Catalog

The life of composer, poet, artist and publisher Carrie Jacobs-Bond reads like a classic American rags-to-riches success story. Hailed during her lifetime as the "James Whitcomb Riley of Song," many of Bond's 400-some "home" songs have become standards in the popular repertory and have been near and dear to the hearts of generations of listeners. She was born in a small town in southern Wisconsin and enjoyed some celebrity as a child because of her ability to play the piano. She received minimal formal music training. After a first failed marriage, during which she had her beloved son Fred, she married her childhood sweetheart Dr. Frank Lewis Bond and moved with her young son to Iron River, Michigan. It was here she began to compose her songs, but sadly, after only seven years, her husband died, leaving her almost penniless. To support herself and her son, she "peddled" her songs. She founded her own publishing house "The Bond Shop" and it was run by her and her son until he committed suicide in 1929. Here is how she was described: "In a voice drenched with tears, almost basslike in quality, she would sit at her old grand piano and intone these quaint melodies for us. These were certainly not distinguished compositions, by any means, but there was a quality about them, a wistfulness that was part of her nature, that made each new song seem a revelation." A composer of American melodies in the tradition of Stephen Foster, Carrie Jacobs-Bond's songs epitomize the Victorian and post-Victorian parlor song: unapologetically sentimental, yet displaying a genuine lyric gift. In the words of one biographer, her songs "represent a final flowering of the 19th century genteelly sentimental song in American popular music."

Lettie Beckon Alston was born in Detroit, Michigan. She now resides in Michigan and is Associate Professor of Music at Oakland University. At the age of 15 she began piano lessons. She went to Wayne State University where she studied piano and composition. She graduated with her bachelor and masters degrees. She was the first African-American composer to obtain a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan, where she studied composition with Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom and Eugene Kurzt. She also continued to study the piano and took courses in electronic music. Dr. Alston went on to teach at Wayne State University in 1983, the Detroit Public School in 1986, Oakland University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 1987 and Eastern Michigan University in 1988. She returned to Oakland in 1991. This recording is entitled "Keyboard Maniac" because of the excitement electronics bring to Art Music, and Lettie Alston says, "as a composer, pianist and organist writing for the piano and electronic medium has been a spiritual awakening for me."

Lucius R. Weathersby was born in Houston and raised in Louisiana. He is an assistant professor of music and chairperson of the music department at Dillard University in New Orleans where he teaches piano and lectures in music theory. He is the founder and co-director of the Dillard University String Ensemble. For more than five years , he was employed as full-time director of music in two churches where he founded and managed the First Congressional Concert Series in Waterloo, Iowa and the Second Sunday Concert Series at the Church of the Beatitudes in Phoenix, Arizona. He has given recitals in the United States and worldwide. The organ used for this recording was originally built and installed at Sherwell Chapel in Plymouth, Devon by Henry Willis in 1864. The sound of the instrument was influenced by the French organ builder Aristide Cavaille-Coll. The chapel was damaged by a bomb during the War. It was restored in 1951 and moved to Torrington where it was first used there during Easter services 1991.

You are saying to yourself: Self! Why a disc with two short orchestral pieces and two major new piano concertos? The answer is simple. Each concerto is preceded by a short overture - a curtain raiser, if you will, to prepare the listener for what is to come. Andrew Bishop is a young American composer who studied in Michigan with William Albright, William Bolcom and Michael Daugherty. He is also an active saxophonist who has worked with Ray Charles, The Manhattan Transfer, and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra. "Crooning is a love song without words. Its inspiration is the Golden Age of American popular songs brought to life by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra." Allen Shawn studied music with Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim at Harvard, in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and at Columbia with Jack Beeson. Since 1985 he has been on the faculty of Bennington College where he teaches composition. He wrote his Piano Concerto for Ursula Oppens who premiered it with the Albany Symphony on March 18, 2000 in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. The great American composer Benjamin Lees wrote his Piano Concerto No. 2 for the Boston Symphony Orchestra who premiered it in Boston on March 15, 1968. It is great to see more and more of Lees' music showing up on disc. About the delightful Paul Creston Dance Overture, suffice it to say that here this infectious piece finally receives a performance that is worthy of its title.

This recording seeks to celebrate the eclectic American music of the recent past. In 1994 John Sampen and Marilyn Shrude initiated a commissioning project designed to represent this diversity. Seven major American composers were invited to contribute "postcard pieces" highlighting their unique musical styles. The resulting collection, which comprises an interchangeable suite for saxophone and piano, demonstrates serialism, aleatory, improvisation, and a variety of other musical languages, styles and genres. In addition to the postcard pieces, this compact disc includes five works complimenting the musical and cultural melange of late 20th century America. Internationally-recognized saxophonist John Sampen has premiered more than 60 works, including commissions by Rands, Subotnick, Cage, Adler and Babbitt. A clinician for the Selmer Company, Sampen has presented master classes at important universities and conservatories in Asia, Europe and North America. Dr. Sampen is presently Distinguished Artist Professor at Bowling Green State University and president of the North American Saxophone Alliance.

Harold Blumenfeld is a composer given to language, languages and the human voice. Born in Seattle of musical parents, he studied at Yale with Hindemith, in Zurich, and trained with Leonard Bernstein and Boris Goldovsky at Tanglewood. In the Sixties, from his academic base at Washington University, he launched the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, forerunner of the present company, focusing on the production of early and contemporary works. During a 1970 summer residency at Yaddo, he drafted the choral War Lament, converting the forceful World War I poetry of Siegfried Sassoon into a polyphonic protest against the Vietnam War. Though still loosely anchored in a kind of "neo-classicism", this work, with its dramatic outbursts and moments of poignancy, engendered textural and coloristic choral procedures going materially beyond a cappella norms. In 1990, Derek Walcott visited St. Louis to offer readings of his work to a literary organization in which Blumenfeld was involved. The composer was swept away by the power and imagery of this poetry and a friendship was forged over shared adoration of Rimbaud. Blumenfeld mustered three Walcott poems into the cycle Mythologies, scored for baritone, flute, clarinet, three celli and percussion - the work featured on this disc. On impetus from the great guitarist David Starobin and with great audacity, Blumenfeld tackled Hart Crane's vast Voyages cycle, setting it for baritone with guitar, viola and percussion.

This recording is the long-awaited second release on Albany Records of the famed New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble. Conducted by Frank Battisti, the Wind Ensemble performs the significant literature for brass, woodwind and percussion instruments composed from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Many of its performances are broadcast over the National Public Radio network. This disc will be a must for all wind ensemble enthusiasts. (Volume 1 is TROY340.)

About this music David Maslanka writes: "In recent years I have developed an abiding interest in the Bach Chorales, singing and playing them daily as warm-up for my composing time, and making my own four-hand settings in the old style. The chorales now regularly find their way into my music, and have become a significant "leaping off" point for me. The first movement of Quintet No. 3 from 1999 opens with the chorale "Your stars, your cavernous sky." The Quintet was first performed on March 14, 2000 in Columbia, Missouri by the Missouri Quintet. Music for Dr. Who from 1979 is a whimsical little piece which takes its title from the British science fiction TV series of the 1970s. The music has no official connection to the TV show, but came about as a result of my watching one particular episode. Little Symphony (1989) was written as part of a birthday offering to composer Barney Childs. Sonata for Oboe and Piano was written in 1992. Its inspiration was a poem of ecstatic vision written by an Eskimo woman." Composer David Maslanka was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He studied clarinet, music theory, and composition, receiving degrees from Oberlin and Michigan State. Today he lives and composes in Missoula, Montana.

New York-born Sylvia Glickman earned bachelor's and master's degrees in performance from the Juilliard School where she was a piano student and received a Licentiate in Performance from the Royal Academy of Music. Her performance and composition awards include the Loeb Memorial Prize from Juilliard, a Fulbright Scholarship, the Hecht Prize in Composition from the Royal Academy and a Solo Recitalist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her music, for keyboard, voice, chamber groups, orchestra and chorus, has been performed throughout the United States, in Europe and in Israel. Carved in Courage commemorates the fortitude of the Danish people who helped to save Denmark's Jews from the Nazis. Am I a Murderer? is a cantata for voice and chamber ensemble. The singer speaks and sings the text written by Frank Fox, translator of the diary of Calel Perechodnik, a Polish Jewish policeman. Perechodnik was promised by the Nazis that his family would be saved if he helped to round up Jews for deportation. He assisted the Germans, but lost his family. His diary was found after he committed suicide. The Walls are Quiet Now reflects emotions evoked by the sight of a memorial wall outside the Grnnwald S-bahn station in Berlin, Germany. This wall honors the memory of the Jews of the city, transported from that station to concentration camps.

Scott Eyerly received his master's degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Elliott Carter, and his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan School of Music, where he studied with William Bolcom and Curtis Curtis-Smith. He currently lives in New York City. About his opera he writes: "In 1989, while seeking a story for my first opera, I picked up a copy of The House of the Seven Gables. It was love at first read. What seized my imagination immediately was the atmosphere and the characters. Vivid stage pictures suggested themselves to me, from the vast gloomy house to its singular characters. I was drawn to the powerful morality in the tale. Hawthorne's exploration of human nature, especially the repercussions of one's actions on others, struck me as being no less relevant today than in 1850. Having received a grant in 1992 from the National Endowment for the Arts to begin writing the opera, I spent six weeks in Salem, Massachusetts, where the actual House of the Seven Gables stands. Although the story is fictional, it is set in a real house. The chance to see what Hawthorne had seen intrigued me. Seven years were to pass between my Salem visit and the Manhattan School's announcement of the opera's premiere." With the current opera craze on the part of classical music lovers, here is a new opera which should have a broad appeal to anyone who enjoys the voice.

More than anything, people probably remember Fisher Tull (he died in 1994) by saying: "He was my friend." Known universally by his nickname, Mickey, he had the warm, honest smile and open-hearted character that bespeak the treasured friendship for which true Texans are known. Born, raised and trained in Texas, his life was dedicated to the cause of music within the state. Tull was a native of Waco and earned his undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees in music from the University of North Texas. He was a faculty member at Sam Houston State University for 37 years until his death. He was chairman of the university's Music Department for nearly half that time (1965-1982) and was a great builder of musical institutions at the university. As a composer, Tull received awards, commissions, appearances, performances and recordings, all of which brought recognition to his name from major musical institutions in Texas, across the United States, in London and continental Europe. His compositional activities grew out of his background as trumpet performer and jazz arranger in the early fifties. During his years in college, he wrote over 100 arrangements for dance bands, radio and television productions and recordings. He was the first staff arranger for the renowned University of North Texas Lab Bands. His first serious compositions were for brass ensembles, followed by several works for symphonic band. As he matured, his works embraced a large segment of the instrumental, orchestral and vocal spectrum.

Preeminent in the American musical landscape not only as an artist but also as an administrator, Francis Thorne was born in Bay Shore, New York in 1922. A self-taught jazz pianist, he had hoped for a professional career in music but was deterred by active naval duty in World War II, a young family to support and a dismissive appraisal at Yale by the redoubtable Paul Hindemith. So for several years he worked on Wall Street, like his stockbroker father, and kept music essentially a hobby until a serendipitous recommendation from Duke Ellington led to a number of prestigious jazz engagements. With this rekindling of his musical ambitions, he ultimately traveled to Florence, Italy, studying under the American composer David Diamond, and remained there with his family until 1964. Thorne has served as executive director of the American Composers Alliance and helped organize the American Composers Orchestra and served for many years as its president. His many compositions  ranging from symphonies to solo pieces  reveal a love of tonality-based chromaticism, uniting the European musical heritage with the jazz tradition native to America.

" In Canada, Schafer has won national and international acclaim not only for his achievement as a composer but also as an educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual artist and provocateur. Through his unique explorations of the relationships between music, performer, audience and setting, he has expanded the potential and appreciation of music and its place in the arts and culture of our time. The texts of the songs in A Medieval Bestiary are based on T.H. White's translation of a Latin bestiary dating from the 12th century. In the Middle Ages bestiaries were serious works of natural history. They were anonymous compilations of what was known or presumed about the characteristics and habits of animals, both real, and mythological. Because they were compiled by churchmen, the behavior of animals frequently seemed to point up an instructive moral for humans. The highlight of this disc is Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore. Here is one of Menotti's most accomplished works. It was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation and calls for chorus, dancers and nine instrumentalists. The text focuses on a well-to-do, but eccentric man in a castle and presents his life in three stages, his youth, middle and old age. Three unusual pets symbolize these stages - a unicorn, a gorgon and a manticore. Today, in his 90th year, Gian Carlo Menotti is one of the world's finest composers. It is a pleasure to welcome this delightful music back to the catalog.

Raphael Hillyer's distinguished career as a co-founder of the Juilliard String Quartet, soloist, teacher, and guiding light of the formation of the Tokyo String Quartet has made him one of the most respected musicians in the United States. Born in Ithaca, N.Y. he studied in Berlin and Leningrad, where he also took theory lessons with a young Dmitri Shostakovich. He later attended Curtis and graduated from Dartmouth. He did his graduate work at Harvard where he studied with Walter Piston. He made his debut as a soloist in Budapest, Hungary. Mr. Hillyer appeared frequently in recital with such artists as Leonard Bernstein, Nadia Boulanger and Ruth Laredo and he played with the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky and the NBC Symphony under Toscanini. He was also a member of the Stradivarius and NBC String Quartets. In 1946, William Schuman, President of the Juilliard School, invited Mr. Hillyer to co-found the Juilliard String Quartet. This quartet went on to concertize throughout the world in thousands of concerts and broadcasts, becoming the quartet-in-residence at the Library of Congress, and making numerous recordings for Columbia and RCA Victor. In 1969, he resigned from the Quartet to pursue his own solo career. In this capacity, he has appeared all over the world. Mr. Hillyer has taught at the Juilliard School, Yale University School of Music, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival and many other centers of learning around the world. He was visiting professor in chamber music performance at Harvard and is on the faculty of Boston University.

Cellists don't normally travel in herds. Usually, when playing chamber music, they individually seek out their natural partners. In certain environments, though, they do gather: to comprise the cello section of a symphony orchestra, or to learn as pupils of a master teacher. The development of such groups takes place more naturally in the cello studio of a conservatory teacher. There the teacher may view the ensemble as a vehicle to share musical and technical ideas at once with many of his students. Take the Yale Cellos, for instance. For more than four decades their technique has been refined, their sound shaped by Aldo Parisot, cello professor at the Yale School of Music. The trilogy of works, Aldo, Simoes, and Parisot heard on this recording, comprise the most significant contribution to the cello repertory since Villa-Lobos wrote his two works for cello ensemble. When Laderman composed Aldo, the earliest of his three works for the Yale Cellos, he had heard the group perform with regularity for six years. So he knew already the special capabilities of multiple cellos, with its range of highs and lows approximating the vocal range of a chorus, its center of gravity pitched lower than that of a string orchestra. When Aldo was composed, Laderman did not yet know that he was embarking on a three-work cycle. Only later did Laderman regard the piece as the first in a series, the title for each work drawn from a different one of Parisot's names.

Bernard Stevens was born in London and studied at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Music. After his service in the Army, he came to national prominence in 1946 with his Symphony of Liberation , which won a competition sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper for a "Victory Symphony" to celebrate the end of World War II. Stevens spent much of the rest of his career lecturing at the Royal College of Music (also, later at the University of London), and became a tireless champion of contemporary music, and that rare being, a born teacher - whose warmth, encouragement and intellectual stimulation is remembered with affection and respect by his many students. He continued to compose, of course. His life's work includes an opera on J.M. Synge's The Shadow of the Glen, two symphonies, three concertos, much chamber music, cantatas and other choral pieces, piano music, songs, and other compositions for instruments as diverse as natural trumpet and guitar. His music impresses the hearer immediately by its downrightness and strength, its commitment to humane musical values, to firm architecture and the traditional crafts of counterpoint and variation. There is nothing flashy about his music; and in the 1950s and 1960s, as Britain strove to catch up with the Continental avant-garde, his robust independence of fashion hardly helped to gain his works prestige. Occasionally, wryly, he spoke of himself as one of an "almost lost generation" of British composer; yet as a craftsman and a musical mind he must be judged one of that generation's leading figures. Since his death in 1983 after several years of crippling illness, there has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in his output: this disc of chamber music for strings follows our issue of his opera and song cycle (TROY418).

Horn soloist Eric Ruske has established himself as an artist of international acclaim. Named associate principal horn of the Cleveland Orchestra at the age of 20, his impressive solo career began when he won the 1986 Young Concert Artists International Audition at 22. In 1987, he won the first prize in the American Horn Competition, and in 1988, the highest prize in the Concours International d'Interpretation Musicale in Reims, France. Mr. Ruske gave the 1990 world premiere of Gunther Schuller's Concerto for Horn and Orchestra with the San Antonio Symphony with Mr. Schuller conducting. He has performed as soloist with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Milwaukee Symphony and the Boston Pops. Mr. Ruske was educated in his native Croatia and at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute.

The harpsichordist Mark Kroll has long been recognized as one of the central figures in the field of historical performance and early keyboard instruments. During a career spanning over 50 years, he has concertized worldwide as a harpsichordist and fortepianist, winning critical acclaim for his virtuosity and expressive playing. His many recordings include solo repertoire, violin and keyboard music with Baroque violinist Carol Lieberman, and world premiere recordings of Hummel's transcriptions of Mozart symphonies. As an educator he has served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Historical Performance at Boston University since 1977, and he is frequently invited to teach as guest professor at music academies such as Wurzburg. This is his first recording of a disc devoted to just contemporary music and it is most welcome. How many remember the wonderful recording of the beautiful Trimble piece on Columbia in their modern American music series? This new performance is just as stunning and most welcome.

In his second CD recording, bass-baritone Oral Moses offers art songs and spiritual arrangements by African-American composers and arrangers whose work spans the 20th century and spills over into the 21st century. Mr. Moses, a South Carolina native, began his singing career as a member of the United States Seventh Army Soldiers Chorus in Heidelberg, Germany and a member of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers while attending Fisk University following his military career. Upon completion of his undergraduate studies he was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship which provided him the opportunity to return to Europe for further study in vocal performance and opera. Upon his return to the United States, he attended the University of Michigan where he earned a Masters of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts Degree in vocal performance and opera. He is the co-author of Feel the Spirit: Studies in 19th Century Afro-American Music. He is currently Professor of Voice and Music Literature at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.

Here we have the first recording of Handel's final Italian opera with a period instrument orchestra, chorus and a superb American cast. Deidamia was Handel's last opera. He began work on it in October, 1740, at the same time he was completing its companion work, Imeneo, which he had begun two years earlier. On November 8, Handel presented his London winter season - with some new works, some revivals - and for this purpose had engaged the Theatre Royal at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Opening night saw a semi-staged version of the serenata Il Parnasso in festa; later in the month came the premiere of Imeneo. Despite a superb score and fine cast, the production was a failure and was offered only once again in early December. The fact is that opera - Italian opera - was passe in London by this time. The public had turned to other musical delights - stage works in English of a more frivolous nature than Handel's offerings. For serious entertainment, the sacred oratorio, also given in the native tongue, was becoming increasingly popular. Thus, the true merits of Handel's last two operas were ignored at their premieres: Imeneo and Deidamia really never had a chance. For the libretto, Handel turned to his long time collaborator Paolo Antonio Rolli, who devised a "dramatic skeleton" for the composer of the Ulysseys-Achilles-Deidamia legend. As entertaining as the plot was, the new opera met the same fate as Imeneo. So indifferent was the public that it was only presented twice more, January 17, and February 10, 1741. Thereafter, Handel substituted more sure-fire oratorios. Handel was discouraged by the failure of his new stage works. Whether he would have attempted a further London season or ever written another Italian opera was decided by the extraordinary success in Dublin later that same year of a new English-language work he presented to the world. Messiah would change the course of his life. Its reception gave Handel nearly another two decades of celebrity and began a particularly fertile period of composition. Deidamia went by the wayside completely until this wonderful new recording with this first class American group of singers.

Memento Mori is an oratorio for soloists, men's chorus and chamber orchestra. It is dedicated to those who have succumbed to AIDS. The work combines traditional English, Hebrew, and Latin texts with original prose and poetry by Quentin Crisp, Philip Justin Smith, Denise Stokes, and Bill Weaver. About this new work James Adler writes: "Where to begin? The road to this recording has been a longish, winding one. It began in 1994 when Jeffrey McIntyre, then director of the Atlanta Gay Men's Chorus, first talked about and then commissioned me to compose this work. I had lost so many colleagues, friends and loved ones to the disease that I simply had to do something. And my way was going to be a musical way. I did not set out to compose something diverse or unusual. It was my initial intention to create a work that could be emotionally gut-wrenching, quasi-theatrical, and religious in a spiritual sense. Jeffrey and I both shared the vision that while my Requiem should use as its model the Roman Catholic "Mass for the Dead," it should also feature some special twists and turns." Composer/conductor/pianist James Adler has been hailed as a composer who "writes for both chorus and orchestra with uncommon imagination." Following the April 2000, New York City premiere of his Requiem, in Merkin Hall, Bill Zakariasen acclaimed this "very ecumenical and consoling" work, which "gets straight to the heart."

JoDee Davis is professor of trombone at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and second trombone of the Santa Fe Opera. She has served on the faculties of Kent State University, where she was a member of the Kent Brass Quintet, and Eastern Washington University. Formerly principal trombone of the Spokane Symphony, Dr. Davis has also performed with a number of other orchestras including the Akron, Canton and Youngstown Symphony Orchestras in Ohio, and the Spoleto Festival Orchestra. She has presented solo recitals and master classes throughout the United States and has performed and given clinics at International Trombone Festivals, the Eastern Trombone Workshop, the Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic, the Arizona Low Brass Symposium, and the Ohio and Texas Music Educators Conferences. She received the Doctor of Music degree in BrassLiterature and Performance from Indiana University, and the Masters degree in Trombone Performance and Bachelor of Music degree in Music Education from the University of Northern Iowa. Ms. Davis is a clinician for the Selmer Company, Inc. The compositions gathered for this recording represent some of the best works from the trombone literature, as well as some outstanding transcriptions. Ms. Davis gives the listener a colorful, engaging feast of music and talent.

The fascinating career of composer, author, critic, and music professor Marion Eugenie Bauer developed from her initiative and steadfast determination to forge a professional life in music. Born in Walla Walla, Washington, the youngest of seven children of Jacques Bauer, a shopkeeper, and Julie Bauer, a teacher of modern languages. After her father died in 1890, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where, according to Bauer her oldest sister, Emilie, "became literally the father of the family, working with my mother to give the younger brothers and sisters an education and every opportunity for cultural development. To her I owe the fact that I went into the serious study of music." A music critic for the Portland Oregonian as well as a composer and teacher, Emilie was able to build a career as a critic, first in Boston and then in New York. In 1898, Marion joined her sister in New York where she continued her studies with Henry Holden Huss. In 1906 she sailed for Paris where she studied with Nadia Boulanger. She continued to study both in New York and Berlin and by 1912, had established herself as a composer. At 40 she decided she still needed more training so she returned once again to Paris to study with Andre Gedalge who had taught both Ravel and Milhaud. "As a member of the American Music Guild, I had the opportunity to measure my powers and my limitations with those of my colleagues...The result was a period of study in Europe". In 1926, her sister Emilie became ill and died, so Marion moved back to New York. She was hired by New York University as an instructor of music. She remained at NYU until 1951. She also taught part time at Juilliard from 1940.

"Inspired", says the San Francisco Chronicle of flutist Barbara Leibundguth. Former Co-Principal Flutist of the Minnesota Orchestra, Ms. Leibundguth also wins praise from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Bright, gleaming tone...evocative...both stylish and adroit." One of the finest flutists of her generation, Ms. Leibundguth was invited by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as by the major orchestras of Atlanta and Houston, to appear as guest solo flutist. She has also held principal positions with the San Francisco Symphony, the Chicago Opera Theater, and the Omaha Symphony. As a soloist and chamber musician, Ms. Leibundguth has performed at the Marlboro, Grand Teton, and Blossom Music Festivals, and in her hometown of Chicago on the Dame Myra Hess Recital Series. Ms. Leibundguth and award-winning composer/pianist Carl Witt have worked together since 1994, and their musical chemistry creates electric, intelligent performances. In 2002, they received a $25,000 McKnight Performing Artist prize. Visionary Duos was recorded in the world-renowned acoustical space of Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis. This CD presents a collection of passionate and beautifully crafted works, featuring virtuoso counterpoint, radiant melodies, bracing intensity, jazz riffs, and gypsy flair. Here we have an intriguing and expansive view of flute music in the 20th century.

The reasonably experienced listener encountering the music of Louis Gruenberg for the first time is likely at various moments to receive a general impression of artistic kinship with such composers as Szymanowski and Messiaen. Those with a more specialized knowledge of 20th century music may hear a certain affinity with another long neglected creative figure, Igor Markevitch. Better known as a conductor, Markevitch (1912-1983) was widely regarded in the 1930s, by no lesser judges than Bartok and Milhaud, as the outstanding composer of his generation. Markevitch was once described as a "dry mystic", a phrase that might also be used to describe Gruenberg's music. Brought to the United States when he was two, Gruenberg was essentially an American phenomenon. He did do some studying (with Busoni and Koch) and then some teaching and piano-playing in Europe between 1903 and 1919, and one of his most successful dramatic works, The Emperor Jones, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1933, was to achieve a revival in Rome in 1950. But most of his career was spent in the United States, where he was one of the founders of the League of Composers in 1923 and headed the composition department at Chicago Musical College from 1933 to 1936, afterwards moving to California. More pertinently, he devoted much attention to American musical genres, publishing four volumes of spiritual harmonizations, and deriving substantial inspiration from jazz for The Daniel Jazz and several other works. The three works recorded here show relatively little trace of these American resources, fitting for the most part into a broadly European musical tradition that he shared with many compatriots of his generation.

The distinguished professional musical career of Norman Dello Joio began for him at age 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, 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 music and musicians at home. In 1939, he was accepted as a scholarship student at Juilliard where he studied with Bernard Wagenaar. In 1941, he studied at Tanglewood and Yale with Paul Hindemith who told him "your music is lyrical by nature; don't ever forget that." Dello Joio has won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1948 and again in 1962. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for Meditations on Ecclesiastes for string orchestra and an Emmy for his music to 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, which placed young composers in residence in high schools with a salary to compose music for school ensembles and programs. In 2001, at the age of 88, Dello Joio continues to compose with no signs of retiring. His life achievements and compositions have enriched the landscape of American music. There are two other volumes available in this series (TROY344 & TROY359).

Frank Lewin was born in Breslau, Germany, but came to the United States in 1940. He studied composition with among others Hans David and Roy Harris before attending Yale University where his teachers were Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith. The composer himself was on the faculty of the Yale School of Music from 1971 to 1992, teaching composition for film. During this period he also taught the course Music in Modern Media at the Columbia University School of the Arts. He has been active as an editor and engineer of recorded music. In October 1950, Frank Lewin - then a composition student at Yale - saw John Steinbeck's play Burning Bright in New Haven's Schubert Theater. The play was on its way to Broadway, where it found little favor. Lewin, however, was deeply impressed by the story. It seemed ideally suited for an opera. He never forgot Burning Bright. In 1967, he took out an option to turn the play into an opera. During the next ten years, Lewin did research for the opera and worked on a libretto. In 1977, he began composing the music; he completed the score in January 1989. The opera had its premiere in Woolsey Hall in November, 1993 and was warmly received by audiences and critics alike. In July 2000, the Opera Festival of New Jersey presented two performances in Princeton's McCarter Theater. Once again this wonderful opera was well received.

David Macbride has written numerous works, ranging from solo, chamber and orchestral music; to music for film, TV, dance and theater. Tim Page of Newsday writes: “In David Macbride’s music, one finds technical skills of a high order, a direct lyricism that informs the most complex passages, and a personal aesthetic that combines Western chromaticism with a fascination for the music of China.” Macbride is also an active pianist and co-founder, with Benjamin Toth, of Conundrum, a non-profit arts organization that presents concerts and recordings of musically diverse styles. He is on the faculty of the Hartt School, University of Hartford. About his selection of the poetry of Lorca to set to music, Macbride writes: “A composer, much like a poet, spends a lifetime trying to refine his or her voice into its essence. My music has always tried to find the silence, “a rolling silence.” In Lorca, many composers including myself have found the means to speak with their own voices. I am confident that Lorca himself, as musician, visual artist, and writer, would have been pleased to know that he created this safe haven.”

In the seventies and again in the eighties, Ezra Laderman had issued weighty statements, entire worlds for two violins, viola and cello. The first was his three-movement Fifth Quartet, composed in 1976; it lasts three quarters of an hour, incorporates historical models including a sonata form and a Baroque dance suite, and draws on "a rich palette of composing: tonal, serial, aleatoric." But its size makes the Laderman Fifth Quartet impractical to program in its entirety. More often, quartets program the work's movements individually, finding each to be a coherent and satisfying statement. This performance history of the Fifth Quartet led Laderman to re-think his approach to the medium and to multi-movement compositions. A trilogy of single-movement quartets - the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth - comprised the next such weighty statement. The Sixth Quartet was complete by December 1980; the double bar line was put on the Eighth almost five years later, the composer having reached sixty-one years of age. The composer regarded these three quartets as "the payoff from this mother lode" of the Fifth. Each of the three was performed many times before the first performance of the entire trilogy took place, in May 1989 at Merkin Concert Hall's Music Today series in New York City. There the performers - the Audubon, Blair, and Colorado Quartets - gathered to celebrate Laderman's 65th birthday.

Daring and energy are the two basic elements with which Leonardo Balada approaches his very personal compositions. This total musician has blended his strong vocation with his teaching since 1970 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he is University Professor of Composition. He started his piano and theory studies in his native Barcelona, finishing in 1953. Then he studied composition at the New York College of Music and the Juilliard School. The fact that he finished his studies in 1960 could suggest that he was part of the so-called "generation of '51" of Spanish composers. Because of geographical distance he did not participate in the early activities of that group, which was so important to the Spanish music of the sixties. This does not mean he did not identify with them esthetically and ideologically. At the beginning, his compositional direction did not conform to that of his contemporaries, who generally followed the paths of Paris or Darmstadt. The almost obligatory twelve-tone style was not attractive to him. Having left the European continent allowed him the possibility of approaching other musical languages. This he did as one will hear in the broad selection of his orchestral music presented on this disc.

William Bolcom has said: "Curtis Curtis-Smith is one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary music. It is high time that listeners and musicians alike become acquainted with this music of passion and humor, intellectual agility and disarming emotional directness. I have long been its advocate to our best performers, who have played it enthusiastically worldwide, and I envy anyone who is becoming acquainted with it for the first time." C. Curtis-Smith (Curtis O.B. Curtis-Smith) was born in Walla Walla, Washington, studied at Whitman College, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois and at Tanglewood with Bruno Maderna. He has taught composition at the University of Michigan and is currently Professor of Music at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. His Great American Symphony was premiered in 1982 by the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra. The audacious title is as mischievous as it is ridiculous, and as American as a slick Madison Avenue advertising slogan. In the music, there are allusions to sundry aspects of Americana, from New Orleans jazz to acid rock; from gospel harmonies to boisterous marches to quaint southern folk hymns and Broadway show tunes. The composer writes: "On one level, the piece may be heard as fun and games entertainment, while on another it may be heard as an ironic and satirical commentary on the very tunes and styles it purports to trifle with. The piece has certainly enjoyed widely diverse reactions, from those finding it a masterpiece to those thinking it a travesty. Ross Lee Finney called it 'a controversial piece' and David Diamond, while finding the title a 'happy impertinence', admitted to lacking 'the requisite sense of humor about the title'. Another listener objected to my 'irreverent' treatment of The Star Spangled Banner in the last movement. I have never before, nor since, written such a brazen, outlandish, ill-behaved piece - yet GAS! is not malicious; it's more like a clown working things into his act."

Most of the hymns on this recording were written in the 19th century or before, when Americans in general thought more about God than they do today. Our minds nowadays are occupied with other subjects. And yet, surprisingly, our greater familiarity with doubt may help us to hear these hymns more clearly than people in former times could have done. To us a hymn may stand out more vividly against the immensity of the surrounding doubt-filled silence. Faith is not something you have, it’s something you do; the same can be said of art. As an act of faith or a work of art, a hymn exists in that uncertain moment between giving up and going on. A hymn is an inspired decision to go on. The hymns and spirituals on this recording are among the great discoveries faith has made about itself, through words and music that now belong to us all. For a period of about 250 years, from the arrival of the Puritans to nearly the end of the 19th century, the most pervasive musical form in America was the hymn. While Protestant hymns and Negro spirituals were certainly the predominant hymnody in America throughout this time, other denominational hymns were written and sung as well. The first hymnal for the Jewish congregation in Charleston, South Carolina was compiled in 1843 and the Shakers have given us some of the most beautiful and interesting religious songs that have been written in America. This recording was made at a live concert at Christ &St. Stephen’s Church in New York City. Beautifully sung by the William Appling Singers, this recording will satisfy both the Americana scholar, the music lover and those of faith.