Catalog

The eminent violinist Andrés Cárdenes offers a world premiere recording of David Stock's Violin Concerto, written for and premiered by him, as well as Aaron Copland's Violin Sonata arranged by Gerald Elias for violin and chamber orchestra along with a staple of the repertoire, Barber's violin concerto. Mr. Cárdenes holds the Rachel Mellon Walton Endowed Concertmaster Chair of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, teaches at Indiana University and maintains an active career as a soloist.

Originally from Texas, Turner has resided in Luxembourg for more than 25 years. He is a member of the world-famous American Horn Quartet and a member of the Luxembourg Philharmonic. Turner has been composing since the age of 10. His principal successes as a composer have been in the chamber music genre, more specifically for brass. The works recorded here were all composed by Kerry Turner in the mid-1990s and represent four of his major works Ñ in gorgeous surround sound.

Born in Illinois, conductor/composer James Bolle studied at Harvard, Aspen, Antioch and Northwestern University. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by both Franklin Pierce and Notre Dame Colleges. Bolle studied composition with Darius Milhaud and conducting with Richard Lert. His music has been performed in the United States, Israel and Canada. He founded Monadnock Music in 1966 and was music director of the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra for 28 years. He has recorded for Musical Heritage, Monitor, Titanic, Serenus, CRI, Gasparo, Koch International and Albany Records.

The extraordinary tubist Timothy Buzbee presents a program of new works by American composers for tuba and orchestra. The oldest work was written in 1978 (Broughton) and the most recent in 2004 (York). Buzbee has held principal tuba positions with the Acapulco Philharmonic, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Gavle Symphony and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. He has toured throughout the United States, Europe, Mexico, Japan and most of Asia giving master classes and performing recitals. He has recorded for BIS, Chandos, Naxos, Sony and Albany Records.

This third recording of the Argentinian composer Florencio Asenjo's music to appear on Albany Records can be described as predominantly "night music," a meditative kind suitable to the dreamy tales selected from The Thousand and One Nights and Don Quijote, with the Sinfonia Concertante as an appropriate nocturnal interlude. Asenjo's music is written in the maximalist style Ñ meaning that his compositions are based on the creation of sequences of themes that, taken in succession, are each a development of the preceding music.

Although still in his early thirties, the Thai-born composer Narong Prangcharoen has established an international reputation and is recognized as one of Thailand's leading composers. He has received many international prizes, including the Alexander Zemlinsky International Composition Competition Prize. Prangcharoen's earliest composition studies were in Thailand. He later studied at Illinois State University and at the University of Missouri in Kansas City with Chen Yi. This recording contains his better-known works and offers a snapshot of this young composer's gift.

A stunning program of works for soloists with wind ensemble is presented in this recording made by the University of Arizona Wind Ensemble. Acclaimed saxophonist Timothy McAllister performs a work by Daniel McCarthy inspired by the funk-horn band, Tower of Power. Brian Luce, a superlative flutist, performs in one of a handful of works written for flute with wind ensemble, while the great Jonathan Haas is joined by timpanist Gary Cook in performing Glass' work for 14 timpani with wind ensemble, creating a new sound out of the incredibly large sonorities.

World premiere recordings of Symphony No. 2 and the Quintet highlight this compact disc of the esteemed Robert Helps' compositions. Conductor William Wiedrich thinks of Helps as a "romantic renegade." Each work on the recording has a truly unique and emotional bent that speaks deeply and meaningfully to the heart and soul.

Roberto Sierra notes in his comments that "The unifying factor of all the works on this CD is that in one way or another they relate to variation form, as is the case of Antonio Soler's Fandango. This work from the Spanish Baroque has always fascinated me for its strange and whimsical twists and turns. My Fandangos is an orchestral fantasy that takes as a point of departure Soler's piece." Sierra's Reflections on a Souvenir and Variations on a Souvenir both take as their inspiration Gottschalk's Souvenir de Porto Rico. Ian Hobson serves as both pianist and conductor for these inspired performances.

The Moores School (University of Houston) Percussion Ensemble was established in 1997 and is directed by Blake Wilkins. The Ensemble's selection as a Winner in the 2003 Percussive Arts Society Percussion Ensemble Competition and is appearance at the International Convention established its reputation as a leader in percussion performance. The Ensemble was again selected as a Winner for 2006. Under Wilkin's leadership, the Ensemble has emerged as a leader in the promotion and performance of new music. In 2002 a commissioning series was begun to encourage new works for the medium. Since the inception of this project, the Ensemble has commissioned six composers, some of whose works are heard on this recording -- the second made by the Ensemble for Albany Records.

Julius P. Williams is an award-winning conductor, composer, recording artist, educator, author and artistic director. A prolific composer, Williams has created dozens of works for virtually every genre of contemporary classical performance. His film score for Lifetime TV's Fighting for our Future won the Gracie Allen Documentary Award in 2003. Williams included the composition by Joe Westmoreland (Somewhere Far Away) as a tribute to him and to his mentor Coleridge Taylor Perkinson, who orchestrated Westmoreland's work.

The orchestral works on this CD of world premiere recordings incorporate a wealth of compositional techniquesÑarchaic, arcane and contemporary. These works constitute a cross section of musical perspectives that can also be found in his chamber works. The focus on creating relationships that have direction and dimensionality distinguishes these scores from other trends embraced in the 20th century. Unique to all these works is an harmonic vocabulary imbedded into a formal organization that is precise, logical and certainly not academic in the current sense.

All of the pieces on this recording tell a story in one way or another. Some are narrative while others are programmatic or cinematic. Visual imagery, both imaginative and concrete is also part of the fabric of these works. These two elements have been part of several of Raymond Wojcik's works written throughout his creative life and they are brought together here for his second recording with Albany Records. Composer, conductor, and educator Raymond Wojcik received degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver and has served as conductor of the Garden State Philharmonic and the Brunswick Symphony. David Schiff, composer and writer notes: "At a time of technical gimmicks and stylistic uncertainty, Raymond Wojcik writes music from the heart that speaks directly to an audience in a distinctive voice."

What more could an advocate for American music want? This recording combines neglected works by well-known masters (Roy Harris' Symphony No. 11 and Gould's Cowboy Rhapsody) with masterful works by composers whose names may be unfamiliar (Douglas Moore's and Cecil Effinger's Symphonies). World premiere recordings that taken together make up as fresh, finely balanced and excitingly diverse a concert program as one could wish.

The music on this disc came to be out of a unique collaboration between three artists spanning three generations: José Limon, Jon Magnussen and Carla Maxwell, the artistic director for the Limón Dance Company. After Limón's death, the ballet Winged was revived. There was a need for a new score and Magnussen was chosen from a pool of graduate students at Juilliard to write the music. Because that collaboration proved so successful, Carla Maxwell asked Magnussen to write a new score for Psalm when she revived the dance.

This recording of music by Peter Boyer centers around a commission by conductor Lawrence Golan to write a work to be performed in concert immediately following Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony. The idea was that the new work, while not intended to be in the style of Tchaikovsky, would share some musical material so as to be intrinsically connected to it and find a natural place in concert programming. Peter Boyer, born in 1970, received his D.M.A. from the Hartt School. He studied with John Corigliano, then relocated to Los Angeles where he studied film music with Elmer Bernstein. His music has received more than 200 performances by 70 orchestras. His major work Ellis Island: The Dream of America received a Grammy Award nomination.

From the well-known (Ran, Adler, Daugherty) to the less well-known (Bryant, Ruo, Ross), this series continues to offer music of distinction and variety with comments by each of the composers preceding the actual performance. The works evoke programmatic concepts, particularly Shulamit Ran's Vessels of Courage and Hope, inspired by the tragic story of the voyage of the SS. President Warfield (Exodus 1947) during World War II. The ship carried Jewish Holocaust refugees who were refused permission to land in Palestine and were forcibly returned to Germany.

Florencio Asenjo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is best known for his approach to composing called "maximalism," the objective of which was to achieve a high density of content in constant change: he decided to base his composing on the creation of sequences of themes that, taken in succession, were each a development of the preceding music. Again, this was not to be a formal development, or a variation on previous themes, but the creation of entirely new themes connected aesthetically to the preceding ones, a development of substance rather than of form, just as the various characters in a play do not repeat the same sentences over and over again except for special purposes; rather, each rejoins the preceding dialogue to take it further, while retaining the continuity of meaning and atmosphere. But please note: the result is not an avant-garde exercise. This is very colorful music, full of rich atmosphere and drama, upholding the traditions started by his fellow countrymen, such as Alberto Ginastera.

Lee Actor's career as a software engineer and a musician began in Albany, New York: for several years he was a violinist in the Albany Symphony Orchestra while completing an advanced engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy. After moving to California in the late 1970s, he studied with Brent Heisinger, Charles Jones and the late Andrew Imbrie. Actor's music is filled with rhythmic drive and shows a superb ear for orchestral color. Often he builds up a work by emphasizing one or another of the instrumental families Ð woodwinds, brass and strings Ð then mixes them in a rich impasto of orchestral color. In the process he creates music that catches the ear and draws the listener into a world of emotion and drama. All of these recent works are a perfect showcase of his distinct range and style.

Created by conductor Frederick Harris, Jr., in the fall of 1999, the MIT Wind Ensemble is comprised of MIT undergraduate and graduate students studying a wide variety of fields including Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and related fields for which MIT is world-famous. The central mission of the MIT Wind Ensemble is the enhancement of the musical education and artistic sensitivity of its members through large and small wind ensemble performances of music of diverse styles from the 16th century to the present day. A secondary mission is the creation and nurturing of new music, such as the recent works on this disc that vary considerably in style and aesthetic ideas. Since 2001 the Ensemble has commissioned 18 original works by Boston-based and nationally recognized composers such as Gunther Schuller, John Harbison, Ran Blake (best-known as a third-stream artist) and Joe Lovano.

In the far corner of every concert stage, there is an area reserved for the back row of the orchestra. This zone — between the timpani and the double basses — is home to the low-brass section, comprised normally of two tenor trombones, a bass trombone and tuba. Although integral to the symphony orchestra, the low-brass section is seldom featured, and this recording is an opportunity for the listener to discover the special sounds and characteristics of this group. This album consists primarily of chamber music, some of which was composed specifically for this instrumental combination. Also featured are innovative arrangements of piano and non-brass chamber music, and short excerpts from the orchestral repertoire. This is the music the PSO members perform on a weekly basis, and which forms the foundation of their approach to sound and ensemble.

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

A student of Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Druckman and William Thomas McKinley, Meira Warshauer has devoted much of her creative output to Jewish themes and their universal message. As she writes, “The Torah, Jewish teaching and tradition, is likened to water. It is the source of blessing and goodness, filling all who drink from its well with the knowledge of God. I hope this recording will help to satisfy our thirst and encourage us to continue opening our hearts to the Eternal Spirit in each of us.”

Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Silesia, Frank Lewin emmigrated to the United States in 1940. His easily recognizable lean and spare instrumental style has been showcased on several Albany releases in recent years; the 2-CD set of film music (TROY866/67) gave a good indication of his work for various ensembles. This is the first release of his purely orchestral work. The Concerto on Silesian Themes is born of material that is obviously close to the composer's heart and mind. The Concerto Armonico has an interesting history: originally composed for the harmonica of the late John Sebastian, the work was never performed. Then it was revised for the present viola soloist, Brett Deubner. The final work was written for the tenth anniversary of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in 1960.

The very nature of this disc is appealingly old-fashioned: a collection of works that reveal the composers' innermost feelings about distinctly American places. For example, Lee McQuillan's Sweet Home Suite is inspired by his hometown, Middletown, Connecticut and its people and geography. A more wistful approach is taken by Christopher Montgomery in the second half of Two Cities: the idea that unless New Orleans is relocated to higher ground, then the city might be completely submerged in the future -- akin to the ancient legend of Atlantis. And the veteran Chicago composer, Helmuth Fuchs, pays homage to the Second City in his Chicago Fantasie Overture.

Shulamit Ran, probably the most significant Israeli composer since her teacher Paul Ben-Haim to receive wide, international recognition, came to this country in her teens and continued her studies with Norman Dello-Joio. In 1973 she joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. From 1990-1997 she was composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At this time she won the Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony (1990). Her music is marked by a strong sense of lyricism underpinned by dramatic, colorful contrasts and powerful orchestration. "Legends" was written in celebration of the twin centennials of the University of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony, and Albany Records is proud to present this live performance by this great orchestra. The Violin Concerto, as she puts it, "explores certain facets of what, for me, is the violin's complex personality, or 'soul'." It was written for the performer on this disc, Israeli violinist Ittai Shapira.

The repertoire alone - featuring the first commercial recording of the Piston Variations and the elegant Evett Concerto - is enticing enough. But there's much more. Luis Leguia, the veteran cellist of the Boston Symphony (since 1963) is also an inventor and here he performs on his unique Luis & Clark Carbon Fiber Cello, an instrument that has received exceptional praise from critics and musicians.

This is the first major release devoted to the African-American composer Ulysses Kay. Encouraged by William Grant Still, he would study under Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at Eastman, and his works are distinctively American in spirit and strength. Of special interest is his music to The Quiet One, one of the first major film scores by a Black composer.

The versatile and enterprising Paul Freeman, Julia Bentley, Mary Jane Johnson and Louise Toppin here introduce four works for soprano voice and orchestra, pieces which are thoroughly modern yet continue the grand tradition of the concert aria. Robert Lombardo received his master’s degree in composition from the Hartt School of Music. Aria Variata was commissioned by the Chicago String Ensemble and its director, Alan Heatherington. A native of Texas, James Gardner studied under Anshel Brusilow and Peter Herman Adler. Scene for a Diva expressly pays homage to the kind of concert aria composed by Mozart, written as if it were an actual opera aria, complete with dramatic recitativo and cantabile sections. David Baker is Distinguished Professor of Music and Chairman of the Jazz Department at the Indiana University School of Music. Witness was commissioned by Philip Brunelle for the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota’s 1990-1991 season. They represent the composer’s reverent treatment of heartfelt and timeless spiritual texts. Another distinguished African-American composer, Hale Smith grew up performing both classical and jazz music. He chose these particular Four Negro Spirituals because he was deeply moved by the zeal of the songs. As an outstanding composer and arranger he has captured the essence of these songs with his brilliant orchestration.

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 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.

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.