Catalog

All composers of vocal music struggle to find texts suitable for musical setting. The search for words that ignite invention, inspire harmony, dictate rhythm, and suggest texture - all the while submitting to purely musical exigencies of form - is a perpetual and integral part of the creative process. Though the songs on this CD focus specifically on manifestations of love - infatuation, passion, anxiety, fidelity, betrayal, delusion, loneliness and reminiscence - their texts come from a wide range of sources. The larger theme is nonetheless poignantly epitomized by a phrase from James Joyce, The Unquiet Heart, which tells of the unsettled, unnamable and unutterable sensations we all experience in our lifelong search for love. Karen Smith Emerson's extensive concert career has included performances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Boston Music Viva and the Marlboro Festival. Equally at home in music of the Baroque and early Classical music, she has performed leading roles in operas by Gluck, Handel and Mozart.

During one of his recital tours to Edinburgh during the 1860s and 1870s, Anton Rubinstein bluntly told Alexander Mackenzie Sie haben keine Komponisten (You [Britain] have no composers). From his account in his engaging memoir A Musician's Narrative (1927), Mackenzie apparently let the comment pass unanswered. After all, the Russian virtuoso was simply voicing a view widely heard in continental Europe - and even in Britain as well. Many years later, as he surveyed a career that had spanned six decades, Mackenzie noted with "many gleams of satisfaction" the number of important musicians and composers of high merit who had come along. In company with his slightly younger contemporaries, Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Edward Elgar, Mackenzie was himself part of the generation of musicians born in the mid-19th century who first demonstrated that Britain did have composers - and fine ones. Their successors - among them Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells and William Walton - completed the transformation of European opinion. Along with presenting a compilation of signal British contributions to the piano quartet repertoire, this set offers a sample of the music of some of the very composers who helped deliver British music from its lowly state as a source of jests to a place of international recognition and esteem.

Wayne Peterson's music is that of a composer who embraces and takes delight in the hands-on process of making music, especially as it relates to the combinations and interactions of various instruments and their sonic possibilities. In a very real sense the musical ideas appear to evolve naturally from these capabilities without in any way being limited by them. As he writes in the program notes for Duodecaphony for viola and cello, "I welcomed the opportunity to address anew the problems of melody, counterpoint, harmony and timbre as they applied to this somewhat restricted choice of strings." A winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral work The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark, Peterson's music is marked by a wonderful rhythmic fluidity, which derives from his experience as an accomplished jazz pianist. Perhaps most importantly, Wayne Peterson's musical language is at once sophisticated and direct in its approach to the listener; it never compromises its basic integrity. In his hands the instruments are agents of luminous beauty, beckoning us to even deeper aesthetic pleasures. Peterson's music can also be heard on TROY601, 689 and 766.

Any serious collector of wind ensemble music will be excited by this disc that offers the opportunity to hear a set of works that are probably unfamiliar to most of you; no Lincolnshire Posey this time! It's hard to believe that the modern wind ensemble of the kind that commissions and performs contemporary works has been around for barely sixty years. The tradition was started with the famed Eastman Wind Ensemble and now every major Conservatory and University probably has a performing group. Here's another: primarily made up of freshman and sophomores, New England Conservatory's Jordan Winds performs woodwind, brass and percussion repertoire from the Renaissance to the present day for octet to full wind ensemble. World premieres and important works that are sometimes neglected because of unusual instrumentation form an integral part of the group's Jordan Hall concerts. Under William Drury, the ensemble has given compelling performances of sophisticated contemporary music including Varese, Messiaen, Sapieyevski, Foss, Druckman, Burke, Schoenberg and Frank Zappa. Albany Records has made an ongoing commitment to this kind of music and we feel that this release is a major contribution to the wind discography!

Here is a brilliant new CD release by one of the masters of California's thriving new music scene...filled with melodic invention and fluid rhythmic tapestries, this is music of the Heart guided by a keen intelligence - Terry Riley. Howard Hersh was born in Santa Monica and studied piano and composition at Stanford University. Steeped in 20th century modernism, his music has expanded to embrace a variety of tonalities, dance rhythms and quotations, dramatic narratives and explorations of the social conscience. According to the composer, his work is driven by a search for "the nexus of musical abstraction and representational humanity." A recipient of grants and awards from organizations that include Meet the Composer, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the American Composers Forum and the Rex Foundation (the non-profit wing of The Grateful Dead), his works have been performed at Tanglewood, Grace Cathedral and throughout Europe. Together with his compositional work, Hersh has directed many new music groups, including Music Now and the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble, which he founded, and has served as Music Director of radio station KPFA-FM.

The Gondoliers, the sunniest of all the Savoy operas, was preceded by dissension and followed by the bitterest of quarrels between its collaborators. After Yeoman of the Guard (1888), Gilbert and Sullivan exchanged peevish letters, each accusing the other of swamping his efforts. D'Oyly Carte attempted to make peace between the two, and they began their new collaboration, in Gilbert's words, as "master and master -- and not as master and servant." (One wonders, in the latter, supposedly ideal, arrangement, just who was which!) During the premiere of The Gondoliers at the Savoy in London, on December 7, 1889, the demand for encores almost doubled the length of Act I. Critics praised not only the score and libretto, but also the lavish sets and costumes. This live performance is yet another feather in the cap of the Ohio Light Opera, which has been dedicated to producing and promoting the best of the traditional operetta repertoire for more than 25 years. This CD set, like so many others in the Ohio Light Opera/Albany series, will give the operetta aficionado a taste of what makes this company unique.

Robert Schumann was unwell in the years preceding the composition of Dichterliebe. The year 1840, however, proved to be one of unexpected delight. He was finally able to marry the woman he loved and coveted, Clara Wieck, the daughter of his former teacher, Friedrich Wieck, a musical icon in Leipzig. It seems odd, then, that after a five-year struggle to obtain the right to marry the woman he loved and the constant success of such works as Davidsbundertanze, Op. 6, Kinderszenen, Op. 15 and the song cycles Liederkreis, Op. 24 and Frauenliebe und Leben, Op. 42, he should turn to such a dark subject as the one presented in his sixteen-song cycle Dichterliebe, set to texts by the German poet Heinrich Heine. "A Poet's Love" is a murky tragedy with its early flourish of love, its eventual deterioration and the poet's despair of every loving again, even preferring death to a new attempt. American poet Elizabeth Kirschner, who teaches at Boston College and who has collaborated with many modern composers, has created a new set of texts for Dichterliebe, which breaks the cycle into four distinct sections of four songs each (Spring I-IV, Summer V-VIII, etc.). Kirschner has taken the "season of love" in the Heine poems and transformed them into a full year of desperation, elation, introspection and rejection. Soprano Jean Danton has performed widely on the opera, oratorio, musical theatre and concert stage, and has previously performed in the world premiere of Carson Cooman's Seducing Summer by the Sea, on a libretto by Elizabeth Kirschner.

Ross Bauer attended New England Conservatory and Brandeis, studying with John Heiss, Martin Boykan, Arthur Berger and Luciano Berio. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fromm Foundation commissions and a Koussevitzky commission. Bauer is a master composer of deeply expressive, highly charged music in a wide variety of genres. Throughout his works, whether they are orchestral, concerti with orchestra or chamber ensemble, or vocal or chamber music, his sense of form and instrumental writing is exquisitely idiomatic and his orchestration crystal clear and dazzling in its color. His vocal writing is particularly beautiful. He pays close attention to the meaning and sound of the texts that he sets, as well as to the formal implications of those texts. This CD, featuring music written in the 1990's for voice with instruments and for instruments alone, makes an excellent introduction to Ross Bauer's work, which traverses a wide range - from tender lyricism to tremendous ferocity. Bauer writes true chamber music in which every part is an essential element of an unfolding line and harmony. While the surface relationships may seem complex, the underlying harmony is always clear, and the pacing of that harmony masterful.

Ever since 16th century France the term tombeau (French for "tomb" or "tombstone") has denoted a set of poetic or musical compositions honoring the memory of a person, whether eminent or ordinary, real or imaginary. While the authorships of literary tombeaux were quite often collective, music tombeaux were usually created by individual composers and performers (i.e. Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin). It is no surprise that the death of the profoundly influential Claude Debussy (1862-1918) prompted Revue Musicale, a foremost music publication in Paris, to commission pieces from some leading European composers and performers, for a collection of works eulogizing the great composer. Each one of these musicians contributed to Tombeau in a unique and innately personal way, most of the works later becoming known as both individual pieces and parts of larger compositions). Encouraged by the success of Tombeau de Claude Debussy, Revue Musicale came up with another collection honoring the preeminent French composer and pedagogue Gabriel Faure (1845-1924). Composed by seven of Faure's best-known pupils (all French except for the Rumanian Enesco), the suite was completed and published by 1922, while the composer was still alive.

One of the most telling indications of a composer's worth in our glutted musical marketplace is the response of one's fellow music-makers: those who create it as well as those who perform it. And in this regard, Alla Borzova, a Russian-trained composer-pianist from Belarus, is fortunate to claim the global microcosm of New York as her adopted backyard. When a composer of exalted stature praises one's music, the informed public tends to take notice. And well they should, when a modern master like John Corigliano speaks of Borzova's "extraordinary voice" and her "arresting and dynamic" music. David del Tredici finds "genius" (it takes one to know one) and "huge emotional impact" in her work. This engaging CD, preserving some of Alla's finest smaller-scale creations, reveals her sponge-like knack for soaking up far-flung musical influences wherever she goes. Arabic flavors - complete with third-tones, vocal quavers and other idiomatic touches - help to bring out the stark tragedy and outright insanity of her lovelorn Majnun Songs. Her American exposure has left her with a new-found taste for American jazz, as heard in her Pinsk and Blue - an amazing piece for accordion and piano. It is not easy to pin Borzova down stylistically - you'll hear everything from unaffected folk-tunes to cunning and sophisticated tone-rows from her.

William Hill has been critically acclaimed as a composer, soloist, visual artist, recording artist and conductor. Currently he is Principal Timpanist with the Colorado Symphony and teaches composition and counterpoint at Denver University's Lamont School of Music. Mr. Hill has served as a composer with the Ohio Chamber Orchestra, National Music Festival, the Colorado and Denver Symphonies, and the Nova Series of Salt Lake City. On a trip with his wife Natalie to Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and observing the teeming water life, Natalie remarked, "Wow, check out those funky little crustaceans," and the inspiration for the first work was born, reflecting not only the literal ebbs and flows of the tides, but of the impact made on all creatures by the changes in season and the pacings of life in general. Aurora Borealis, featuring the renowned James J. Pellerite, is an impressionistic tone poem depicting the icy monochromatic stillness of the far North, with gradual hints of color developing into more subtle shadows of the spectrum as the piece evolves. Seven Abstract Miniatures is based on pen and ink sketches by the composer, and shows the interrelationships that can exist between music and art (such as Pictures at an Exhibition).

Robert Helps was one of the few musicians of the 20th century who identified himself as both a pianist and composer, a tradition of musical life that was more akin to previous centuries. To Helps, these dual facets of life were equally important and highly dependent on each other. As a teenager he studied piano with Abby Whiteside and composition with Roger Sessions. Helps often wrote about Whiteside's "outlining" or "the magic of rhythm:" the importance of feeling one's way through a piece not by individual notes, but by larger sections that draw one towards a much longer destination. And it was Sessions who jump-started Help's career as one of the leading American new music pianists of the 1940s and 1950s, when he handed Helps a copy of his From My Diary. Helps would eventually give the New York premiere of Sessions's Sonata No. 2. As a composer Helps forged his own way, identifying with no single style. His works have been described as neo-romantic and tonal, impressionistic, twelve-tone, and minimalist. Albany is proud to present this first volume of the complete works for solo piano as performed by Naomi Niskala, a pupil of Gilbert Kalish and Claude Frank. Helps did so much for American music with his classic recordings of the past forty years or so, and it's time to hear his own remarkable piano works in a complete edition.

As renowned trombonist James Pugh writes, "If there's anything (these works) have in common, it's that, while they can all be heard as serious works, they each contain elements of popular music of their time - they combine traditional classical elements with popular harmony and rhythm..."

Cyrille Rose was one of the most respected clarinet performers of the 19th century. A student of Hyacinthe Klose at the Paris Conservatory, he won the First Prize in clarinet in 1847. Rose taught there from 1876 to 1900. From 1857 to 1891 he served as clarinetist at the Paris Opera. Renowned especially for his insistence on careful phrasing, many of his students went on to win first prizes. Today, Rose is remembered for his series of clarinet etudes, most of them arrangements of earlier works for other instruments. This CD presents his best-known collection, the Thirty-Two Etudes. Rose based all but one of these studies on Franz Wilhelm Ferling's Forty-Eight Etudes for Oboe, Op. 31. He generally preserved the outline of Ferling's original etude, but transposed the key and made alterations at times in the melody, rhythm and articulations to render the pieces stylistically idiomatic for the clarinet. His goal was to develop control and good phrasing in the performer. They are in the keys of C, G, F, D, B-flat, A, E-flat, E, B, and D-flat Major, plus a, e, d, b, g and c minor. During his eleven years with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sean Osborn traveled throughout the United States and the world. He has also appeared as guest principal clarinet with the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Seattle Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra. Currently clarinet teacher at the University of Washington, he is also an award-winning composer.

The music of the outstanding American composer Peter Lieuwen has been described by The New York Times as "an attractive array of shimmering, shuddering sonorities." This recording explores 20 years of music-making in four different genres: large orchestra, small ensemble, solo concerto and chamber concerto.

A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for the opera The Crucible (TROY025-26), Robert Ward is one of the last of a great generation of American composers whose music is full of patriotic high spirits and optimism, with equal measures of warmth and heartfelt melody.

British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the son of an English mother, Alice Hare, and a Sierra Leonean father, David Hughes Taylor. Early in his life, Coleridge-Taylor's music education was directed by Colonel Herbert A. Walters, a fellow parishoner and choir member. After passing an audition for the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1890, Coleridge-Taylor studied composition with and became a protTgT of Charles Villiers Stanford. Coleridge-Taylor possessed extraordinary musical sensibilities, and his rise to credibility as a composer of note was at least partly the result of his Royal Academy pedigree. Arguably his greatest work was Hiawatha's Wedding Feast of 1898. What set him apart, of course, was his mixed heritage and his promotion of pan-Africanism, which sought to unify and uplift native Africans as well as those of the African Diaspora. Coleridge-Taylor would incorporate the indigenous music of Africans and African-Americans and sought the preservation of such music. This major piano cycle can best be summed up in the composer's own Forward to the published score: "What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk-music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies. The plan adopted has been almost without exception that of the Tema con Variazioni. The actual melody has in every case been inserted at the head of each piece as a motto. The music which follows is nothing more nor less than a series of variations built on said motto. Therefore my share in the matter can be clearly traced, and must not be confounded with any idea of "improving" the original material any more than Brahms' Variations on the Haydn Theme "improved" that."

Fetherolf's music has been premiered throughout the Americas and Europe. He writes, "I have a special love for the cello; I started life as a cellist. My first large orchestral work was a Concerto for Cello and Orchestra." His affinity for string instruments is beautifully demonstrated by the renowned members of the Gamavilla Quartet of Moravia.

Here's something both old and new for all you Gillis fans: Tulsa was one of the first pieces of Gillis to be recorded (in 1950) and those waiting for a modern recording will be thrilled by this. We also have the premiere recording of his optimistic, patriotic Symphony No. 3, the final part of a trilogy including Symphonies 1 and 2 (TROY888). This is a hybrid SACD release and will play on all compact disc players.

A graduate of UCLA, Don Ray is equally at home in the concert hall and the soundstage: you've heard his music on The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke and Hawaii Five-O. These two works are charming musical settings of the lives and times of his own ex-homesteader.

Armand Qualliotine was born in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of seven he started his instructions in Jazz Guitar and Electric Bass as well as Music Theory. In 1967 he began his studies of Classical Guitar and Music Theory at Hofstra University. After earning degrees in composition and theory from the Hartt College of Music, SUNY at Stony Brook and Brandeis University, his post-doctoral activities included studying with Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt. He has taught guitar, theory, history and composition at Stony Brook, Northeastern University, Brandeis and the Berklee College of Music where is now an Associate Professor of Composition. Awards in his field have included residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Composers Conference and the Tanglewood Music Center where he was the Leonard Bernstein fellow in composition. He also received the C.D. Jackson Award for outstanding achievement as a composer, First Prize in the Boston ISCM Composition Competition, commissions from Harvard's Fromm Music Foundation, the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players and a 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2004 he was nominated to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Gerald Levinson was raised in Connecticut and has been increasingly recognized as one of the major composers of his generation. His principal teachers were George Crumb, George Rochberg and Richard Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania, and Ralph Shapey at the University of Chicago. This is the second Albany CD devoted to the music of Gerald Levinson, following TROY742, a collection of three chamber-orchestra works released in 2005. Critic Paul Griffiths has written, "What must thrill anyone who comes into contact with Gerald Levinson's music is its sheer joy in sound, and the decisiveness with which it sings or dances its way through time...In sympathy with sound, in sympathy with time, Levinson's music is close to the natural phenomena on which all music depends. Two things spring from this. One is that his music can easily evoke other natural phenomena: the sea, the stars, rugged landscapes. The other is that this music is in tune with other kinds of music from around the world. Levinson's resources are classical western: he writes for the symphony orchestra, for the piano, and for chamber groupings of conventional instruments. His disciplines, too, are those of the western tradition. But the east was present in his music even before his first trip there. His works, right through his career so far, exist on companionable terms with Mahler's music and with Bali's, with Ravel's and with Japan's, with Messiaen's and with India's, with Stravinsky's and with China's, with America's symphonic tradition and with Tibet's slow melody. Out of all this he is creating, piece by piece, a world of his own."

This CD showcases works by five living American composers born between 1951 and 1977. A thread binds the pieces together, for each work was written in response to significant outside influences: Irish folk music, the environment, or literature. All of the music was written specifically for the duo of Wolfgang David and David Gompper.

Receiving its first commercial recording in 40 years, Sessions'work is a masterpiece, worthy of comparison to the Alban Berg Concerto. Bolle describes his work as "a group of fragments, some tiny, some larger, which are meant to be heard as a sequence...a ritual/processional that is both a public and private matter."

Ezra Laderman is one of the last of that great generation of composers who first made a mark in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These are recent pieces, B'Shert having been written for Hsu. As she writes, The Sonata No. 3 is a spectacular work, with a depth that is both despairing and sublime! Since making her stage debut at age four, Hsing-ay Hsu has performed at such notable venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, Weill Recital Hall and abroad in Asia and Europe. Born in Beijing, Hsu began piano lessons with her parents, and later studied with Fei-Ping Hsu, Herbert Stessin at Juilliard, and Claude Frank at Yale. This recording adds to the comprehensive discography of Laderman's chamber works.

Composers since the 16th century have reveled in writing sets of variations, exploring the wealth of possibilities in a pre-composed theme, often a hymn-tune. The pipe organ is the perfect candidate for presenting these variations not only because of its connection to the church and hymn singing but because of the myriad variety of colors and textures it offers. Canadian-born Maragaret Kvamme's unique program shows off the organ as the ideal medium for this kind of music. Ms. Kvamme, first-prize winner of the 1993 Naples International Organ Festival Competition, has performed extensively throughout the Bay Area, in Michigan, New York, Arizona, and Ontario, Canada. She has appeared on the "Distinguished Women at the Console" Series in Akron, Ohio. Ms. Kvamme performed this recording on the Felgemaker Organ Opus 506 built in 1889, Holy Cross Church, Santa Cruz, California.

"First Takes" features world premiere recordings of four new works by outstanding American composers from the younger generation: Chris Theofanidis; Paul Moravec; Lisa Bielawa; and Michael Gatonska, beautifully performed by the String Orchestra of New York City (SONYC). SONYC was founded in 1999 and is already acclaimed as one of the leading ensembles in New York City. Performing without a conductor, the individual members each have an impact on the artistic process. Whether performing standard repertoire or the kind of new music on this CD, SONYC strives to inspire and educate its audiences.

Roberto Sierra's Sinfonias burst with color and excitement, mixing popular and classical idioms, reflecting his Puerto-Rican heritage. As he writes, "That is how I hear music: in Technicolor, not black and white. It's not only timbre, it's harmony! I believe that different colors have different emotions." Currently serving as Old Dominion Professor of Composition at Cornell University, Sierra was composer-in-residence with the Milwaukee Symphony from 1989-1992 and with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2000-2001. His three symphonies constitute a revealing window into his evolution as an orchestral composer.

A student of Lukas Foss and Lejaren Hiller, Horwood writes music with an individual stamp, drawing from academic or popular styles, or ranging from Romantic yearnings to avant-garde experimentation. Born in Buffalo, Horwood studied composition and theory at the State University of New York at Buffalo. From 1972-2003 he was a professor of music and humanities at Humber College of applied Arts and Technology in Toronto. His more than 70 compositions constitute a kaleidoscope of the traditional and the avant-garde. His music has been performed in North America, Europe and Japan. The four orchestral works on this CD provide a concert program revealing a composer of substantial musical thought.

Along with his brother, the symphonist Adolfs Skulte (1909-2000), Bruno Skulte represented a bridge between the Romantic era and the blooming of modern Latvian music. After arriving in the U.S. in 1949 he devoted his energies to Latvian music festivals and choir directing. This nationalistic opera was one of his crowning achievements, and we are proud to present this first recording.

Founded in 1998, the Equinox Chamber Players Ensemble is one of St. Louis' most dynamic musical groups. They celebrate community life by performing commissioned works inspired by environmental surroundings, historical and present day culture, and everyday heroes. They have appeared on PBS and NPR and have performed for thousands of adults and students. Members of Equinox include Paula Kasica, flute; Jeanine York-Garesch, clarinet; Ann Homann, oboe; Donia Bauer, bassoon; and Carole Lemire, horn.

Award-winning flutist Jan Vinci presents a wonderfully diverse program of works from around the world, in all styles and moods. As she writes, "My hope is that this eclectic program of rare gems and premieres will exude passion, create intrigue and fascinate both audiences and performers." First Prizewinner of England's International Performance Competition, Jan Vinci has performed at Alice Tully, Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall and Symphony Space, to mention only a few of the worldwide venues where she has given concerts. With a chamber music career spanning more than 20 years, Ms. Vinci performs with Iridescence (flute and harp duo) and Tritonis (flute, guitar and cello). She has commissioned over 15 works and appears on Five Premieres: Chamber Works with Guitar (Albany Records). Dr. Vinci is Senior Artist-in-Residence at Skidmore College. She holds a D.M.A. from The Juilliard School, an M.M. from Cleveland Institute of Music, and a B.M. from Bowling Green State University.