Catalog

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.

In the grand American tradition initiated by Ives, this collection of piano music by Ethan Wickman balances refreshing individuality with an acute awareness of tradition. Aptly titled, Portals and Passages offers myriad glimpses of correspondent time periods, distant relationships, complementary cultural values, and diverse locales -- earthbound and otherwise. Wickman's compositional style weaves a dynamic network of motivic, rhythmic, and textural contrasts into a unified voice that continually prospects fresh realms of tonal possibility and interest. In Nicholas Phillips, his music finds a measured, solicitous interpreter whose touch renders the most challenging technical passages effortless and those more delicate, sublime.

Countertenor Darryl Taylor and pianist Brent McMunn have assembled a superb selection of classics from the still growing corpus of spirituals, including a number of arrangements by key figures in the history of black musical composition. With this project, Taylor and McMunn contribute powerfully to the continuous translation of this aged music from oral tradition to written composition Ñ from folksong to art song. Darryl Taylor has sung in concert halls across the United States and Europe. A native of Detroit, Taylor holds degrees from the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan. He is on the faculty at the University of California, Irvine.

The music of John Allemeier has been described as having a "sweet sense of mystery." His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe in chamber concerts and at international festivals. A graduate of the University of Iowa, Northwestern University and Augustana College, he also studied at the Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. He teaches composition and music theory at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This CD presents four premiere recordings of his music for various chamber ensembles. Each of these pieces resulted from commissions and collaborations with education and and artistic organizations between 2007 and 2010.

William Matthews began studying and performing music as a flutist in Springfield, Ohio, then studied composition formally at Oberlin, the University of Iowa, the Institute of Sonology and the Yale School of Music. He has taught at Bates College since 1978. His creative time is divided between acoustic and electro-acoustic compositions and both types are represented on this first recording devoted to his music.

This recording allowed composer Dalit Hadass Warshaw to feature and reconcile diverse aspects of her musical identity -- composer, pianist, and thereminist. The music runs across a broad harmonic spectrum with music ranging from solo instrumental works to string quartet to voice. It also highlights Warshaw's mission to integrate the theremin with acoustic ensembles as her music for this instrument features the more lyrical, vocal and expressive capacities of this unusual instrument. The theremin used for this recording belonged to Clara Rockmore and was customized for her by its inventor, Lev Theremin, in the early 1930s. A prolific composer and active performer, Ms Warshaw's music has been widely praised for its lyricism, its unique orchestral palette, its sense of drama and emotional intensity.

As the world is turning from the 19th to the 20th century, Hudson, New York, on the Hudson River, in the Hudson Valley, was a little town with a big red light district centered on Diamond Street. Harold Farberman has written a comic opera (libretto by Andrew Joffe) that involves politicians, a heroine forced to work in the red light district and a hero, who rescues her. Harold Farberman is a distinguished composer, conductor and pedagogue. He has conducted many of the world's leading orchestras and his accomplishments as a recording artist have been widely recognized. A prolific composer, he counts orchestral works, chamber music, concertos, ballet music, film scores, song cycles and operas among his compositions. He is founder and director of the Conductors Institute.

Gilbert & Sullivan's hilarious and tuneful 1881 spoof of Oscar Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelite movement is presented with complete music and dialog by the Ohio Light Opera. Patience was the sixth of the 14 Gilbert & Sullivan collaborations. It played for 850 performances, moving to the Savoy Theatre, where it was hailed as the first theatrical production to be lit entirely by electric light.

John Duffy, considered "one of the great heroes of America music," has composed more than 300 works for symphony orchestra, opera, theater, television and film. He is a two-time Emmy winner and the recipient of the American Music Center's Founder's award for Lifetime Achievement. Critics call his work "...haunting...memorable...and brilliant." It is American music of authentic vim and vigor.

The Scott/Garrison Duo consists of clarinetist Shannon Scott and flutist Leonard Garrison, has performed together since 1988, with a long commitment to American music. They have been featured at five conventions of the National Flute Association and were winners of the NFA’s Chamber Music Competition. This recording features nine delightful works for this wind duo, exploring works by American, French and Swiss composers.

This compact disc presents six world premiere recordings of works commissioned by Duo XXI. Each of these pieces introduces an innovative compositional approach to the relatively unexplored genre of the string duo. Both members of Duo XXI -- Anna Cromwell, violin and Mira Frisch, cello -- are passionate string professors who reach a diverse audience through concerts, conference presentations and outreach workshops. Ms. Cromwell is on the faculty at Eastern Illinois University while Ms. Frisch teaches cello at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

A is for Azimuth and Arnica, for found objects and found texts, is a collection of six activities, written for San Francisco-based percussionist Chris Froh, with additional versions by Yarn/Wire members Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, and for Geneva Prize winner Aiyun Huang. The title of the second work, Mediations, Tenors, a duo for marimba with metal and vibraphone with wood, refers to the psalm-tone recitation formula of medieval chant. The work of Ben Carson, Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been recognized at numerous and international festivals of new chamber music, experimental music, and improvisation.

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.

Cellist Jonathan Golove offers a program of contemporary Mexican works for cello, five of which are world premiere recordings. All of these composers are major figures in Mexican music and this recording showcases the exciting and vibrant work that is being done in Mexico. Golove is a dedicated performer of both new and traditional works as well as of improvised music. A native of Los Angeles, he now serves as associate professor in the University of Buffalo's Department of Music.

This second recording of chamber music by Armand Qualliotine on Albany Records features music for piano, vibraphone and marimba. Qualliotine (b.1954) earned his degrees from the Hart College of Music, SUNY-Stony Brook and Brandeis University. His post-doctoral work included studies with Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt. He is now a professor of composition at Berklee College of Music. He has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, and the Paul Jacobs Commission for orchestral composition from the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra.

The Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 40 by Johannes Brahms reigns as one of the supreme works of chamber music that includes the French horn, and it is often thought of as the model for all of the succeeding works composed for this trio. The instrumentation is certainly unique, as there were no precedents of note in the major chamber music oeuvre. Paired with the Brahms on this recording are two rarely performed and previously unrecorded horn trios from the beginning of the last century. All three performers are internationally acclaimed and give exceptional performances of this repertoire.

In the notes to this recording John Salmon observes that he has always been a classical and jazz pianist and that his professional life has mirrored his youthful inclinations with recitals of music from the classical canon around the globe and appearances with the jazz-faculty combo at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is the first recording of his own piano compositions, which are unmistakably in the jazz idiom, probably even more precisely categorized as "third stream," the style that combines jazz and classical languages. The composer/pianist says, "Salmon Is a Jumpin' would have been grammatically incorrect if referring to the fish. But as an autobiographical statement it is correct, especially when I get in a B-flat blues swinging mood."

Radical, traditional, original, archetypal, Cindy Cox derives her "post-tonal" musical language from acoustics, innovations in technology, harmonic resonance, and poetic allusion. Naturally unfolding through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes, her compositions synthesize old and new musical designs. This is the second disc of Cox's chamber music to appear on Albany Records. Cindy Cox is the Evelyn and Jerry Chambers Chair Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

The Young Debussy comprises the songs composed by Claude Debussy before his 30th birthday that he felt were good enough to publish. The vocal writing varies, but in most of them there is the emphasis on the middle and low range characteristic of much French vocal music. Darren Chase sings all of the songs in the composer's original keys. Recordings of Debussy's songs now go back more than 100 years but the large majority feature sopranos or mezzos with the rest sung by lyric baritones. This is the first recording since 1975 where this repertoire is sung by a tenor and as such offers an enlightening experience of this music.

With the exception of the Six Valses Caractéristiques, these are the first recordings of these compositions by Edward Joseph Collins. Born in Illinois, Collins studied piano with Ganz in Chicago and composition with Bruch and Humperdinck in Europe. Collins was hired in 1914 as an assistant conductor for the Bayreuth Festival, a brief engagement ended by WWI. After the war, his music attracted the attention of Frederick Stock, who conducted many of his orchestral compositions with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Jorge Martín's dramatic two-act opera, based on the writings of Cuban dissident and poet Reinaldo Arenas is giving its world premiere recording. In creating an opera from the memoir of Reinaldo Arenas, composer Jorge Martín with the help of Dolores Koch, took every step to insure accuracy, calling upon Cuban émigrés for advice, particularly for the prison and interrogation scenes. Before Night Falls transcends a specific time and place, however, capturing universal themes and Martín has woven these themes into a vibrant music drama.

Modern brass chamber music is dominated by quintets and the relative scarcity of trio performances is belied by the number of outstanding compositions for that ensemble, some of which are presented on this recording. Worth noting is the daunting challenge inherent in the ensemble itself Ñ the transparency of the three voices demands that even secondary lines project with identity and color. When performed on a high level, as on this disc, there is a deeply gratifying intensity to the experience, shared by the listener and the performers.

Born in Chicago, Michael White attended the Chicago Music College and at the Juilliard School where he worked with Peter Mennin and Vincent Persichetti. He was composer-in-residence for the public schools of Seattle and Amarillo, where he began composing operas. He subsequently taught at Oberlin and the Philadelphia Musical Academy and is now at Juilliard. Since 2007 White has composed entirely for solo piano and the results are heard on this recording. In pianist Mirian Conti, White has an unexcelled champion for his music.

The six compositions on this recording by the Armenian-American Hayg Boyadjian, cover a six-year period of his compositional output. Each was written for and is dedicated to specific musicians, although not all of them figure as performers on this recording. The musical language reflects Boyadjian's diverse background. Born in Paris of Armenian parents, he grew up in Buenos Aires and then relocated to the United States. He has drawn musical inspiration and materials from all these different cultures. Inspired by Boyadjian's interest in astronomy, the last work on the recording (Pleiades) was written for James Pellerite, who has dedicated himself to the native American flute.

Although the six pieces that make up this program were not composed with this purpose in mind, each work explores different ways to combine the sounds of flute and percussion. Two of humanity's oldest instruments, they remain favorites of contemporary composers. Stylistically, the pieces on this recording vary greatly, but they also complement each other by showing manifold possibilities that flute and percussion duos offer.

Extreme Measures is the first project in clarinetist Jean Kopperud's Rated X series. It is seven clarinet and piano works written for Kopperud asking composers to dare to stretch the medium. The Winnipeg Free Press reviewed a past project that Kopperud toured, which might best describe Rated X. "You can expect to have your head bent a little. You will stay awake. You will be fascinated and infuriated . . . and exhilarated by what you have heard." Rated X ("Extreme Measures") premiered in the fall of 2008 on the West Coast and was recorded in the spring of 2009. A graduate of Juilliard and former student of Nadia Boulanger, Kopperud has toured the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, China, the Caribbean and Australia as a concert soloist and chamber musician. She performs with the New York New Music Ensemble and is a professor of music at the University of Buffalo.

Morris Rosenzweig was born October 1, 1952 in New Orleans, where he grew up among the tailors, merchants, and strong-willed women of an extended family that has lived in southern Louisiana since the mid 1890s. His works have been widely presented throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Japan, Argentina, Mexico and Israel. His recorded compositions are available on Albany Records Centaur, and New World/CRI. Mr. Rosenzweig has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Argosy Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and support from the Alice M. Ditson Fund. Presently Professor of Music at the University of Utah, he has formerly held positions at Queens College and New York University. He was educated at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University.

The Bowling Green Philharmonia offers another fascinating mix of new music in this sixth volume of the series. Ranging from the young Avner Dorman's Variations Without a Theme for Large Orchestra to the even younger Raymond Lustig's Unstuck to 103-year-old Elliott Carter's Pastoral for English Horn and Strings with works by Marilyn Shrude and Steven Stucky occupying the generations in-between, the recording gives the listener an opportunity to hear fine music in excellent performances.

Born in New York, Peter Ivan Edwards studied at Northwestern University and at the University of California, San Diego. His work has been performed throughout the world by numerous ensembles and at major international festivals. He is assistant professor at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore where he teaches composition and theory. His music is influenced by two strands of music thinking -- the American experimentalists and the European avant-garde. Edwards takes many different things from these traditions and creates an original music that builds off their discoveries.

Thomas Sleeper enjoys a highly prolific career as both composer and conductor. An active guest conductor in the U.S. and abroad, Sleeper has appeared with more than 30 orchestras on four continents. His compositional oeuvre to date includes two symphonies, two orchestral song cycles, eight concerti, six operas, numerous chamber and solo works and music for film. Sleeper is the Director of Orchestral Activities at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music.

Clarinet trio CDs aren't the most mainstream kind of CDs around. However there are always clarinetists like the distinguished artists from Chicago performing on this recording who are always searching for fun, interesting new music to perform. The music was selected with these criteria in mind and the hope is the listeners will find the "fun" in this music -- four works of which were written specifically for this ensemble.

The only opera composed by Edward Joseph Collins, Daughter of the South, is set on a plantation on the Potomac River, near Leesburg, Virginia. The composer also wrote the libretto, the dramatic action commencing on the day the Civil War began and ending when peace was declared. Pondering what would be an appropriate opera for an American composer, Collins drew on his life-long interest in the Civil War and created an opera using the love story of a Southern beauty with a Northern boy as the basis of the libretto. The music shares many identifiable qualities with Collins’ other compositions for large ensembles, yet also makes more direct use of music styles from the popular culture of the 1920s and 30s, especially jazz and blues.