culmination of a decades-long partnership between the composer and the Esterhazy Quartet, which began in 1977 with the Quartets performance of his String Quartet No. 1. Since then the Esterhazy Quartet has performed and recorded all eight of the composer's works in this genre. Aided by this long, closely-knit collaboration in which ideas, revisions and artistic inspiration would flow back and forth between composers and performers, James Willey has created one of the most beautiful and personally expressive canons of string quartets in the latter part of the 20th century.

David S. Lefkowitz, a native of New York City, studied composition at Eastman, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. He has won international acclaim as a composer, with his works garnering performances around the world as well as numerous prizes and including recognition from the National Association of Composers, the Chicago Civic Orchestra and the Gaudeamus Music Week. As a theorist Lefkowitz has researched "meta-theoretical" issues such as the process of segmentation and the internal structure of set-classes. Lefkowitz has enjoyed creating music with different, often contradictory faces. The works on this disc in which tonality and atonality, consonance and dissonance exist in tension are not found at one particular point along the continuum from one stylistic extreme to another. Rather these pieces thrive on the tension between the contradictory characteristics.

As on the previous release of Gernot Wolfgang's music on Albany Records, rhythms (grooves) from musical styles such as jazz, rock & roll, pop, world music and electronica play important roles within his chamber music compositions. While they rarely stretch through an entire piece, they provide energy and forward motion in between the free flowing rubato passages. Active in the Los Angeles film and TV music industry, Wolfgang has served as composer-in-residence with the Beverly Hills International Music Festival where he curated a concert series featuring the chamber music of film/TV composers.

This recording brings together a selection of Ingrid Arauco's music written in the last decade and suggests a certain continuity of thought, with the entire program intended to be comprehended as a single artistic statement. A member of the music faculty at Haverford College, Ingrid Arauco studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Her works have been performed by many distinguished musical organizations, including the Colorado Quartet and the Network for New Music. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including awards from the American Guild of Organists and has received commissions from the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and the Kindler Foundation in the Library of Congress.

This recording is a symbol of cross-ocean friendship between composer Faye-Ellen Silverman and guitarist Volkmar Zimmermann and includes two pieces commissioned by Zimmermann and his Corona Guitar Kvartet. All the works feature guitar and range from works for solo guitar, guitar quartet and works for voice with guitar. Faye-Ellen Silverman studied at Barnard College, Harvard University and Columbia. She has received numerous commissions and awards and recordings of her music appear on the Albany, Capstone, Crystal and New World record labels. Her collaborator, German-born guitarist Volkmar Zimmerman studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He has performed in Europe, Russia, the United States and in Canada as a soloist and as a member of the Corona Guitar Kvartet. A bonus video, playable on QuickTime is included. Titled SPOR, it is a film by Nike Arnold and Clara Bausch and uses the first track from the recording, Processional, as music.

It was Biljana Milovanovic, pianist for the Ibis Camerata ensemble, who conceived this project of recording a group of compositions by Yehudi Wyner. Mr. Wyner performed in one piece (with Richard Stoltzman) and conducted another, but his major contribution was in coaching performers in matters of his style. The music spans 50 years of Wyner's compositional output beginning with the Partita for Piano of 1952 and arriving at Commedia for Clarinet and Piano of 2002. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, Yehudi Wyner is one of America's most versatile musicians. His compositions include more than 60 works and he has received many commissions and honors in addition to the Pulitzer. He has taught at Yale, SUNY Purchase, Cornell, Harvard and Brandeis. This is the fourth recording by the Ibis Camerata to appear on Albany Records.

Violist George Taylor and guitarist Nicholas Goluses, both faculty members at the Eastman School of Music, offer a lovely program of music for viola and guitar. The recording leads us through the various phases and moods of night from the first shadow to darkness to the sounds of night. The performers capture all the moods and colors, the timbre and sonority of the viola and guitar blending and interweaving beautifully. Their interpretations of these works are characterized by elegance, grace, warmth and humor.

Since 2006: The Saxophone Music of Allan Blank, is comprised of recordings of music dating from 2006-2009 by noted composer Allan Blank. These works, in combination with five pieces written for saxophone prior to 2006, qualify Blank as one of the most prolific major American composers for the saxophone. Saxophonist Bill Perconti is a Professor of Music at Lewis-Clark State College. He has been an ardent champion of American composers, and his numerous recordings contain world-premieres. Most of the compositions included on this recording were as a result of correspondence between the composer and Perconti.

The music of composer David Dies (b. 1972) has been performed in venues around the world, including London, Lima, New York City, Chicago, Lenox, Massachusetts, Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, where he has been both student and teacher. Notable performances include sopranos Mimmi Fulmer and Judith Kellock, cellist Jakub Omsky, pianist Christopher Taylor and bassoonist Marc Vallon, among others, who are featured on this recording. He currently teaches music theory and composition at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Dies comments that, "I titled the CD, agevolmente, because the complicated path I took to find the "simple" term reminds me of a central irony in my music. Generally, I want my music to sound comfortable, natural, elegant, and easy, but it takes a high level of skill, musicianship, and concentration to perform. I want the music to sound unlabored and simple when, for the performer, it can be exacting and complex."

George Edwards graduated from Oberlin and then did graduate study at Princeton, where he studied with Milton Babbitt, Earl Kim and Edward T. Cone. He taught at the New England Conservatory and then moved to Columbia University in 1977 where he taught composition and theory until 2004 when he retired. George Edwards' longtime friend and colleague, the composer and theorist Fred Lerdahl, identifies three basic strands in Edwards' music. First, it is relentlessly contrapuntal. Second, Lerdahl notes that while the music is not truly serial, the works of twelve-tone composers have had a profound effect. Finally, the music shows a strong affinity for the lyrical intensity and harmonic richness of the late Romantic Austro-German repertoire. These three strands coalesce in important ways to form the essence of George Edwards' unique compositional voice. With the release of this recording, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to engage with a composer of the first order.

Born in 1936, the eminent American composer Elliott Schwartz has had a distinguished career as a composer, professor and writer. He is the Robert K. Beckwith Professor of Music Emeritus at Bowdoin College, where he taught from 1964 to 2007. His music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world and he has held visiting appointments at Oxford University, the Royal Danish Academies, and the Rotterdam and Amsterdam Conservatories, among many others. His style is marked by a fondness for unsynchronized layers of activity, highly dramatic -- even theatrical -- gestures, and brilliant instrumental colors. Although the three works on this recording appear to be widely contrasted in certain surface ways, they also share important features. Each was conceived as the response to a personal experience and each explores a layering of textures.