Catalog

The four compositions on this disc effectively portray both sides of William Schuman's musical personality -- from the spirited energy of American Festival Overture and the uninhibited patriotic fervor of A Free Song to the much darker character of Prelude and the profoundly moving On Freedom's Ground. One of the 20th century America's most important composers and arts administrators, William Schuman (1910-1992) went from being a Tin Pan Alley song plugger to professor at Sarah Lawrence to president of Juilliard and finally, to president of Lincoln Center. With the exception of the oft-recorded American Festival Overture, these are world premiere recordings and represent the many sides of this extraordinarily creative musical mind. Joseph Polisi, the current president of Juilliard and author of American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman has provided the notes.

These five works for cello by noted Cuban-American composer Jorge Martín were written between 1997 and 2010 -- most of them having some association with his vocal music. Martín studied at Yale and Columbia University and has received awards and grants from a number of prestigious institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Cintas Foundation, among others. Cellist Yehuda Hanani has performed with such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra and is a guest at many international festivals. His pioneering recording of the monumental Alkan Cello Sonata received a Grand Prix du Disque nomination. A soloist, chamber musician, recitalist and teacher, Mr. Hanani also has a weekly broadcast called Classical Music According to Yehuda.

Saxophone virtuoso Noah Getz explains: "Still Life represents a snapshot of the music that I have been performing and enjoying over the last several years. This recording is an eclectic mix of works, most of which were written for me, from a number of trusted composer friends and colleagues." Based in Washington, DC, Noah Getz has performed at major venues throughout the United States. He has commissioned and premiered numerous works for the saxophone, including collaborations with Aaron Jay Kernis and Lewis Spratlan. He maintains an active schedule performing jazz as well as presenting masterclasses, recitals and lectures at universities across the country. He is the Saxophone Musician-in-Residence at American University.

Written in commemoration of September 11, Reflections upon a September morn sets two poems by Walt Whitman. Performed by Kate Maroney, mezzo-soprano, Virginia Brewer, English horn and oboe, and James Adler, piano, this is a poignant tribute to our national tragedy. Available only as a digital download through our online digital store.

This disc includes a premiere recording made in 1992 with Leon Kirchner conducting his Music for Orchestra with the orchestra he founded at Harvard along with two historic releases from the SONY Columbia catalog, both featuring Leon Kirchner, as a pianist in his Piano Concerto No. 1 with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting, recorded 1956 and as a conductor in Lily (for soprano and chamber ensemble), recorded 1973. Leon Kirchner (1919-2009), composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist, was recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in 2009, and an Honorary Doctorate at Harvard in 2001. He received the New York Music Critics Circle award, the Naumburg Award, Pulitzer Prize, and the Freidheim Award, and commissions from the Ford, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Symphony, Spoleto and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festivals, the Boston Symphony, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Kirchner studied with Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, and Ernest Bloch. He was composer-in-residence and a performer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Tanglewood Music Center, Tokyo Music Today (Takemitsu Festival), and the Spoleto, Charleston, Aldeburgh, and Marlboro Music Festivals.

Born in the German spa town of Honnef am Rhein, Boris Papandopulo (1906-91) has emerged as one of the most significant Croatian musicians of the 20th century. Son of the Greek nobleman Konstantin Papandopulo and the famous Croatian opera singer Maja Strozzi-Pecic, he arrived in Zagreb in 1910. He studied conducting in Vienna and composition at the Zagreb Music Academy. He was an extremely prolific composer, with several hundred works in his catalog. His distinctive stylistic pluralism is evident in his solo piano music. His style is marked by its eclecticism and the artful manner in which various music idioms are brought together. This recording, performed by the distinguished pianist Nicholas Phillips, is the first devoted to Papandopulo's music.

This is a world premiere recording of Lee Hoiby's 1971 two-act opera, with libretto by Lanford Wilson, based on the play by Tennessee Williams. Lee Hoiby, who died on April 8, 2011, was best known as a composer of operas and songs, although he was a child prodigy as a pianist, studying at the University of Wisconsin with Gunnar Johansen and Egon Petri. But on the verge of a career as a concert pianist, he received a scholarship to study composition with Gian Carlo Menotti. His immense contribution to American music, particularly opera and song repertoire is recognized by American singers everywhere. His style is an elegant and unobvious bridging of the lyrical works of Verdi and Gershwin.

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.

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

The two works on this recording are concerned with time-cycles: Book of Hours with the ordering of days, Helian with the changing of seasons. Book of Hours uses the medieval Book of Hours, a devotional book containing prayers and psalms, for its structure while Helian is a setting of a poem by Georg Trakl and is concerned with years, not days. Active as a composer, conductor and pianist, Jeremy Gill studied at the Eastman School of Music and at the University of Pennsylvania. He has received awards from BMI, ASCAP, Meet the Composer and the American Symphony Orchestra League. He is Music Director of the Delaware County Symphony. This is the second release on Albany Records devoted to his music.

The internationally acclaimed flutist Marya Martin, assisted by musicians from the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, offer a program of Eric Ewazen's music for flute. The Flute Sonata and the Bridgehampton Suite were both written specifically for Ms. Martin, a long-time friend of the composer's; the SeaSkye Songs were inspired by the poetry of Karen Wagner, written as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide; and Mosaics was composed for another flutist friend. Composer Ewazen says that he was completely influenced by Martin's lovely golden tone and her spectacular technical agility. This compact disc of world premiere recordings offers beautiful performances of Eric Ewazen's music for flute, and adds immensely to the chamber music repertoire.

Donald Crockett is dedicated to creating music inspired by the musicians who perform it and this recording is no exception. It represents works composed across a span of about a dozen years and Xtet, the Los Angeles-based new music ensemble, with its highly variable instrumentation and composer/performer ethos, was the ideal vehicle to undertake the performance of this music. Donald Crockett was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and has also received the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and an Aaron Copland Award, among many other honors. Also known as a conductor, Crockett has presented many world, national and regional premieres with Xtet. He has also been active over the years as a composer and conductor with the venerable and famed Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles. Donald Crockett is on the faculty of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and serves as Senior Composer-in-Residence with the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East.

This CD presents songs by some of America's reigning composers, many known for their cross-genre writing, including jazz, pop, classical, folk and art songs written with distinguished authors for concert, theatre and film venues. The elements are universal--melody, groove, harmony, story and imagery--the musical passport to a chapter in The Great American Songbook. Lisa Kirchner is joined by a group of world-class performers in jazz and classical genres. They offer a unique take on these gorgeous songs crossing the borders of musical genre.

Composer, concert presenter, educator and arts administrator, Theodore Wiprud has played many important roles in American musical life since the 1980s. His ongoing work with musicians, students, and communities -- currently as Director of Education at the New York Philharmonic and host of the Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts -- corresponds with music described as "rewarding to perform," "warmly received by audiences," and "destined to set a high standard." Theodore Wiprud came of age as a composer as the rigorous precepts of both serialism and classic minimalism yielded to a flowering of musical plurality. His works characteristically employ a freely tonal approach to harmony, convey specific emotional climates, and often reflect aspects of spiritual experience. This is the first commercial recording dedicated to his music.

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

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

For their first commercial recording, the Alabama Wind Ensemble offers three concertos by American composers. James Beckel's The Glass Bead Game is a horn concerto loosely based on the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name. Scott McAllister's Black Dog is a rhapsody for solo clarinet and wind ensemble, inspired by Led Zeppelin's rhapsodic-style song Black Dog. David Maslanka's Trombone Concerto is a memorial to Christine Capote, a flutist and teacher who was a dear friend. The performers and conductor Kenneth Ozzello are all faculty members at the University of Alabama.

Commissioned by Dicapo Opera Theatre, Thomas Pasatieri's charge for God Bless Us, Every One! was to bring the cast of characters to the shores of America. God Bless Us, Every One! suggests what might have happened 20 years after the famous final line of Dickens' original tale. The libretto combines the characters from A Christmas Carol with the plot of another Dickens' story, Doubledick, and mixes them all into the turbulent years during the American Civil War.

For his fourth recording on Albany Records, "maximalist" composer Florencio Asenjo gives us three orchestral works based on literature. The Batrachomyomachia or The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice is an anonymous ancient Greek parody of the Iliad. Palm-of-the-Hand Tales is incidental music to ten of Yasunari Kawabata's narratives from his Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. Basile's Pentameron frames incidental musical episodes from Giambattista Baile's Penteramron, which was the source of famous stories by Perrault and the Grimm brothers.

Two works for soprano and orchestra by American composers comprise this recording. Frank Ticheli composed An American Dream as his fifth and final work for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra during his seven-year tenure as the orchestra's Composer-in-Residence. Based on a text by Philip Littell, the work addresses the conscious and unconscious sea of anxiety during the winding down of 20th-century America. Lansing McLoskey has chosen to excerpt lines for his text for Prex Penitentialis from two works by Petrarch: the Canzoniere, a collection of love poems, and Septem Psalmi Penitentialis, in which the civil war between body and soul is made explicitly and profoundly clear.

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

What unites this fascinating disc of song cycles is the poetry of Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933), a beloved Greek poet. The four composers have offered their personal musical response to his art. Baritone John Muriello has maintained a varied performing career in opera, operetta, musical theatre and concert work. He has concertized in London, Moscow and throughout the U.S. and has performed at international contemporary music festivals. A voice teacher at the University of Iowa, he is joined by his colleague, composer/pianist David Gompper.

Composer Charles Bestor received his musical training under Paul Hindemith, Vincent Persichetti, Peter Mennin and Vladiir Ussachevsky. His long career has included numerous awards and commissions and recordings of his music appear on Albany Records, Capstone, Centaur, New Ariel, Serenus, Orion and MSR Classics. He has pursued a parallel career as a teacher and administrator and served on the faculty and administration of the Juilliard School, Wilamette University and the Universities of Massachusetts, Utah and Alabama. He is presently Professor of Composition Emeritus and Director of the Electronic and Computer Music Studios of the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. This recording is the first devoted to his orchestral works. Two works on the recording (Requiem and The Long Goodbye) are the composer's attempt to generalize a private personal loss.

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

The fact that a composer of Persichetti's stature and prominence wrote so many works for wind band was not a result of a unique devotion, but simply because he was inherently attracted to the medium. The works on this recording, which constitute Persichetti's major works for wind ensemble, represent a wide variety of lengths, forms and difficulty levels and yet certain compositional consistencies can be found throughout. The differences are in technical demands and harmonic density rather than the basic musical language. The Illinois State University Wind Symphony and their conductor Stephen K. Steele offer exceptional performances of this music.

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.

MAD DANCES? Mad indeed! This collection of American music for saxophone and piano is a representation of the wonderfully "mad" and spectacular contemporary saxophone repertoire. There is a uniquely mad-like quality to all of these works: this madness is presented in many different ways, using the definition of "mad" quite loosely. Libby Larsen's Holy Roller is full of madness, invoking the intensity of revival meetings and sermons of "holy roller" type preachers. Skookum Suite, by Kevin Isaacs is inspired by the Sasquatch, or "Skookum," who becomes "mad, sad and glad" as he is discovered by humans, escapes, and finds true love. William Albright actually provided us with our album title in the second and fourth movements of his brilliant Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, while David Diamond's sonata allows us a brief respite from madness with his eloquently composed and truly American work. The collection ends with an arrangement of David Del Tredici's Acrostic Song from Final Alice...well, what could be madder than the Mad Hatter? All this given brilliant performances by the esteemed saxophone player, Dan Goble, and pianist Russell Hirshfield.

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

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

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

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

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