Catalog

Vanessa Sielert and Catherine Anderson formed Duality to commission and perform new works for saxophone and piano as well as to challenge the listener and the performer. This recording contains some of those commissions as well as arrangements of popular compositions that are treated in a new and interesting manner. Saxophonist Vanessa Sielert is on the faculty at the Lionel Hampton School of Music at the University of Idaho. She studied at the University of Idaho, Baylor University, and the University of Illinois. She has performed with a wide range of performing groups — jazz ensembles, orchestras, and chamber ensembles. Pianist Catherine Anderson, a former faculty member at the Lionel Hampton School of Music, is in demand as an independent collaborative artist throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Scott Sandberg performs a concert of works for tenor saxophone and piano ranging from new works by Catherine McMichael, to music by French and American composers written in the 1970s and 1980s. Sandberg is on the faculty at the University of North Dakota and maintains an active schedule as a performer, clinician, and adjudicator. He has toured China three times, including performing as a featured soloist with the East China Normal University Orchestra and is a regular performer at the North American Saxophone Alliance Conferences and International Saxophone Symposiums. He is a graduate of the University of North Dakota and the University of Iowa. He has presented clinics at the North Dakota Music Educators Association, the Northeast Texas Saxophone Symposium, and numerous universities and high schools.

Susan Kander and Roberta Gumbel's dwb (driving while black) tackles what it means to be a parent of a black child who starts driving. In its swift 45 minutes, the listener spends 16 years with a black mother, feeling her growing fear as her black son moves towards driving age. Librettist and soprano Roberta Gumbel has been called "silver-voiced" by the New York Times. She has appeared with opera companies in Kansas City, Houston, Indianapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Memphis, and toured the United States and Europe in companies of Porgy and Bess, including the renowned Houston Grand Opera production. Composer Susan Kander's music has been heard across the U.S. and in Europe, China, Russia, Australia, and South Africa and she has received commissions from a variety of ensembles including the Minnesota Opera Theater, Opera Theater of St. Louis, the Columbus Opera, and National Symphony Orchestra, among many others. Her music appears on the MSR, Navona, and Loose Can record labels. dwb (driving while black) enjoyed a video premiere on October 23, 2020 as a joint production of the Baruch Performing Arts Center and Opera Omaha.

Two works honoring Earth Day comprise this distinctive recording. The first, by composer John Harmon, is a symphonic setting of the words of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Earth Day Founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson with descendants of these men as narrators. The second, Hymn to the Earth by Edward Joseph Collins, is a secular cantata for soloists, choir, and orchestra, praising Mother Earth and the beauty of the four seasons using text set by the composer. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Earth Day's founding in 1970, this recording was undertaken by a non-profit: Earth/Art Resources as part of their educational and cultural mission to foster Earth Day values.

The intersection of Chinese cultural elements with Western art music provides a rich palette of Eastern colors in this first commercial recording of music for clarinet and piano by well-known Chinese composers. The composers on this recording were born in China, but have all studied and worked in the West. Chinese-American clarinetist, Jun Qian, has shared similar experiences with these composers and his performances show a deep understanding of Chinese culture and Western musical ideas. Dr. Qian, now on the faculty at Baylor University is principal clarinet for the Waco Symphony Orchestra. He was a professor of clarinet at St. Olaf College and served as principal clarinet of the Shanghai Philharmonic. Among his many honors, Qian was the featured soloist at the International Performing Arts Festival in Japan in 2004. Qian studied at Baylor University and the Eastman School, where he received his Masters and D.M.A. He is joined on this recording by a former colleague from St. Olaf College, pianist Kent McWilliams who previously taught at the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

This unique disc features the artistry of soprano Judith Kellock in works by composers either American-born (Womack, Moss and Askim), or now an American citizen (Chen Yi) or born and active in Japan (Hosokawa). These works show each composer's fascination with Asian culture, primarily that of China and Japan as well as settings of Vietnamese poetry (Askim's Spring Essence). Judith Kellock has been described in the press as "a singer of rare intelligence and vocal splendor, with a voice of indescribable beauty." A primary influence in her musical life was the late Jan DeGaetani, with whom she studied for many years. Ms. Kellock has been featured with the St. Louis Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New World Symphony and many more. Highly acclaimed for her song recitals and chamber music performances, she is also sought after by composers for her interpretation of contemporary music. Ms. Kellock has also sung major operatic roles in Italy and Greece, toured with the Opera Company of Boston and performed with the Mark Morris Dance Company. She serves on the performing faculty of Cornell University, and is much in demand as a master class teacher.

Like volume one of East Meets West, this recording is a collection of new music for clarinet by Chinese composers who have lived, studied, and worked overseas. The compositions combine Chinese cultural elements with Western art music to create a unique intersection of cultures through the use of tone colors produced by the combination of clarinet with Chinese instruments, sound effects created with the use of both Chinese and Western musical forms and harmonic language, and a blend of classical and contemporary musical idioms. All the music on this recording was written or arranged for clarinetist Jun Qian. On the music faculty at Baylor University, Jun Qian is principal clarinetist of the Waco Symphony. Previously he was principal clarinetist of the Shanghai Philharmonic and studied at the Shanghai Conservatory and Eastman. He has concertized throughout China, and has performed and taught in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Canada.

Robert Freeman, then Director of the Eastman School of Music says in the introduction to this recording: "Ever since the appointment of Howard Hanson as Director of the Eastman School of Music in 1924, Eastman has been on a continuing course to encourage the future of music by American composers. From the earliest years of Dr. Hanson's 40-year directorship, Eastman produced each spring a festival of new works by young Americans, including the first performances of Orchestral works by Copland, Piston, Carter, Thompson and Sessions, for example, together with the initial performances of a great many works by Eastman faculty, graduates and students. Recordings conducted by Hanson, of the music of American composers from his own and earlier generations, helped spread both familiarity with many American composers and the reputation of the Eastman School all over the world. In the meantime, the strength of Eastman's composition program remains unabated under the current faculty. We at Eastman are all very proud of the opening of a new recording series with Albany Records, a firm that continues to make the most notable accomplishments in behalf of music in America." We at Albany are equally proud that Dr. Freeman and the musicians at Eastman are working with Albany Records for this historic new series of recordings made in their lovely recording facilities, in honor of their 75 years of service to American music. You, too, will be pleased with this selection of the music of two Pulitzer Prize winning composers: the late Stephen Albert and Christopher Rouse.

Look at the gems on this disc! Look at some of the performers; Jan DeGaetani, Bonita Boyd, Verne Reynolds. For contemporary music lovers this series from Eastman is a feast. David Maslanka studied clarinet, conducting and composition. His principal composition teachers were Joseph Wood and H. Owen Reed. "I consider my Duo for Flute and Piano to be something of a milestone in my composing. It emerged fully formed from a part of me with which I wasn't at the time very familiar. It whispered, it cried, it shrieked, when on the surface I had no idea that I was doing any of those things. As has been the case for 30 years of composing, my music consistently reveals things to me in advance of its arrival in my conscious mind. If the Duo revealed pain and depression, it also revealed a search into mystery, a love of the beautiful, and a penchant for formal construction and precision of detail - all issues which have occupied me in the intervening years, issues which have been the premise of a composer's life." Heaven to clear when day did close is really a concerto for tenor saxophone and string quartet. It is in one movement. Warren Benson has had a long and distinguished career that includes an appointment at the Eastman School of Music from 1967-1994. Upon accepting a commission from the International Horn Society for a major work featuring the horn, Mr. Benson chose to write a song-cycle for mezzo-soprano, horn, English horn, cello, and marimba. "In Songs for the End of the World I wanted to write something that the composer might treat either as a song cycle or as an internalized one-woman short opera."

William Albright was professor of composition at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1982 until his death. His Four Fantasies for harpsichord were commissioned by Douglas Reed, who performs them here and were composed at the American Academy in Rome. Norman Dinerstein was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and studied composition with Lutoslawski, Schuller, Copland, Foss, Sessions and Babbitt. He considered Arnold Franchetti his most important teacher. He chaired the departments of composition, musicology and theory at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He was Dean of the college when he died of a heart attack in 1982. Love Songs is an example of his late music and uses words by the Brownings, Christina Rossetti and the Song of Solomon. This music is "Tonal, expressive and deeply humanistic." Ann Silsbee studied at Radcliffe College and Syracuse University. She received her doctorate from Cornell where she studied with Karel Husa. Janice Hamer studied at Harvard University and holds a master's degree in conducting from Westminster Choir College. She taught and conducted at St. Paul's Girls' School and at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where here music was performed in concert halls and on the BBC. She served as choral director at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges before turning to composition.

This album features René Fleming in what has to be one of her earliest recordings, if not the earliest. Renée Fleming received her M.M. degree from the Eastman School of Music. The music she sings on this recording was recorded in 1983, while she was still a student at Eastman. As well, the presence of the great Jan DeGaetani (1933-1989) makes this a special disc. For many years she taught at Eastman, as well as Aspen. Bruce MacCombie studied with among others, Wolfgang Fortner. For several years he taught composition at Yale University, and in the last decade he moved from teaching to administration, serving as Dean of the Juilliard School from 1986-92 and now as Dean of the School for the Arts at Boston University. Leaden Echo, Golden Echo is the setting of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Sydney Hodkinson received his earliest training at Eastman under Louis Mennini and Bernard Rogers. He also studied with Carter, Sessions, Leslie Babbitt and Ross Lee Finney. He has been on the faculty of Eastman since 1973, teaching both composition and conducting. The Alte-Liebeslieder or "Old Fashioned Love Songs" are based on contemporary poems. Stanley Walden studied composition with Ben Weber and has been a faculty member at Juilliard, Sarah Lawrence College, and the State University of New York, College at Purchase. In addition to his Broadway Musical Oh! Calcutta, which has been produced throughout the world, he has written scores for film and dance.

Brian Israel studied with Ulysses Kay, Robert Palmer, Burrill Phillips and Karel Husa. He graduated from Cornell in 1975. He taught at Syracuse University for 12 years until his untimely death at 35. His In Praise of Practically Nothing for tenor voice and eight-player Chamber ensemble was composed in Syracuse and is a setting of poems by Samuel Hoffenstein. Gerald Levinson is professor of music and former chair of the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College. He studied composition with George Crumb, Richard Wernick and George Rochberg. His work in dark is a setting of poems by Nanine Valen and Robert Lax. David Noon is a graduate of Yale. His teachers have included Milhaud, Charles Jones, Yehudi Wyner and Mario Davidovsky. His Six Chansons were composed when he was a Fulbright Fellow in Warsaw, Poland. They are settings of six poems by the great Chinese master of the late Tang dynasty, Meng Chiao. Noon translated the poems into French. Robert Stern was educated at Eastman. He studied with Louis Mennini, Kent Kennan, Wayne Barlow, Lukas Foss and Howard Hanson. He writes: "Blood and Milk Songs takes its name from Blood and Milk Poems, a volume by Ruth Whitman. The lyric quality of the poetry is mirrored in the music, which is propelled by a strong melodic impulse."

David Liptak was born in Pittsburgh in 1949. After teaching composition and theory at Michigan State University and the University of Illinois, he joined the faculty of the Eastman School in 1987, where he has chaired the composition department since 1993. In 1994, he was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation to write a trumpet concerto for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, which was premiered in 1996. In 1995, he was awarded the Elise L. Stoeger Prize by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in recognition of distinguished achievement in the field of Chamber music composition. Other discs of his music appear on Gasparo and Opus One.

Throughout their musical careers Ramon Ricker and Bill Dobbins have championed a less compartmentalized approach to music; an approach which is obvious on this new Eastman disc. They began their musical association in 1973 as faculty members at the Eastman School where Dr. Ricker is presently Professor of Saxophone. Mr. Dobbins left his professorship in Jazz Studies in September of 1994 to assume the position of music director of the West German Radio Big Band in Cologne, Germany. Both musicians have extensive professional experience in jazz and classical music. Dr. Ricker plays in the clarinet section of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, has recorded and toured with such jazz artists as Buddy Rich and Chuck Mangione, and is active as a studio musician, composer-arranger, producer and contractor. Mr. Dobbins has performed as soloist with symphony orchestras under Pierre Boulez and Louis Lane, and has worked with jazz artists Phil Woods and Red Mitchell, The National Jazz Ensemble and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra.

In the spring of 1997, the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik in Freiburg, Germany, presented the Eastman School with the idea of doing a collaborative exchange concert between the two institutions. Their idea was to mix Eastman and Freiburg faculty and students together in live performances of music written by faculty composers from both schools. It was their hope that this sort of collaborative venture between student and faculty performers and composers would bring the two schools closer together and help strengthen their exchange relationship. That initial idea was realized with concerts in Rochester, New York in October, 1997 and in Freiburg, Germany in February 1998, as well as this CD which was recorded at the Sudwestrundfunk Landesstudio in Freiburg, Germany.

Echoes of America was commissioned by the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild in celebration of Robert Ward's 80th birthday. Jimmy Gilmore, the clarinetist for the piece, responded to the idea of a title for the trio with Echoes of America. He felt that each of the four movements related to some aspect of American musical culture in the southeastern part of the country. The work was completed in June 1997. About Appalachian Ditties and Dances the composer writes: "This work reflects the interest I have had in American folk music in general since the 1950's and in Appalachian music in particular since the 1970's when my wife and I had a second home in Sparta, North Carolina. The richness and vitality of that music is unparalleled by that of any other region of the country. The mountain folk are a singing people and the tunes are an inspiration or a solace for a wide spectrum of human feeling." The Raleigh Divertimento was commissioned by the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild for the Aspen Wind Quintet. "My great fascination with the beauties and difficulties of writing for the medium dates from the late 1940's when I coached woodwind ensembles at the Juilliard School. The creation of the work started with the melodies inspired by the sounds of the instruments." Lamentation first appeared as "Of Ancient Guilt" for piano and dancer and is dedicated to dancer Judith Martin who commissioned it and gave the first performance in 1947 at the Studio Theater in New York. Scherzo, which is frequently performed with Lamentation, was first performed in 1951 at the Peabody Conservatory by William Crystal. Dialogues for Violin, Cello and Piano first appeared as Dialogues for Violin, Cello and Orchestra, written on commission from the Chattanooga Symphony for its 50th anniversary season, 1982-83. The Chamber version of the work was premiered at Duke University on February 4, 1984.

Albany Records is proud to present the first disc ever devoted to the music of the great American composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley. Kelley grew up among the pioneers from New England and New York who founded Sparta, Wisconsin. He was a direct descendant of the Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford. Sparta was no ordinary frontier village. Its Yankee settlers were lovers of music and literature and as a boy Kelley took every opportunity to steep himself in both. His mother was a writer and musician and his father was a writer and newspaper editor. While drawn to both writing and painting, Kelley decided early on to become a composer. He studied at home first with a young tutor from Germany, who had just arrived from Leipzig, and then in Chicago, where he remained for two years. He then went to Germany, where he studied with the best teachers of the day and was exposed to the music of Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz and Chopin. In 1880, he returned to America and San Francisco, where he took a job as an Organist. He composed all the time. He married a singer, who helped him promote his music. He also taught at Western College in Oxford, Ohio. He went to New York where he became a friend of Victor Herbert and even taught a semester at Yale, where he conducted the New Haven Symphony. The history of music in America is filled with musicians like Edgar Stillman Kelley. Like so many of his American contemporaries, Kelley professed to be nothing more than entertaining. He succeeds so very well as this disc devoted to his music proves. An edition of the piano music of Edgar Stillman Kelley, edited by Brian Kovach has recently been published by Mel Bay Publications.

Albany Records completes its series of recording of the music of Edward Joseph Collins (1886-1951) by offering an anthology of the 10 discs in a slipcase. Collins left an oeuvre comprised of ten major orchestral works (including a symphony, two overtures and three suites), three piano concerti, Hymn to the Earth (for orchestra, choir, and four solo voices), several chamber works, 15 songs for voice and piano (four arranged by Verne Reynolds for chamber/string orchestra), and more than a dozen piano solo and duo scores and an opera, all of which are included in the anthology. Called “…an exemplar of romantic, tonal tradition, keenly lyrical in manner…” the influence and importance of this Illinois native’s music can now be assessed.

The lure of the operetta stage proved as irresistible to America's "March King," John Philip Sousa, as it had a decade earlier to Vienna's "Waltz King," Johann Strauss. Sousa played under the baton of Jacques Offenbach as a teenaged violinist and was aware of the unprecedented success of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore on Broadway. El Capitan can lay claim to be the most enduring American comic opera of the 19th century. It was premiered in Boston in 1896, transferred to Broadway a week later and for the next four years played continuously across the U.S. and Canada and even had a five month run in London. This recording, with complete music and dialogue, was recorded at the 2010 Ohio Light Opera Festival.

This recording of tangos began with the idea of writing music that could allow for freedom of improvisation while adhering to the composer's intent. Composer Pablo Ortiz began writing works for cello, multiple cellos and cellos with other string instruments while exploring the concept of original composition versus transcription, or music inspired by other music. His colleague Anssi Karttunen began transcribing music as well, using music of classic tangos, both from Argentina and Finland. Thus the listener will experience original compositions in the tango idiom along with transcriptions and arrangements of classic tangos. It is often hard to tell whether the composer is the interpreter or the interpreter the composer. This is a study in freedom and the shifting line between invention and re-invention. The two different kinds of tangos -- those from Argentina and those from Finland give different shades to the nostalgia and sadness they are both about.

This recording is a result of the collaborative cross-relations that exist between the musicians and composers on the disc, and their enthusiasm for each other's work. Violist Jonathan Bagg, composers Scott Lindroth and Stephen Jaffee are colleagues at Duke University, while flutist Laura Gilbert and Bagg were co-directors of the Monadnock Music Festival. While Miriam Gideon's playful and probing Creature to Creature was not written for these players, it seemed to add a different, powerful voice that was aesthetically consonant with the other works on the CD. Gilbert and Bagg are joined by harpist Stacey Shames, pianist Donald Berman, guitarist Daniel Lippel and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Shammash for performances that evoke the character of these wonderful recent compositions.

Madeleine Shapiro is a recognized figure in the field of contemporary music as a cellist, producer of chamber music concerts, and as a teacher. She has appeared as a solo recitalist throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. She has a strong commitment to performing works by living composers and has a repertoire of over 40 solo works by composers from the Americas, as well as Europe and Asia. The chamber ensemble ModernWorks, founded by Madeleine in 1997, presents an annual New York City concert series and has been heard yearly on the New York Consortium for New Music's prestigious Sonic Boom Festival and at other New York venues, including a series at the Museum of Arts and Design, as well as on NPR. She teaches at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, where she directs the Contemporary Music Ensemble and teaches classes in the performance practice of contemporary music. She writes: "My love for electro-acoustic works began as an undergraduate at The State University of New York at Stony Brook where it was suggested by the eminent violinist Paul Zukofsky that I learn Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 3, my first experience with a work by a living composer. My subsequent performance of this piece led to a life-long commitment to both works by living composers, and the electro-acoustic medium. The pieces on this CD were chosen for their wide range of musical expression, and for the variety of electronic technology they employ. Since 1964, when the Davidovsky was written, the developments in technology have been astounding. As a performer, I have found this revolution exhilarating, and embrace the expressive and coloristic possibilities that such technology has afforded us."

Genevieve Feiwen Lee received her degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Boris Berman. As an open-minded, generous and expert proponent of new music, she presents two significant composers, the French-born Bodin and the American Tom Flaherty. As Kyle Gann writes, "The 21st Century composer for piano faces tremendous competition from the past, yet for many, the medium still offers irresistible temptations. This recording offers compositions commissioned from Bodin and Flaherty; apart from making extensive use of the piano's ability to display different tempi simultaneously, these composers approach piano composition in different way: Bodin shows interest in layering and complexity, while Flaherty's approach is more linear and sound-oriented."

In a seemingly unlikely marriage of ideas, this recording presents new works by four American composers for a fabled instrument of China, the pipa. Building on the instrument's long history, these composers present a new vision of how an ancient instrument from another culture can provide inspiration to an even broader audience. The composers on this recording, Donald Reid Womack, Jeff Myers, Thomas Osborne, and Takeo Kudo, blend idiomatic performing techniques with inventive textures and widely divergent harmonic contexts. They build on the instrument's traditional repertoire by extending the range of cultural influences and reinventing the music that can be played on pipa. The performances are by the renowned pipa virtuoso Yang Jing, whose distinct mix of virtuosity and lyricism, tradition and innovation brings these new works to life.

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.

Captivated by the sound of the native American flute, virtuoso flutist James Pellerite has virtually single-handedly reinvented the playing of the instrument by commissioning dozens of composers to write for it. The resulting new works have challenged Pellerite to develop new techniques for the instrument. His legacy is therefore both an entire body of literature for the instrument and the development of techniques necessary to perform the music. Former principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pellerite has also had a long and distinguished career as Professor of Flute at Indiana University. This recording showcases the native American flute in a range of contemporary styles by eight composers, performed by the man who re-imagined the instrument.

A native of Kansas City, Missouri, Emma Lou Diemer received her degrees in music composition from the Yale School of Music (B.M., M.M.) and the Eastman School of Music (Ph.D.). She studied further in Brussels on a Fulbright Scholarship and at Tanglewood. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she taught composition and theory from 1971 to 1991. She has been composer-in-residence with the Santa Barbara Symphony, and is organist emerita at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara. This recording offers some of her recent chamber works including a work for string trio and a work for brass and piano, both written in 2001.

Tobias Picker was born in New York City and studied at Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and Princeton University. When he was eighteen, he was pianist for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Recently, Picker has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to compose an opera that will have its premiere in the fall of 2002. He has also been commissioned by the BBC to compose a cello concerto to be premiered in the summer of 1999. He is currently completing Fantastic Mr. Fox, an opera based on Roald Dahl's classic story which was commissioned for the Los Angeles Opera and will premiere on December 9, 1998. For its 40th anniversary season in 1996, the Santa Fe Opera gave the world premiere performances of Picker's first opera Emmeline. The opera is inspired by Judith Rossner's novel about the true life story of Emmeline Mosher, a single mother forced to give up her baby son who unknowingly marries him twenty years later. Emmeline, which played to sold out houses, standing ovations and international critical acclaim, was nationally broadcast on PBS Great Performances in April 1997 and receives its New York premiere on March 31 at City Opera. Here are some of the comments the critics made about the Santa Fe performances of Emmeline. Heidi Waleson in the Wall Street Journal said: "This summer the Santa Fe Opera struck gold with the American premiere of Emmeline." Jamie James in The Times, London said: "Picker has written a sensational, satisfying first opera...Emmeline, in its world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera, is one of the most successful American operas in years." Hugh Canning in The Sunday Times, London said: "The unquestionable hit of the festival was Picker's Emmeline...accessible, exquisitely crafted, and it always serves the drama as both accompaniment and commentary. And what a drama!...A hugely enjoyable occasion that I would gladly relive." John J. O'Conner in The New York Times said: "Mr. Picker's score is ominously taut, punctuated with moving solos and duets...The production is stunningly spare. The singers are never less than impressive." It goes without saying that Albany Records feels privileged to release this magnificent work by one of America's finest composers. The added presence of Patricia Racette who has been winning rave reviews lately is an added bonus. The sound on the recording is superb because it has been especially remixed for audio from the original masters just for this CD release.

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

Entering its 30th season, the American Horn Quartet continues to be unique in the field of brass chamber music. Their exuberant performances have brought audiences all over the world to their feet. The individual members of the AHQ are all very successful soloists in their own right — four Americans who work and reside in Europe. The AHQ has more than 500 concerts and masterclasses to its credit and has produced 10 compact discs. This disc, a collection of gems that the AHQ has performed over the years, is appropriately titled En-Cor!

The esteemed Mexican/American composer Daniel Catán (1949-2011) is best known for his opera Florencia en el Amazonas, which was premiered by the Houston Grand Opera in 1996. His first opera, Rappaccini's Daughter, was the first opera by a Mexican composer to be premiered in the United States. Catán enjoyed an international career and is probably best known for his operas and works for voice, for which he had a special affinity. This recording includes one of the arias from Florencia as well as a work for flute and harp; the Antonieta Songs, and Mariposa de Obsidiana, a work for voice, orchestra and chorus, based on a prose-poem by Octavio Paz. The performers include Cynthia Clayton, who has performed with the New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Ft. Worth Opera and many others. She is on the faculty at the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston. Clayton is joined by Mexican mezzo-soprano Cecilia Duarte; flutist Salpy Kerkonian; harpist Andre Puente- Catán; baritone Hector Vásquez and the Texas Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Franz Anton Krager.

And now for the serious side of Don Gillis...Yeah, right! Actually, in both the "Encore" Concerto and the Harp Rhapsody (written for the NBC Symphony's Edward Vito), one can hear some very serious thoughts being bandied about, but nearly all of these pieces represent high spirits and good, clean fun. "Twinketoes" was originally meant for a ballet about a crippled girl who dreams of becoming a ballerina, and surgery allows her to fulfill her destiny. But Gillis lost interest in the soap-operish plot. Instead, he assembled a suite, and we have the opening number, as sprightly as any Broadway overture, and with enough humor to keep Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck going. And we also have one of his last works, the whirlwind Rhapsody for Trumpet, which shows some more modern touches (bongo drums!). The Short Overture is a concise ball of energy, not really for any proposed opera, but a great curtain-raiser just the same.