Catalog

There's a reason reveille is played on the trumpet instead of the bassoon; the trumpet commands attention, its stentorian voice rising above all. But the trumpet can also be soulful and quiet, even playful and, with its various mutes, can create many different moods in both classical music and jazz. This new release features world premiere recordings of distinctive American works for trumpet and orchestra, alternately heroic, romantic, introspective and, in Frederick Tillis' work based on the spiritual Sinner, Please Don't Let this Harvest Past, redolent of African-American folk traditions, but cast in a modern, jazz context. Paul Neebe, acclaimed as both a solo player and orchestral musician, has made a commitment to American contemporary music. He is currently Principal Trumpet of the Roanoke Symphony, the Charlottesville Symphony and the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra in Virginia. He is a graduate of both Juilliard and the Catholic University of America.

Peter Westergaard taught composition and theory at Princeton University from 1968 to 2001, and also directed the Princeton University Opera Theatre during this time. Moby Dick is his fifth opera, the others being Charivari (1953), Mr. And Mrs. Discobbolos (1964), The Tempest (1990), and Chicken Little (1997). As he writes about Moby Dick: "Melville's novel paints a vast canvas. But of the many stretches that might have made good scenes for an opera, I have chosen only those I deemed absolutely necessary to spinning the central yarn. Gone is Father Mapple's sermon, all that's left of Pip is his tambourine...there are a few brief glimpses of Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo." In terms of being imaginary, Mr. Westergaard recognizes the complexities of adapting the many elaborate scenes from the book into a viable stage presentation, especially the struggles of attacking the whale, etc. As he continues, "With a recording, of course, all these problems conveniently disappear as you, the listener, imagine from Ishmael's words and the music that surrounds them what Ishmael sees in his mind's eye as he tells us his tale." In essence, Mr. Westergaard has created the ideal opera for the recording medium.

The composer of such Broadway hits as The Student Prince, New Moon and The Desert Song was born in Hungary, educated in Vienna and studied engineering. But his musical gifts were recognized, and he came to New York at age 22. In between menial odd-jobs, he made his presence known to the point where the Schubert brothers engaged him in 1914 to become their house composer, eventually producing 17 shows and hundreds of songs (many for Al Jolson) by 1917. That was the year that Maytime, based on a play by Walter Kollo, had its premiere. Romberg changed the locale from Europe to old New York, and the work was a great success and ran for nearly 500 performances. Though Maytime achieved great popularity as a 1937 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy film, it only used two original Romberg numbers. Here is a chance to experience this tuneful, charming operetta of lost and found love in a sparkling performance, the kind we expect from the wonderfully talented Ohio Light Opera Company members.

Solo violin discs don't get more varied than this! Movses Pogossian is a prizewinner of the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Competition, and the youngest-ever First Prize winner of the USSR National Violin Competition. His American debut was in 1990 performing the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the Boston Pops. He has since performed with major orchestras in Europe and the United States. A major proponent of new music, he has premiered over 30 works. He is currently a Visiting Artist Teacher at SUNY Buffalo, and a member of the Baird Piano Trio and Duo Forza. As you can imagine, the styles and technical approaches are as eclectic as the backgrounds of the composers themselves, which allows for some wonderful contrasts along the way. A definite must for adventurous chamber-music listeners.

Have you noticed how some of the most interesting new guitar music is coming from Europe? Here's what Volkmar Zimmermann has to say: "Our first contact with Jonas Tamulionis harks back to 1997. As always, I was on the lookout for new and exciting works for guitar quartet. As it came to pass, I received a letter from the Lithuanian Music Information Centre telling us about a composer hitherto unknown to us, a composer who we eventually came to discover possesses a loving heart for the guitar... It was truly a delight for us in 1998 when Jonas wrote his guitar quartet, Per Suonare a Quattro, which serves as the ticket for our journey, a serpentine path leading to (this) CD...we sincerely hope you will enjoy the music created by this eminent Lithuanian composer as much as we do." Needless to say, guitarists will want to snap this one up, and listeners who enjoy the music of East Europe will be intrigued as well! More information on the composer and performers is available at the following websites:

Italian opera was all the rage in German courts at the turn of the 18th century and the young Handel's trip to Italy from 1706 to 1710 allowed him to immerse himself in Italian music. This spurred a remarkable output of cantatas, many written for the meetings of the Arcadian Academy, a group of noblemen and artists who gathered in Rome to further their literary agenda and raise the level of Italian poetry. Though their main interests were in pastoral subjects, these three cantatas dealt with portrayals of tragic heroines, the scorned and betrayed: Agrippina, Lucrezia and Armida, whose stories were drawn from Roman history and myth. No doubt the Academy was impressed with subject matter, which would have been at home in full operatic treatment! Hailed as "outstanding" by the New York Times, soprano Melissa Fogarty's wide range of experience has taken her from the stages of the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera to the world of early music. She has appeared in concert with the Seattle Baroque, New York Collegium and Concert Royal. Her unusual experience (in rock bands during her college days) has given her the kind of versatility to branch out into other fields, including the works of Harry Partch and even klezmer music.

Joseph Waters writes, "I find this juxtaposition of contemporary electro-acoustic ephemera with a collection of musical instruments and a performance practice that predates the age of technology to be simultaneously anachronistic and engaging. It is my goal to create strong and deep tie lines that connect the present surface to the ancient seabed miles below. This is my celebratory reaction to our current milieu, which juxtaposes Mozart one minute with rap music the next. There are many connections between them, which I find fascinating and exhilarating." This music bears tribute to Debussy and Messiaen (Ocean Eyes), explores Afro-Cuban influences (Witches of the Unconscious) and the worlds of seabirds and exotic marine life (Ghosts and Aloiloi) as well as the phenomenon of intense fright when suddenly awakening from a deep sleep (Kanashibari) and the onset of morning (Loneliness). Born in 1952, Waters is Associate Professor of Music Composition and Director of Electro-Acoustic and Media Composition at San Diego State University. His first musical experiences included playing in a rock band, and the myriad influences of the world and its music figure in his own compositions.

Eager to capitalize on the 1875 success of Trial By Jury, impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte organized the Comedy Opera Company, Ltd., and commissioned Gilbert and Sullivan to write a comic operetta. Drawing upon various sources, Gilbert fashioned a plot dealing with the effects of a love potion on an English village. Though Gilbert finished his libretto by April 1877, Sullivan, despondent over the death of his brother Fred, finished the score barely in time for the mid-November premiere at London's Opera Comique. The Sorcerer, satirizing both Victorian customs and theatrical devices, was a success and ran 175 performances; this was to lead to the next collaboration, H.M.S. Pinafore. Once again, Albany is proud to present another wonderfully sparkling performance by the renowned Ohio Light Opera Company, the first complete CD set incorporating Gilbert's hilarious spoken dialogue. Those who have come to know and love the acclaimed series by this group are in for an absolute treat!

The University of Houston Percussion Ensemble serves as the cornerstone of the Department of Percussion studies at the University's Moores School of Music. Established in 1997 and directed by Dr. Blake Wilkins, the Ensemble has steadily gained recognition throughout the state of Texas through appearances on campus and in public schools. The group achieved further distinction when it performed at the 2002 Texas Music Educator's Convention. Their selection as Winner in the 2003 Percussive Arts Society Percussion Ensemble Competition and its appearance at the 2003 Percussive Arts International Convention has secured its reputation internationally as a leader in percussion performance. Since its inception, the Ensemble has given the world or U.S. premieres of a number of new works. In the fall of 2002 it also initiated its Commissioning Project to encourage new works for the medium. Two of the works on this new disc, Donald Grantham's Houston Strokes and Rob Smith's Surge were among the first in this series. Percussion music has proven over the years to be phenomenally popular with performers as well as listeners. This release is an exceptional addition to the catalog; and wait until you hear Vaughan-Williams' Thomas Tallis Fantasia arranged for five marimbas and two vibraphones!

We lost one of the great American composers in June of 2005 when David Diamond passed away. However, we have been fortunate to have heard his Symphonies, chamber works and complete String Quartets (TROY504, 540, 613 and 727) on record over the years, yet this is the first CD devoted entirely to his songs, though he wrote nearly 100 of them. The songs range in emotion from the sweetly lyrical and wistfully elegiac to the humorously satirical and ironic, from plaintive innocence to homespun world-weariness, from mysterious enigma to heart-rending poignancy, from compassion with souls in torment to the need for humans to connect with others even though the connection may be painful, and from deceptive quasi-simplicity to unearthly and nearly orchestral passion and power. All but one are in English and encompass the full poetic gamut of human emotion and experience. Soprano Helene Williams and pianist Leonard Lehrman have collaborated on performances in Amsterdam, Paris, Germany, the United States, as well as song recitals on CD. This, their first Albany release, is a wonderful memorial to an important American composer.

If you're of a "certain age," you grew up in the late '50s and early '60s hearing the music of Angelo Musolino without even knowing his name. He was responsible for original music and arrangements for the Ed Sullivan Show, a dozen nationally televised game shows, the Children's Television Workshop, and many more. At the same time, his concert works were being performed in the United States and Europe. He was born in New York City, learned his craft in "formal" institutions during the day while playing with such names as Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Mandel and Oscar Pettiford at night. He carries on the traditions of Copland, Bernstein, and Henry Mancini and Nelson Riddle, writing in a style that freely combines pop elements with a traditional orchestral scoring. This new disc, a companion to his earlier CD Opening Doors (TROY708), reveals a master of light musical forms. You may not know his name now, but you will definitely remember it after hearing this delightful disc.

The fact that Timothy Polashek has lived with moderate hearing loss (and the need to wear hearing aids) has actually had an impact on his compositional aesthetic; prompting him to explore the world of nonsensical speech sounds as music, as well as pitch and timbre manipulations of other sounds in his electro-acoustical works. He wrote his first computer program in the 5th grade to generate time-based graphic animations and by the time he entered high school he had written a computer program in PASCAL that could synthesize musical tones, generate improvisations in blues style, and display them as musical notation in real-time during the computation and reading of the music. As he writes, "all of the compositions on this album were composed recently, with the oldest, Porcupine Quest, dating from 2002...when I was composing these works, I knew that Eric Huebner might perform them so I kept his incredible virtuosity and spirited piano technique in mind...also, I am appreciative of pianist Steven Beck's superb playing on the duets, both in concert and in the recording sessions...overall, aesthetically, I view these works as modern classical music, but spoken at times in the dialect and emotion of jazz."

Jacob Avshalomov is one of the great veterans of American music. He studied with his father Aaron, as well as Ernst Toch, Bernard Rogers and Aaron Copland. His orchestral, instrumental and choral works are full of classic American melodies, rhythms and harmonies; in short, the kind of music "they don't write anymore." Serious listeners to American music have him to thank for those pioneering recordings from the late 1950's and early 1960's with his beloved Portland (Oregon) Youth Symphony, which introduced many of us to composers such as Benjamin Lees and William Bergsma. This disc features his wonderful choral music, much of which is based on texts by his wife Doris. These works all fall into the great American choral tradition of Randall Thompson and Copland. More of Avshalomov's music can be heard on TROY115, 160, 249, 296 and 502.

By now the Illinois State University Wind Symphony under Stephen Steele has achieved renown for their adventuresome Albany recordings (TROY500, TROY600, TROY755 and TROY774-775). One of the composers prominently featured in these releases is David Maslanka, who, after Vincent Persichetti, is probably the most important American composer for band. His Symphonies 4 and 5 are featured in this series, and the Symphony No. 7, as Maslanka explains, is a Symphony of old songs remembered: "I am strongly affected by American folk songs and hymn tunes. With one exception all the tunes are original, but they all feel very familiar. The borrowed melody is from the 371 Four-Part Chorales by J.S. Bach. Each song has a bright side and a dark side, a surface and the dream underneath." Samuel Zyman, a long-time Juilliard faculty member, is one of the most prominent Mexican composers. His Cycles is a one-movement work that consists of several distinct sections that appear and alternate "cyclically" throughout the work. Matthew Halper's works are widely performed and his Flute Concerto is an expansive, dramatic work that covers a wide musical terrain in a single movement.

Over the past few years the highly charged, exuberant music of Florencio Asenjo has been slowly appearing on CD, and this is his debut on Albany. Asenjo employs an approach to music called maximalism, a method of transition from one theme to another to achieve a highly dense content which is constantly changing. Perhaps the technique sounds experimental, but the music certainly is not avant-garde. The Buenos-Aires born composer is beholden to his country's colorful past, and anyone who enjoys the early works (such as Estancia or Panambi) of Alberto Ginastera will certainly be caught up in the excitement of Asenjo's music. All three works on this disc were composed in 2004, and represent colorful portraits of life (Tearings and Glimpses) as well as various psychological states of mind (Passion and Apotheosis). As Asenjo himself has written, "I like when large-scale forms are built on many ideas. There should be a lot of independent ideas. I think that now the general need is for more substance in music."

Robert De Cormier's Counterpoint, Vermont's premiere professional vocal ensemble, debuted in 2000 and can be heard on Albany TROY676 (When the Rabbi Danced), TROY746 (Misa Criola) and TROY801 (Noel). Here they present their latest album that brings together new arrangements, ranging from traditional to contemporary, of some of the best known and loved Israeli folk-songs. Unlike European folk-songs, whose origins tend to be vague and lost in the past, most of these songs originated in the 20th century and have known composers and poets. Yet they are folk music just the same, for they live now in the oral tradition. Several generations of Jews have grown up singing them, and some songs, such as Tsena Tsena, Shalom Chaverim and, of course, Hava Nagila, have achieved mainstream recognition. The purpose of Israeli folk-songs was to inspire a new national cultural identity through which, in the words of Hinei Ma Tov, Jewish brothers and sisters from many lands would dwell together in unity. Among many Jews and Israelis throughout the world the songs evoke sentiments of pride and belonging. And despite the inner conflicts between Israelis today and the violent conflicts with its neighbors, the message of this disc is the sincere hope that the entire region may someday achieve unity and peace.

Here is a welcome companion to the acclaimed release of Reza Vali's music for string quartet on TROY790. This time music for larger chamber ensembles is featured, with an emphasis on the Persian folk music Vali grew up with. Since 1988 he has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, and has received numerous awards and commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Kronos Quartet and many other ensembles. His early works indicated his interest in the avant-garde but in recent years he has composed works featuring strong influences from the music of his native Persia. The sets of Folk Songs and particularly the Calligraphy No. 4, with its use of the santoor (a Persian hammered dulcimer), derive almost entirely from Persian folk song. This is truly unique and highly original music.

Long before people began talking about postmodernism, Michael Sahl was living the postmodern life. Back in the 1970's there was a definite barrier between the Accepted High Art of modern classical music and the field of popular music (not so between jazz and rock-hence the fusion-jazz of Weather Report or Herbie Hancock). But Michael Sahl dared to write "classical" music with jazz chords and folk-music rhythms. Today, the Kronos Quartet plays rock music, and someone once even suggested that it would be perfectly normal for Sir Michael Tippett to write a piece for an established rock group. So, now we have Michael Sahl who is finally coming into his own, with his cabaret-style melodies riding smoothly over pungent jazz harmonies, and his rock-flavored rhythm section filling out his classical forms nicely. The music may strike some as "eclectic," but in Sahl's own mind, the contrasting elements fit perfectly together. The fusion is smooth, with its own personality: energetically syncopated, with a cool sense of restraint.

Flutist Margaret Swinchoski, clarinetist Donald Mokrynski and pianist Ron Levy make up the Palisades Virtuosi, a group of friends who wish to promote and enrich the repertoire for their instruments. They present concerts that include existing music for this trio, supplemented by solos, duos and larger works and include a new work for flute, clarinet and piano on each of their programs. This recording includes seven of the works Palisades Virtuosi commissioned and premiered during their first two seasons. What's appealing about this disc (apart from the wonderful sounds these instruments make) is the variety of composers presented. Some are familiar names (Godfrey Schroth, a pupil of Paul Creston, and Richard Lane, an Eastman graduate whose music was recorded by Howard Hanson) and others will be new to you. Nearly all of the works are based on traditional forms and feature strong folk and popular music influences. This is an ideal disc for those who love wind music and an absolute treat for performers who wish to hear new music for their instruments.

Born in Mill Valley, California, John Anthony Lennon earned a liberal arts degree at the University of San Francisco, as well as a master's degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie Bassett and William Bolcom. He shares with those two composers a strong sense of unusual instrumental color as well as a strong grounding in traditional American forms. Lennon studied guitar early in life so it is not surprising that he has devoted a substantial portion of his career to this instrument, including his popular Zingari Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra (The Play of the Sixes is an independent part of that work). The works contained on this CD constitute one of the most significant contributions to the guitar literature in recent times. They are beautifully and idiomatically written for the instrument and have been played by such renowned guitarists as David Starobin and David Tanenbaum as well as Daniel Stanislawek who began his studies while growing up in Chicago, and has performed to critical and audience acclaim throughout the United States and abroad. He is a specialist in contemporary music.

Two of his most important orchestral works, Sacred Symphonies and the Idumea Symphony, are beautiful, strikingly kaleidoscopic works in the best Ivesian tradition. A renowned pianist, Bell presents here a recital of his highly original piano music. The vocal works of Larry Bell can also be heard on Albany TROY741.

Born in Buenos Aires, Jorge Liderman is quickly becoming one of the most highly-regarded South American composers of today, with his works being performed worldwide. Though his music is experimental, it is also extremely colorful, with a strong nationalistic undercurrent. Aires de Sefarad (Airs from Spain) is a cycle of 46 songs without words for violin and guitar, and although many of them are love songs, they vary in character and their musical nature. These songs highlight, at the core of their musical structure, unchanged original melodies that were sung in Ladino by the Spanish, or by the Hebrew, Sephardic Jews. After the Spanish Inquisition, a large number of Jews emigrated to Portugal, Tunis, Morocco, Turkey and Israel among other countries. After a 2003 visit to Spain, walking through the Jewish quarter in Cordoba and experiencing the vibrant life of the region, Liderman was inspired to write Aires de Sefarad. As he says, "This work reflects my impressions of past and present Spain in its vast and varied culture."

Richard Thompson, one of today's most artistically aware composers, offers here "two song cycles and six piano preludes, in a contemporary classical vein as well as an arrangement of the Spiritual, Wade in the Water, for jazz quartet." Thompson's work here helps to highlight the natural tendency of today's urban American composers who, not content to write in one style of music, work to remove the presupposed barrier between traditional classical music and contemporary jazz, thereby underscoring their artistic and spiritual kinship. Mr. Thompson, originally from Aberdeen, Scotland, has written compositions that combine European and African-American styles, so that the formal structures of European classical music develop ideas that are essentially jazz in nature. Thompson completed graduate studies in jazz at Rutgers University in New Jersey. While there, he studied jazz piano with Kenny Barron and classical piano with Ted Lettvin. He also holds a jazz diploma from the Berklee College in Boston.

Considered "one of the heroes of American music," John Duffy has composed more than 300 works for symphony orchestra, opera, theatre, television and film. His best-known work in television is his score for the PBS series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews. He also composed music for the New York City productions of Macbird, The Ginger Man and the Yeats musical Horseman Pass By. Duffy grew up in the Bronx, one of fourteen children of Irish immigrant parents. He studied composition with, among others, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell and Luigi Dallapiccola. As founder and president of Meet the Composer, an organization dedicated to the creation, performance and recording of music by American composers, Duffy initiated countless landmark programs to advance American music and to aid American composers. As he writes of this CD, "As the 2005 composer-in-residence (of the Virginia Arts Festival), I had the good fortune to work with JoAnn Falletta (and the soloists and ensembles on this recording). This CD covers 50 years of my composing life...A born and bred New Yorker, part time Virginian, and traveling Mainer, my music and this recording reflect my love of these seacoast lands, of our beautiful country and this vast earth, with its miraculous variety of peoples."

Thomas Mann's extraordinary novella Mario and the Magician was written while he was vacationing on the Baltic seacoast, hard at work on his massive novel Joseph and His Brothers. An unpleasant incident that occurred down on the beach inspired Mann to create an ominous allegory about the rise of fascism and the Nazi blight that was beginning to affect Germany at that time. American composer Francis Thorne's interest in Mario goes back to 1963, when he discussed with Mann's daughter, Elizabeth Borgese, the possibility of an opera. Permission was granted, and work began with librettist Chester Kallman, but delays forced inevitable changes. Years later, Thorne would work with J.D. McClatchy (librettist, incidentally, for Tobias Picker's Emmeline [TROY284/5]). The work was premiered March 12, 1994. Thorne himself is part of that great generation of American composers born in the 1920s (others being Donald Erb, Leonard Rosenman, and the late Meyer Kupferman and Jacob Druckman) who came to prominence in the late 1940's and early 1950s, writing strongly accented music often with prominent jazz influences. Thorne's first professional job was as a jazz pianist at New York's famed Hickory House, with Duke Ellington's recommendation. He later studied with David Diamond. His output includes concertos, symphonies, chamber music and songs both "classical" and pop. He was also principal founder of the American Composers Orchestra, and has served on the boards of CRI Records, The Virgil Thomson Foundation and the MacDowell Colony. Mario and the Magician is his only opera.

This release of Don Gillis' music is especially important because it contains three of his most beloved works in their first commercial re-recordings since the classic 1950 LP's conducted by the composer. All of these works have that wonderfully bracing, great-outdoors sound that fans of Gillis thrill to. The common theme of the Old West runs through the entire program. Each of these works abounds in the terrific melodies, spicy harmonies and a strong narrative drive, which are all the musical fingerprints of this fine American composer. As in past releases, Ian Hobson and the Sinfonia Varsovia show a great affection for this music. If anything, Maestro Hobson matches Gillis' own energetic performances and even finds a bit more emotional gravity in The Alamo. On top of this is the excellent SACD surround sound that really brings out the orchestral colors hidden in these scores.

Established in 1972 as a resident faculty ensemble at Tennessee Technological University, the Cumberland Wind Quintet has built a solid reputation for unique programming and fine musicianship. The group has toured throughout the United States and in Europe, performing to a wide variety of audiences. Commanding a large repertoire of music from all periods, the Quintet offers the standards and classics, exciting modern works, and lighter popular music. The Quintet has also performed as guest artists at conferences for the College Music Society, Tennessee Music Educators Association and the Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic. This CD demonstrates perfectly their range, with delightful arrangements of film themes and vocal and keyboard music by such composers as Ravel and Mahler, and in between highly entertaining original compositions by Ewazen, Uhl, Berger and Danner.

We've been proud over the past several years to offer the chamber and orchestral music of James Yannatos on Albany Records, and this newest release offers an excellent sampling of his talents. Born and educated in New York City, he studied with Philip Bezanson, Nadia Boulanger, Luigi Dallapiccola, Darius Milhaud and Paul Hindemith. He also studied conducting with William Steinberg and Leonard Bernstein, and has been music director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra since 1964. The Violin Concerto was commissioned by the Pierian Foundation in honor of his 40th year at Harvard. The Symphony, loosely based on a twelve-tone theme, was influenced, as Yannatos says, "by the ragged, edgy rhythms of jazz filtered through the ears of a classical composer." The Contrabass Concerto is described as "a cross between the classical solo concerto, with its typical virtuoso technique, and the alternating 'ritornello' style of the Baroque solo concerto." Yannatos' music is exciting and colorful with a particularly "transparent" sound to the orchestration. The other releases of his chamber, choral and orchestral works can be heard on TROY241, 278, 366, 400, 516 and 638.

Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, but accelerated early in the 19th century, New Romanticism seems to have given composers the impetus to write more works for the cello as a solo instrument. The cello's capacity to "sing" was exploited by Romantic composers for dramatic and melodic effects in ensembles. For this recording, cellist Anthony Arnone and pianist Timothy Lovelace have dipped into the cello literature for the "Forgotten Romances" that were written intentionally for the cello and piano rather than arrangements for the cello by well-known composers. Cellist Anthony Arnone is an active soloist, chamber musician, conductor and teacher throughout the country and the world. A native of Honolulu, Mr. Arnone received his bachelor of music degree from the New England Conservatory, and was a founding member of the Meridien Trio and the Sedgewick String Quartet. Also active as a soloist, chamber musician and conductor, Timothy Lovelace studied with Harold Evans, Gilbert Kalish, Donna Loewy and Frank Weinstock. An advocate for new music, Lovelace has given premieres of works by Osvaldo Golijov and others and has recorded for Albany and Boston Records.

In the early 1900s, Nationalism in Argentina, which coincided with the various strong artistic national currents throughout Europe and the United States, was competing with the other "isms": post-romanticism, neoclassicism, expressionism, futurism, etc. It was the era of constant searching for an individual voice, original style, and the desperate need to "belong" to an "ism." Nationalism in Argentina was at its peak during the late 1800s through the early decades of the 20th century. This recording encompasses works written in different styles and idioms, each with a unique compositional personality, but at the same time having one distinctive quality in common: expressing the Argentine soul in sound. Whether it is using traditional, folkloric or popular motives within the frame of Romanticism, Neoclassicism or Modernism all these composers have a common thread uniting them: a respect and understanding of piano writing, and a skillful and resourceful way of bringing out the best of the instrument's colors. Argentine Pianist Mirian Conti (who can also be heard on TROY299, Poems for Piano) enjoys a growing reputation as a musician whose performances combine technical brilliance with striking originality and artistic insight. A Juilliard graduate, her vast repertoire encompasses composers from both North and South America.

Network for New Music is an award-winning chamber music ensemble widely acclaimed for its outstanding performances and its dynamic and diverse concerts. Led by artistic director Linda Reichert and conducted by Jan Krzywicki, Network's virtuoso musicians bring the sound of imagination to audiences eager for fresh musical adventures. In its first 20 years, Network has commissioned, premiered and presented a rich variety of more than 500 innovative new works. The three composers on this disc all share a lineage going back to George Crumb and Richard Wernick, connections to Philadelphia, a happy relationship with Network, and a commitment to renew the articulate, expressive power of melody, harmony and rhythm. In each composer, we encounter three very different approaches to form. Whitman offers emphatic sonic guideposts that locate us firmly - beginning, middle, end - in the discourse. Wagner (winner of the 1999 Pulitzer for Music) proposes a stream of consciousness narrative in which each moment suggests a continuation, leaving much of its past behind. Levinson interjects ritual, both athletic and ceremonial, arriving at healing states of contemplation remote from the every day activities. The high quality and diversity of these works are emblematic of Network for New Music's commitment to creating an art music for the future, today.

Will Marion Cook was one of the earliest African-American composers to achieve significant commercial success in musical theater. However, even though his talents were admired at the turn of the twentieth century, he and his work have since been largely forgotten. With the interest in African-American culture sparked by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and revived interest in all American music during the Bicentennial celebrations of the 1970s, Cook has been rediscovered by such music historians as Thomas L. Riis and Marva Griffin Carter, as well as by such performers as the Black Music Repertory Ensemble of the Center for Black Music Research and, of course, tenor William Brown, who had previously recorded some of Cook's songs on the album Fi-yer! (TROY329). Having studied with Joseph Joachim in Berlin and Antonin Dvorak in New York City, Cook was respected for his pioneering achievements in popular songwriting, Black musical comedies and syncopated orchestral music. His career as a songwriter spanned some 40 years from 1893 to 1934. Cook's memoirs reveal that he believed his ultimate challenge was to right social injustice while at the same time creating beautiful music. Renowned tenor William Brown's repertoire encompassed practically all musical genres. He was a particularly avid performer of American music from all ages and had appeared with major orchestras and ensembles all over the world. Sadly, Mr. Brown died shortly after this recording was made. This CD is a tribute to the memories of both Cook and Brown.