Catalog

Christopher O'Riley combines a piano technique of remorseless brilliance with a fastidious musical intelligence. He has asserted himself as one of the most formidable and best-loved pianists of his generation. He appears throughout the United States and Europe as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra, and chamber musician. His repertory encompasses the literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. O'Riley, who was born in Chicago and reared in Pittsburgh, launched his career by winning prizes in the major international piano competitions. A pianist in the grand manner, he especially favors the colorful, large-scale works of the uniquely pianistic master composers like Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Scriabin, and Schumann. O'Riley's playing is, of course, the product of his distinct personality. But there can be little doubt that his profile as an artist is also the result of the dramatic tension between the stern conservatism of his musical training and the sensuous flamboyance of his own innate temperament. He is at once architect, dramatist, colorist, and dancing master; he is the intellectual's hedonist.

Christopher Rouse was one of America’s most prominent composers. Winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Music, he created a body of work perhaps unequalled in its emotional intensity. Three of his concertos — for trumpet, oboe, and bassoon — are included in this recording. Eric Berlin is principal trumpet of the Albany Symphony and assistant principal trumpet of the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra. He has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous new works for trumpet. Katherine Needleman is principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and has appeared as a soloist with orchestras around the U.S. Peter Kolkay is the only bassoonist to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant. In demand as a chamber musician, recitalist, and soloist with orchestras, he is on the faculty at Vanderbilt. The Albany Symphony, led by conductor David Alan Miller, has received four Grammy nominations and is both a 2014 and 2021 Grammy award winner.

Christopher Theofanidis’ music has been performed by many of the world’s leading performing arts organizations. He is a two-time Grammy nominee for best composition and his work for viola and chamber orchestra won the 2021 Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. He is on the faculty at Yale University and the Aspen Music Festival. Italian guitarist Nicolò Spera initiated this project of recording all of Theofanidis’ music for guitar, which includes a work for viola, guitar, and flute; a work for flute and guitar; and a large work for chorus and guitar. Spera enjoys a distinguished career as a recitalist and chamber musician. He is known for his research on the Franco-Andalusian composer Maurice Ohana. He is on the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder. EXIGENCE is a professional vocal ensemble highlighting artistry within Black and Latinx communities. Melissa Studdard is the author of two poetry collections. Her awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award, and the Tom Howard Award.

About her piece Canyon Echoes composer, conductor and flutist Katherine Hoover writes: "This piece was inspired by a book called 'The Flute Player,' a simply and beautifully illustrated retelling of an Apache folk tale by Michael Lapaca." Joan Tower is the composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Lukes. "In my piece Snow Dreams there are many different images of snow, its forms and its movements: light snow flakes, pockets of swirls of snow, rounded drifts, long white plains of blankets of snow, light and heavy snowfalls, etc. Many of these images can be found in the piece, if in fact, they need to be found at all. The listener will determine that choice." Roberto Sierra is Professor of Composition at Cornell University. "These six pieces for flute and guitar are a series of chronicles (cronica in Spanish) that I composed on the subject of the meeting between the aboriginal Indian culture of the Caribbean Islands and the Spanish Conquistadors." Augusta Thomas writes: "Music of all kinds constantly amazes, surprises, propels and seduces me into a wonderful and powerful journey. I am happiest when I am listening to music and in the process of composing music. I care deeply that music is not anonymous and generic or easily assimilated and just as easily dismissed. I would say that Eclipse Musings has urgent, seductive, and compelling qualities of sometimes complex, but always logical thought, allied to sensuous and engaging sonic profiles."

Brian Fennelly is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, where he taught from 1968 to 1997. Following a degree in engineering from Union College, he studied music at Yale with Mel Powell, Donald Martino, Gunther Schuller and George Perle. The five works recorded on this CD cover a 21 year period in the creative life of the composer. Among the consistent, remarkable features of Fennelly's orchestral works from these years - the elements which define his distinctive compositional voice are the abundant paradoxical tendencies: steadfast resistance to fashion, coupled with frequent signs of his awareness of contemporary compositional trends; nearly obsessive dedication to formal transparency, coupled sometimes with impressionistic, sensuous orchestral textures and the masking of structural divisions; strong goal orientation through progressions of phrases leading to powerful climaxes, coupled often with rhapsodic passages of a seemingly static nature; pitch organization clearly derived from dodecaphonic or hexachordal procedures, coupled frequently with motives and harmonies selected for their apparent non-serial associations (suggestive of, but not operating functionally in, traditional tonality or modality). This album reveals Brian Fennelly as a craftsman of sober, weighty music built to stand objectively, i.e. by the strength of its own content and architecture.

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.

A listener new to Amy Williams' world should not expect to need help entering it. Long an active pianist, Williams has internalized the work of Boulez, Nancarrow, Cage, Ligeti, Kurtág and Feldman, but confidently occupies the present. In fact her work combines attributes often considered opposites: it is rigorous, yet playful; abstract yet personal; stylish but as bracingly frank as a cold shower. With her music, one encounters a radiant intelligence and clear sense of musical purpose that vaults past many of the issues customarily associated with discussion of new music. This recording consists of duos as well as her Cineshape series, which is a group of striking stand-alone chamber works that together form an impressive sequence on a symphonic scale. Amy Williams' compositions have been presented at important contemporary music venues worldwide and have been performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the JACK Quartet and many of the major new music ensembles. She has received numerous awards and commissions and is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar. A graduate of the University at Buffalo, she is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and artistic director of the New Music On The Point Festival.

Donald Wheelock is a native New Englander and has taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts since 1974 where he is currently Professor of Music. He studied composition with Edgar Curtis and Kenneth Leighton prior to receiving his Master of Music degree from the Yale University School of Music, where he was a student of composer Yehudi Wyner. A frequent guest at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, he has twice received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to the string quartets, Wheelock has written many chamber ensemble works, solo instrumental compositions, and numerous vocal, choral and orchestral works. The Ciompi Quartet has been in residence at Duke University since 1965. The current members of the quartet are professors in the Department of Music at Duke, where they perform, teach strings and chamber music, and bring the living tradition of string quartet playing into the University as well as to many cities in the region. In addition to their performance of the masterworks of the Classical and Romantic periods, the Ciompi Quartet has a special interest in commissioning and performing music by contemporary composers.

Faculty colleagues at Georgia State University, saxophonist Jan Berry Baker and clarinetist Kenneth Long perform a program of contemporary American compositions, the oldest of which by Lee Hyla was written in 1992. Works by Nickitas Demos, Lansing McLoskey and Perry Goldstein were all completed in 2011 and Gregory Wanamaker's Duo Sonata was written in 2002. Ms. Baker has won top prizes in numerous competitions including the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the North American Saxophone Alliance Concerto Competition and the Johann Strauss Society competition. She has been featured as a concerto soloist with several orchestras in Canada and the United States and with the National Symphony of the Ukraine. An advocate of new music, Baker is Co-Artistic Director and saxophonist with the Atlanta-based new music ensemble Bent Frequency. Clarinetist Kenneth Long enjoys a multifaceted performing career including orchestral, chamber music and solo engagements. He is a member of the clarinet section of the Utah Festival Opera Orchestra and has performed with many of the Southeast's preeminent ensembles including the Atlanta, Sarasota and Charleston symphonies. Principal clarinet of Bent Frequency, Long also is principal clarinetist of the Atlanta Chamber Winds.

Chris Gekker is Professor of Trumpet at the University of Maryland. For 18 years he was a member of the American Brass Quintet, as well as being Principal Trumpet of the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. As a soloist, he has specialized in new American music for his instrument. This release is a companion to his earlier Albany disc, Winter (TROY670).

Ronald Perera is Professor of Music at Smith College. He studied with Leon Kirchner, Randall Thompson and Mario Davidovsky. His Music for Flute and Orchestra was composed for William Wittig who performs it on this disc and who is also the principal flute (since 1970) of the Springfield, Mass. Symphony Orchestra. Howie Smith is a virtuoso saxophonist, composer and jazz musician. As a performer he has worked with everyone from Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley to Luciano Berio and John Cage. About his Song for the Children he writes: "It is a song for the children of Argentina, El Salvador, Lebanon, Nicaragua, South Africa, and so many other places where they seem to have been forgotten." The work is scored for alto saxophone and WX7 MIDI Wind Controller, strings, 2 DX synthesizers and a pipe Organ. The Italian title of Edwin London's one movement work una novella della sera primavera translates as "A novel of the spring evening." The solo oboe is the central character in the "novel." In a further whimsical program note the composer suggests that his "music novel" might be construed as "the make-believe quintessence of oboe (a rebel dude) coming forward from ashes (a rubble deed!) to meet the challenge offered by anthropomorphic dialectics: vicissitudes in search of a character. A double read? Why not." In The London Financial Times Andrew Porter called John Eaton "the most interesting opera composer writing in America today." Eaton's Songs of Desperation and Comfort were composed during a residency the composer spent in the Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio, Italy. The premiere of this music by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony was the 100th world premiere composition presented by this Organization. It is scored for mezzo-soprano and Chamber Orchestra.

If you are looking for a disc of all WORLD PREMIERE performances of some very appealing American music, this is the disc for you. Wendell Logan is a composer and saxophonist who was educated at Florida A & M University, the American Conservatory, Southern Illinois University and the University of Iowa. He is presently chairman of the department of jazz studies at Oberlin Conservatory. Roots, Branches, Shapes and Shades (of Green) was commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and first performed by them in February, 1991. It was composed for the pianist Neal Creque. Thomas Jefferson Anderson is Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from West Virginia State University, Penn State and the University of Iowa. He studied with Scott Huston, Philip Bezanson and Darius Milhaud. Chamber Concerto (Remembrances) was commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and premiered in 1988. Leroy Jenkins is a virtuoso violinist, composer, arranger and educator. Born in Chicago, he earned a music degree at Florida A & M University and studied Baroque and classical masters while also developing an interest in improvised music. Under the spell of jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane he returned to Chicago and became a charter member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an Organization in which he is still active. Wonder Lust was commissioned by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and premiered by them in 1988. Dolores White, composer, pianist, and educator, is assistant professor of music at Cuyahoga Community College. She received a bachelor's degree in piano performance from the Oberlin Conservatory and a masters in piano performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her Crystal Gazing was commissioned and premiered by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in 1994. In the composer's words its single movement explores "the world of crystal making, crystal gazing and the psychic state of mind while crystal gazing." David Baker was born in Indianapolis. He is now professor of music and chairman of the jazz department at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is a virtuoso performer as well as teacher. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from Indiana University. His teachers have included J.J. Johnson, Janos Starker, William Russo, Bernard Heiden and Gunther Schuller. His piece Parallel Planes was also commissioned and premiered by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony.

The program for Close to Home began when clarinetist Michael Rowlett met two composers whose music intrigued him — Valerie Coleman and Eric Mandat. He gathered works by other American composers, finding similarities among the diverse pieces with inspiration for the compositions coming from a particular place, a moment or a memory. Michael Rowlett is on the faculty at the University of Mississippi and was a semi-finalist in the ICA's 1998 Young Artist competition. He has appeared as a concerto soloist with orchestras in Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi and at the conventions of the International Clarinet Association. He studied at Florida State University where he received his D.M, the University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His collaborator on this recording, pianist Stacy Rodgers is on the faculty at the University of Mississippi.

Charles Knox is a former student of Bernard Heiden at Indiana University where he received the Ph.D. degree. He has written over 100 compositions and received commissions for conventional instruments as well as such unusual combinations as bassoon choir and tuba octet. His most recent compositions are a short opera, Workshop, a symphony for saxophone Orchestra, and a duo for piano and keyboard percussion called Attempted Claviercide. Clouds are not Spheres for flute, cello and piano was composed in 1994 especially for the performers heard on this disc. The title "clouds are not Spheres" comes from a statement made by Benoit Mandelbrot in Chaos by James Gleik. Song and Double is a lyrical tune for oboe and piano and it was composed in 1984. Semordnilap was composed in 1991 as a light, humorous piece for a fundraising drive for the contemporary music ensemble, Thamyris. It is composed for flute, piano, soprano and marimba. Scherzos for horn, violin, cello and piano was composed in 1994 for the Atlanta Chamber Players. Rounds About for violin, clarinet, trombone and percussion is in five short movements and was composed in 1983. Music for Brass Quintet is a work in three movements and was composed in 1967. The Suite for Piano Four-Hands is the oldest work on this disc and was composed in 1959. Wings of Our Soul was composed in 1993 and is written for violin and Organ. Music for Brass Quintet and Piano was commissioned by the Georgia Association of Music Teachers in 1983. The performers of the music on this recording are from the Atlanta area; many are principals and members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Cold Sassy Tree, Carlisle Floyd's first crack at writing a comic opera, is taken from Olive Ann Burns' delightful exploration of youthful old age and set in an America affectionately drawn. As always, he has written his own libretto, drawing upon his own theatrical instincts that have been nourished simultaneously with his music. Like five of the six Floyd operas that preceded it, Cold Sassy Tree is about American attitudes, characters - and the joy of language. Like all the work that preceded it, the music is about expressive clarity, lyricism and the value of song. According to Daniel Webster, "Floyd writes popular opera. Not pandering opera, but theater pieces strapped tight with technical virtuosity, yet sounding innocent and natural..." Carlisle Floyd comments that "In dramatizing the book for the stage, there were two undergirding themes in particular from the novel that I wanted to deal with. First was the astonishing capacity human beings possess for change and growth, and the second was the healing and transforming power of love. When the book first appeared one reviewer aptly described Ms. Burns' novel as the story of an old man growing young and a young man growing up and the woman who, without intending to, becomes the catalyst for both. This general description holds true, I hope, for the opera as well." This recording represents a major addition to the opera discography.

Evan Chambers studied composition at the University of Michigan, where he joined the faculty in 1993. He is also a traditional Irish fiddler, and appears frequently as a performer of his own works. The composer writes: "I grew up on the edge of the suburbs. Living at a balance point between urban and rural, I did not fully belong in either world but always moved in both: symphony concerts, shopping malls, and trips to museums on one hand, and fields, ponds and endless walks in the woods on the other. I also occupied the dividing line between folk and classical music, surrounded as I was by my father's equally enthusiastic renditions of Tchaikovsky on the violin and John Henry on the five-string guitar. I came to love the beauty of in-between spaces." It can safely be said that Evan Chambers' music occupies most imaginatively all these in-between spaces.

This disc marks the first commercial recording of the music of Donald Sur -- one that is long overdue. Donald Sur was born in Honolulu of Korean parentage. He studied at UCLA, Princeton and Harvard. He resided in the Boston area, teaching occasionally at Harvard, M.I.T. and Tufts. Among contemporary composers in New England, Donald Sur was one of the best known and best loved. His colleagues and friends have universally respected his eclectic style, which reflects a variety of interests but remains unmistakably personal. His music is permeated with a quiet, sometimes bemused expressivity, and simultaneously a structural firmness quite unlike anyone else's today.

Composer Martin Brody is on the faculty at Wellesley College, president of the Stefan Wolpe Society and on the editorial boards of Perspectives of New Music and The Open Space. He was a Fromm Resident at the American Academy in Rome and later served as the arts director. His three works on this recording explore a common premise: imaginative identification with something or someone outside one's self as a catalyst of self-transformation. In Beasts, it's identification with animals; Millennium Sightings uses text from a 12-century Italian monk that details the apocalypse and an impending new age; and Tree of Life uses texts by James Merrill and Ovid, that deal with the relation between a person and the natural world. Performed with sensitivity and virtuosity by the illustrious Boston ensemble, Collage New Music conducted by David Hoose with soloists Elizabeth Keusch and Pamela Dellal, these works are world premiere recordings.

Born in California, composer Alva Henderson studied at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Conservatory, where he concentrated on voice and composition. Henderson is known for his operas and vocal music, reflecting his interest in the potential of the human voice. His collected songs presented on this 2-CD set are gems of the American song genre. Sung by soprano Melanie Emelio, a versatile performer and noted pedagogue on the faculty at Pepperdine University and baritone John Kramar, who has performed in opera and concert productions around the country, these songs possess great color, style and sheer beauty.

The SUNY Fredonia Wind Ensemble conducted by Paul Holcomb, presents its first recording that includes music commissioned for the Ensemble and superb soloists. The renowned bass trombone player, Randall Hawes, is featured on Hungarian composer Hidas Frigyes' Rhapsody and Alex Jokipii, principal trumpet of the Buffalo Philharmonic is the soloist for Jerzy Sapievevski's Concerto. There is also a Concerto for Percussion by Japanese composer Toshiro Mayuzumi with soloists from the Wind Ensemble. Mark Engebretson's Symphony for Winds is a commissioned work and this as well as Karl Boelter's Mountains and Mesas receive their world premiere recordings.

Born in Bad Gastein, Austria, Gernot Wolfgang is a graduate of USC's "Scoring for Motion Pictures and TV," and also holds degrees from the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Austria University of Music in Graz. He has received commissions from individuals and organizations such as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Verdehr Trio, bassoonist David Breidenthal, flutist Susan Greenberg and the Jazz Bigband Graz. As a guitarist with the Austrian ensemble "The QuARTet," he has recorded two critically-acclaimed CDs. He currently resides in Los Angeles. He writes, "As a former jazz guitarist, rhythms are a top priority for me. Specifically, rhythms (grooves) that can be found in 20th century music styles such as jazz, rock, pop, world music, etc. I have made it my mission to find ways of organically incorporating grooves into orchestral or chamber music settings, hence the subtitle of this CD. That doesn't mean that all of the music is based on grooves all of the time, but grooves play important roles within the individual pieces. My goal is to allow them to have an equal standing among other compositional devices already established in contemporary concert music."

From the little that is recorded about Zipoli's life, we may understand that he pursued two paths during his lifetime: music and religion. At first it seems it was the religious road that led him to South America, but in fact, as well as wanting to take his vows in the order of the Jesuits, he was summoned to the New World because he was a musician as well as a missionary. As a child, he sang in the choir and was granted the support necessary to allow him to study in Florence. In 1709, he moved to Naples to study with Alessandro Scarlatti. His study with Scarlatti was short-lived and then went to Bologna and then Rome to study. In 1715, he was appointed organist of the Jesuit church in Rome. The following year his celebrated keyboard collection, Sonate d'Intavolatura, on which his fame rests, was published. Zipoli joined the Society of Jesus on July 1, 1716, and soon after went to Seville to await passage to the Paraguay province. With 53 other prospective Jesuit missionaries he sailed from Cadiz in April, 1717, but due to a violent storm, it was not until July that he and the others disembarked at Buenos Aires. From there they set out for Cordoba. By 1724, Zipoli had completed his theological studies and by 1725 was ready to receive priest's orders. Sadly, he died of tuberculosis before receiving them for lack of a bishop in Cordoba to ordain him that year. Zipoli was one of many excellent musicians recruited by the Jesuits between 1650 and 1750 for work in the Paraguay reductions. There is evidence that his music was in demand in South America. Jesuit documents of 1728, 1732 and later note his continuing reputation up to at least 1774. In the 1970s some 23 works by Zipoli (including copies of known keyboard pieces) were discovered among a large collection of manuscripts at the San Rafael and Santa Ana missions in eastern Bolivia. Sonate d'Intavolatura, Zipoli's work of 1716, consists of two bands of compositions for keyboard. The first band is devoted solely to the Organ. The second band is entitled "Sonate d'Intavolatura per Organo e Cimbalo." It is graceful and elegant music; its charm attracting republication in London and Paris in 1741. Band II of the complete keyboard works contains a series of four dance suites and two partitas. It is played here on the Cristofori piano from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of Keyboard instruments.

What a pleasure it is for Albany to be able to bring these wonderful pieces to the musical public. Bolcom tells this story: “One day in the fall of 1967 I had lunch with Norman Lloyd, then head of the music division for the Rockefeller Foundation, who mentioned having heard of a ragtime opera by Scott Joplin. Who is that? I asked – few people in 1967 knew the name Scott Joplin – and Norman told me Joplin was the composer of the “Maple Leaf Rag’ but that his opera existed only in legend. For some reason I immediately went on the trail of Treemonisha, only to find that no one even at the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, or the Schomburg Collection had it. That is, until I asked my colleague Rudi Blesh at Queens College; we had barely ever said hello before as we rushed in and out of the same office on the way to teaching, but one week I asked him if he knew where I could find a copy of the opera, as all the usual suspects had nothing. When he said, “I have a copy of the vocal score. Shall I bring it next week?” I almost fell off my chair. From this happy event came an exploration of Joplin’s rags (courtesy of Rudi’s friend Max Morath) as well as the whole field of turn-of-the last-century piano ragtime. Soon after, Joshua Rifkin recorded the Joplin rags and Gunther Schuller laid the period instrumentations of Joplin onto disc; Joplin’s obscurity would be no more. What may be less well known is that from about 1968 on a whole group of young American composers, Peter Winkler, William Albright and several others, joined me in writing new traditional style rags. Bill Albright and I would send each other rags by mail like chess problems. It was all delightful for us (playing these new-old pieces in concert elicited warm responses from audiences), but I think we all felt the real impetus from our picking up a dropped thread of our emerging American tradition. Few of us would continue to write rags after about 1975, but the Ragtime Revival was certainly the beginning of American composers’ serious absorption of our own popular sources into our music in an unself-conscious way.” This wonderful two CD set should find a large audience.

Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was a prolific composer of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal music. He composed more songs than any other type of music. In four volumes, four singers accompanied by their individual pianists, present more than 150 songs chronologically, the first recording of the complete songs of Charles Ives. Ives authorized transposition of them, so they can be sung by all voices. This amazing body of work from a musician who was also an inventive and successful insurance executive, span the 35 years of Ives's compositional life, mirroring the many facets of his character: tenderness, humor, disapproval of hypocrisy and sham, nostalgia, Americanism, Yankeeism, religion, socialism, love of nature. Some of the songs are extremely difficult; others are simpler; few can be picked up and read right off. They resemble a workshop filled with Ives's ideas, fragmentary or extended. Most were published in 114 Songs - the book compiled, published, and distributed at Ives's own expense in 1922; others were composed "post-114," among them Peaks, Yellow Leaves, The One Way, A Sea Dirge and In the Mornin'. The Ives oeuvre is substantial, and his output in songs alone is richer and more fulsome by far than might be expected from any career, let alone a curtailed one. This four volume set of the complete songs of Charles Ives is a major contribution toward the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of one of the greatest song collections in the history of music.

Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was a prolific composer of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal music. He composed more songs than any other type of music. In four volumes, four singers accompanied by their individual pianists, present more than 150 songs chronologically, the first recording of the complete songs of Charles Ives. Ives authorized transposition of them, so they can be sung by all voices. This amazing body of work from a musician who was also an inventive and successful insurance executive, span the 35 years of Ives's compositional life, mirroring the many facets of his character: tenderness, humor, disapproval of hypocrisy and sham, nostalgia, Americanism, Yankeeism, religion, socialism, love of nature. Some of the songs are extremely difficult; others are simpler; few can be picked up and read right off. They resemble a workshop filled with Ives's ideas, fragmentary or extended. Most were published in 114 Songs - the book compiled, published, and distributed at Ives's own expense in 1922; others were composed "post-114," among them Peaks, Yellow Leaves, The One Way, A Sea Dirge and In the Mornin'. The Ives oeuvre is substantial, and his output in songs alone is richer and more fulsome by far than might be expected from any career, let alone a curtailed one. This four volume set of the complete songs of Charles Ives is a major contribution toward the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of one of the greatest song collections in the history of music.

Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was a prolific composer of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal music. He composed more songs than any other type of music. In four volumes, four singers accompanied by their individual pianists, present more than 150 songs chronologically, the first recording of the complete songs of Charles Ives. Ives authorized transposition of them, so they can be sung by all voices. This amazing body of work from a musician who was also an inventive and successful insurance executive, span the 35 years of Ives's compositional life, mirroring the many facets of his character: tenderness, humor, disapproval of hypocrisy and sham, nostalgia, Americanism, Yankeeism, religion, socialism, love of nature. Some of the songs are extremely difficult; others are simpler; few can be picked up and read right off. They resemble a workshop filled with Ives's ideas, fragmentary or extended. Most were published in 114 Songs - the book compiled, published, and distributed at Ives's own expense in 1922; others were composed "post-114," among them Peaks, Yellow Leaves, The One Way, A Sea Dirge and In the Mornin'. The Ives oeuvre is substantial, and his output in songs alone is richer and more fulsome by far than might be expected from any career, let alone a curtailed one. This four volume set of the complete songs of Charles Ives is a major contribution toward the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of one of the greatest song collections in the history of music.

Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was a prolific composer of orchestral, instrumental, and vocal music. He composed more songs than any other type of music. In four volumes, four singers accompanied by their individual pianists, present more than 150 songs chronologically, the first recording of the complete songs of Charles Ives. Ives authorized transposition of them, so they can be sung by all voices. This amazing body of work from a musician who was also an inventive and successful insurance executive, span the 35 years of Ives’s compositional life, mirroring the many facets of his character: tenderness, humor, disapproval of hypocrisy and sham, nostalgia, Americanism, Yankeeism, religion, socialism, love of nature. Some of the songs are extremely difficult; others are simpler; few can be picked up and read right off. They resemble a workshop filled with Ives’s ideas, fragmentary or extended. Most were published in 114 Songs – the book compiled, published, and distributed at Ives’s own expense in 1922; others were composed “post-114,” among them Peaks, Yellow Leaves, The One Way, A Sea Dirge and In the Mornin’. The Ives oeuvre is substantial, and his output in songs alone is richer and more fulsome by far than might be expected from any career, let alone a curtailed one. This four volume set of the complete songs of Charles Ives is a major contribution toward the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of one of the greatest song collections in the history of music.

American composer Benjamin Lees was born on January 8, 1924 to Russian parents. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to San Francisco where he began to study piano. After military service in World War II, Mr. Lees began the study of composition at the University of Southern California. He soon came to the attention of the legendary American composer George Antheil, the famous "Bad Boy" of music. Lees left the university and began studies with Antheil in advanced composition and orchestration that lasted almost five years. The recipient of numerous awards and commissions, Lees's works have enjoyed numerous performances by such legendary conductors as George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, Eugene Ormandy and Zubin Mehta, among others. Mr. Lees's music is unmistakably American in its rhythmic energy and directness. But it is markedly different from what audiences have come to identify as American music as associated with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. The influence of his eight-year stay in Europe, of the Surrealist ideas to which Mr. Lees was exposed there, the avoidance of folk material, a keen appreciation of the visual arts, an ascorbic wit, and an unerring sense of the true and expressive combine to make his a singular voice in contemporary music. His craft is formidable, but even more so is his awareness of the essence of music, and it is this awareness that is so appreciated by audiences.

Debra Torok is the recognized authority on Dello Joio's piano music. She has talked extensively with the composer on how his music should be performed and is currently compiling and editing Dello Joio's complete piano music. Dello Joio's distinguished musical career began at the age of fourteen when he became a church Organist and choir director of the Star of the Sea Church on City Island, New York. A descendant of Italian church Organists, he was born on January 24, 1913 in New York. His father was an Organist, pianist, singer and vocal coach. Dello Joio recalls that his father was working with singers from the Metropolitan Opera who used to arrive in their Rolls Royces, and that his childhood was surrounded with musicians and music in his home. In 1939, he was accepted as a scholarship student at Juilliard, where he studied with Bernard Wagenaar. In 1941, he went to study with Paul Hindemith who told him that "your music is lyrical by nature, don't ever forget that." In the latter part of the forties, Dello Joio was considered one of America's leading composers and by the fifties had gained international recognition. He won the Pulitzer in 1957 for his Meditations on Ecclesiastes and an Emmy Award for his music for the television special Scenes from the Louvre. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Mannes College of Music, and was Professor of Music and Dean of the Fine and Applied Arts School of Boston University. From 1959 to 1973, he directed the Ford Foundation's Contemporary Music Project. In 1999, at the age of 86, he continues to compose with no signs of retiring. He is frequently being commissioned, as his music remains in constant demand. There is some wonderful music on this disc.

Rodney Rogers has written music for a wide variety of media, including orchestra, chorus, wind ensemble and chamber groups. He first gained national recognition as a composer while in college with BMI Awards, the ASCAP Foundation Grant for Young Composers and a fellowship to Tanglewood. Named "Distinguished Composer of the Year" in 1989 by the Music Teachers National Association for his composition Riffing in Tandem, he has also received a NEA Consortium Commission and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yadoo Artist Colony. Today, he is on the composition faculty at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Paul Ramsier was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and showed promise as a pianist at the age of five and began composing at the age of nine. At 16 he entered the University of Louisville School of Music and then went to Juilliard where he studied piano with Beveridge Webster. At Florida State University he studied composition with Ernst von Dohnanyi. In his early career in New York City, he was a staff pianist with the New York City Ballet where he was influenced by Balanchine and Stravinsky. During this period he studied composition with Alexei Haieff. He is a composer of Orchestral, opera and choral works, but his chief contribution to 20th century music is a body of work for the double bass. On this disc we have his four major works for this instrument gathered on one CD, including one of the most requested works from the back Louisville catalog, The Road to Hamelin, a most popular work for children, which, with more exposure will become as popular as Peter and The Wolf. Please note that two of the compositions are performed by the great double bassist, Gary Karr.

The three concertos on this recording are representative of a contemporary renaissance in concerto writing. The challenge for composers is how to tackle the range of technical and expressive problems. Ross Bauer, Steven Burke and Martin Matalon have each responded to that question with music that is fresh, imaginative, technically brilliant and dramatically convincing. Though not one of the works actually bears the title, each is a true concerto, albeit in a recognizably contemporary way.