Catalog

This recording of world premieres commissioned and performed by the Texas Christian University Percussion Ensemble is highlighted by Eric Ewazen's Symphony for Percussion Ñ a joyful celebration of the world of percussion with its kaleidoscope of colors and expressive possibilities. Conductor Brian A. West has developed a percussion program at TCU that is recognized for excellence in performance and education. Under his leadership, the TCU Percussion Ensemble has twice won the Percussive Arts Society International Percussion Ensemble Competition. A fascinating exploration of new works for percussion ensemble.

Described by the Chicago Tribune as "an ensemble that invites you--ears, mind, and spirit--into its music," the Avalon String Quartet has established itself as one of the country's leading ensembles. Formed in 1995 at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Quartet came to the fore after participating in Isaac Stern's Chamber Music Workshop at Carnegie Hall in 1997. As a result, Mr. Stern invited the Avalon Quartet to perform in the Isaac Stern Chamber Music Encounters in Jerusalem and presented the ensemble's Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall. The quartet captured the top prize at the ARD Competition in Munich (2000) as well as the First Prize at Concert Artists Guild Competition in New York (1999). The quartet is in residence at Northern Illinois University. Their recording on Channel Classics won the Chamber Music America/WQXR Record Award in 2002.

Victoria Bond is the only woman composer/conductor to receive commissions from major organizations and also hold music director positions with leading ensembles. Her extensive catalog includes works written for the Houston, Shanghai, and Richmond Symphony Orchestras, the Saint Paul and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestras, American Ballet Theater, Pennsylvania Ballet and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. This recording highlights some of her enchanting music, including Bridges, a work for two clarinets and two Chinese instruments, the Erhu and the Pipa.

Performing his own music for piano on this recording, Gary Smart considers himself an improvising composer-pianist who finds ideas at the keyboard and works them out in an active engagement with the instrument. Smart contends that the piano can create subtle and complex orchestral textures, wonderful tonal variations and most of all -- the piano can sing. This recording adds to his discography on Albany Records. Previous recordings include a disc of sonatas, one of rags and one of songs.

William Appling, who died in 2008, felt that the music of Joplin and Bach were perfect compliments to each other. He was passionate to have people hear that the two composers were comparable in the caliber of their work. Bach wrote tightly structured works within the baroque style and his music became more complex over time. Joplin worked the tightly structured rag style, developing and expanding it throughout his career. Both stylistically created music having melodies within melodies. These were two geniuses writing at the highest level and thus the idea for a recording pairing the music of both was born. Those people who heard William Appling play knew that his gifts as a pianist were equal to those as a conductor, teacher and mentor. This recording is a small sample of his genius.

Gilbert & Sullivan's hilarious 1887 Gothic comic opera, complete with dialogue and music, was recorded at the 2009 Festival of the Ohio Light Opera. Originally titled Ruddygore, the name, which meant bloody gore, gave offense at the premiere and the more acceptable Ruddigore was substituted. Cat-calls sayings "Give us back the Mikado" during the bows prompted a substantial reworking of the action. Despite the initial reception, the show ran for almost 300 performances. The score, full of ingratiating melodies, also boasts some novel touches as well as the usual comic patter songs and tuneful ballads. The extraordinary music for the ghosts in Act II represents Sullivan at his most inspired.

The story of the wide-eyed lad from Kansas City who became the toast of Paris via Harvard, one of America's most influential music critics from his decades' long perch at the New York Herald Tribune and a truly unique and productive composer, is almost hackneyed now, but still bears that "only in America" cachet. It was as a long-term resident of the Chelsea Hotel in New York that Gregg Smith and his Singers got to know the redoubtable Virgil in the later decades of his long life (born in 1896, he died at the age of 92 in 1989.) The present CD is an offering of gratitude for Virgil's support and friendship, as well as a concise overview of his work in the choral field--along with a brief excursion into his solo output.

Rarely has a composer exhibited such an extraordinarily heightened awareness of the very details of music-making, every physical, acoustic and emotional gesture of performance, painstakingly arrived at and indicated with astonishing clarity in the score. Nuance -- that is what Donald Martino wished to capture in his music and to pass on -- it's the demand he makes of the performer and it's the poignant, comprehensive, detailed world that draws the listener in. The ultimate result is a musical intimacy of great and intricate energy. Some of the best performers of 20th and 21st century music offer beautiful performances of this great composer's music.

The music of Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991) is often framed as a bridge between East and West. Upheld as a central figure in the musical life of the Turkish Republic, Saygun represents a nationalistic stance based on an embrace of European compositional models combined with an appreciation for Turkish traditional music, particularly folk sources from Anatolia. The distinguished pianist Kathryn Woodard offers a fascinating and sympathetically performed program of his music for that instrument.

Composer/pianist Ketty Nez joined the composition and theory department at the Boston University School of Music in the fall of 2005. Ms. Nez completed a residence of several months at the École Nationale de Musique in Montbéliard, France, prior to the premiere of her chamber opera An Opera in Devolution: Drama in 540 Seconds, at the 2003 Seventh Festival Avantgarde in Munich. She comments: "The five recent chamber works on this recording, Postcards from the 1930's, timed curves, between, before, and wind down ii, were written for myself to play, and were composed after moving to Boston in 2005 to start teaching at Boston University while the most recent work on this recording, and marking a departure of sorts, Postcards from the 1930's was the byproduct of my everlasting curiosity for the sounds and rhythms of my own ethnic backgrounds, a mixture of Slovenian and Slavic Macedonian.

Lawrence Dillon is best known for his chamber music, with commissions, performances and recordings by the American, Borromeo, Cassatt, Daedalus, Emerson and Mendelssohn String Quartets; this recording is the first to feature some of his many works combining words and music. Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Dillon began composing at the age of seven, despite the complete loss of hearing in one of his ears due to a childhood illness. Appendage and Other Stories is a collection of Dillon's works that combine words and music. Entrance and Exit use spoken text, Still Point is sung and Appendage alternates between spoken and sung text.

This selection of piano music by Henry Martin composed between 1980 and 2007 has a place within both the composer's broader work and the literature for piano to which it makes a valuable contribution. Over the years, Martin has composed for chorus, orchestra, string quartet, various smaller ensembles, and solo instruments; but many of his works involve the piano, and about a score of them are for solo piano. All facets of Martin's life (pianist, music theorist, educator) come through in this music that is so beautifully performed by the noted pianist Hilary Demske. The listener to these pieces can look forward to rewards for the heart as well as the mind.

Pianist and composer Yvar Mikhashoff had an international performing career that led him to promote new music and American music around the world. He organized many festivals and broadcasts throughout the world, notably at the Almeida Theater in London and De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam. Mikhashoff was one of the founders of the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo and its co-director, with Jan Williams, for 11 years. The Canadian pianist Winston Choi offers splendid performances of Mikhashoff's Elemental Figures and Ravel's Gaspard. The parallel design of Ravel's work and Mikhashoff's is multi-faceted and extensive. Both are trilogies that are associated with poetry and the tempos and the structure of both works are similar.

Gregory Fritze is a prize-winning composer, Fulbright Scholar and an active performer, conductor and educator and is chair of the composition department at Berklee College of Music. His passion for the tuba has inspired numerous compositions and this recording features his music for that instrument performed by Gary Bird, the retired professor emeritus of music at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and friends. The works range from tuba duets to a concertino for tuba and orchestra.

This recording offers a tantalizing sampling of Morton Gould's work from the vibrant decade of the mid 1930s and '40s, featuring two of his trademark Symphonettes, the gutsy Concerto for Orchestra and his earliest big orchestral work -- Chorale and Fugue in Jazz -- presented in full for the first time since its 20-year-old composer wrote it with Interplay, the diminutive concerto holding center stage.

Donald Reid Womack is the composer of more than 80 works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voice. He received a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship to live and work in Japan. His work with Japanese and other Asian instruments has placed him at the vanguard of East-West cross-cultural fertilization and has enabled him to make a significant contribution to the body of new literature for Asian instruments, both alone and in combination with Western instruments. His music combines a rich tonal language with an intricate use of color and texture and an exploration of multiple perceptions of rhythm.

The Ibis Camerata consists of four internationally acclaimed musicians of the new generation. Their unique ensemble of violin, cello, clarinet and piano enables them to command a much more varied repertoire than the traditional piano trio. Avid supporters of new music, the Ibis Camerata concentrates on Boston composers for their third recording on Albany Records. All of the composers have a relationship to the New England Conservatory, either as former students or as faculty and administrators.

This recording, a collection of performances by some of the most celebrated performers of our time that Leon Kirchner considered extraordinary, continues the series on Albany Records devoted to this distinguished composer's music. Leon Kirchner, who died in December of 2009, performed regularly both as a pianist and conductor, but was always first and foremost, a composer. He left a legacy of masterworks and made an indelible mark on the history of contemporary music.

The most recent work on this recording, the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, was completed in 2008 and features the composer's son as soloist. The composer observes that "The special qualities of all of the works on this cd are captured skillfully by the conductor Ian Hobson and the Sinfonia Varsovia." This recording is the second volume on Albany Records that features this esteemed composer's orchestral music.

Featuring performances by Grammy Award winners Gloria Cheng, Masumi Rostad (Pacifica Quartet) and Oto Carillo (Chicago Symphony), the four pieces on this recording are all inspired by our relation to the world, both natural and invented. The Machine Awakes is about technology and where it's leading our spirit. Seven Memorials is inspired by Maya Lin's elegy to our planet; Quark Shadows and Nebulae are about the world untouched by us. Stephen Andrew Taylor, born in 1965, teaches music at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Japanese-American composer Asako Hirabayashi writes: "After 150 years' absence, there has been a vigorous revival of interest in and compositions for the harpsichord. To address the lack of music for harpsichord as a solo instrument, I started to write my own pieces." The recording was made at St. Bridget's church in rural Johnson County, Iowa. The harpsichord is a French double manual after Peter Taskin, built by Eizo Hori in 1986.

The three concertos on this recording are representative of a contemporary renaissance in concerto writing. The challenge for composers is how to tackle the range of technical and expressive problems. Ross Bauer, Steven Burke and Martin Matalon have each responded to that question with music that is fresh, imaginative, technically brilliant and dramatically convincing. Though not one of the works actually bears the title, each is a true concerto, albeit in a recognizably contemporary way.

For more than 40 years, Lynn Klock has been an enthusiastic participant in new music for the saxophone. He has premiered more than 50 compositions written for and dedicated to him and this cd of world premiere recordings highlights this aspect of his career. All of the compositions on the cd are the result of friendships and musical collaborations between the composer and Mr. Klock and were written specifically for Klock or one of his students.

The Chicago Trombone Consort was formed in 2008 as a creative outlet for some of the top professional trombonists in Chicago. As a diverse collection of musicians in a city with a rich and storied brass tradition, their mission is to explore new avenues of trombone music in a variety of ensemble situations. This debut recording of the CTC presents a varied repertoire including well-known works for brass, several new critical editions, an outstanding fantasy suite from Strauss’ Alpine Symphony and an exciting new work by American composer Rob Deemer. Lovers of brass music are sure to enjoy the Chicago sound!

Most of the music on this recording honors artists whose works are going or have gone, and each work is either a song or composition in the lyrical mode. The compositions celebrate the work of departed masters--Yehuda Amichai, Gyögy Ligeti, Johannes Brahms and Willie Dixon (among others) and the title honors the last album recorded by Walter Becker and Donald Fagin of Steely Dan. The distinguished American composer Martin Bresnick's compositions are performed throughout the world and he is the recipient of many prizes and commissions including The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many others. Recognized as in influential composition teacher, Martin Bresnick is a member of the faculty at Yale University's School of Music.

The cycle of birth, death, experience, and the renewal of life can be found in varying degrees as the inspiration for several of the works on this recording, and in some cases, their reinterpretations. This recording highlights the diversity and creativity that can be found in the music of these distinguished American composers. The music is brought to life through the exquisite performances of Jonathan Keeble and Ann Yeung. Their collaboration as a flute/harp duo since 2002 has led them to venues in Asia, Europe and throughout North America.

A cycle based on folk material for flute and guitar by Robert Beaser, a commissioned song cycle by David Liptak based on the poetry of Homero Aridjis for soprano, flute and guitar, plus the ever popular Histoire du Tango by Astor Piazzolla are given exquisite performances by flutist Bonita Boyd and guitarist Nicholas Goluses with Kathryn Lewek, soprano on this recording of Songs & Dances of the Americas. The Boyd/Goluses Duo has received much acclaim, the two members breathing new fire into a rich repertoire for flute and guitar, as well as an artistic vision that embraces support for new repertoire.

American composer, cellist, and arranger Alan Shulman (1915-2002) made a distinct and significant contribution to American music. He was a fellowship student at the Juilliard School studying both cello (with Felix Salmond) and composition (with Bernard Wagenaar.) He then continued his studies on cello with Emanuel Feuermann and in composition with Paul Hindemith. Shulman had a significant career as cellist, teacher, arranger and, of course, composer. He performed extensively as cellist of the Kreiner, Stuyvesant, and Haydn String Quartets, the Philharmonia and Vardi Trios, with An Die Musik, and as a charter member of both the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini and the Symphony of the Air. Shulman was a notable and active teacher for many decades. Primarily know for his Theme and Variations for Viola and Orchestra, his body of fine solo cello literature is virtually unknown today. This recording intends to begin raising awareness of this important music.

The distinguished composer/conductor David Stock is Professor Emeritus of Music at Duquesne University, where he conducted the Duquesne Contemporary Ensemble. He has been Composer-in-Residence of the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Seattle Symphony, and is Conductor Laureate of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, which he founded in 1976. He retired as Music Director of PNME at the end of the 1998/99 season, after 23 years of dedication to new music and the living composer. His compositions have been performed throughout the world and he is the recipient of many awards, honors and commissions. This recording of his last three quartets includes one commissioned by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano (the Seventh), who have been an integral part of Stock's musical universe for the past two decades.

Jorge Elias Variego is a clarinetist and composer born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1975. He holds a Bachelors Degree from Universidad Nacional de Rosario and a Masters Degree from Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied with Michael Rusinek and Leonardo Balada. He has performed as soloist with the most renowned orchestras in Argentina and his works have been performed throughout the world. This recording features Variego performing all the clarinet parts in works written for a variety of clarinet configurations and ensembles.

Mallarmé Chamber Players, the distinguished ensemble based in Durham, North Carolina presents a program of chamber music by African American composers. Spanning several generations of composers, the recording includes works by Undine Smith Moore (1904-1989); Thomas Jefferson Anderson (b. 1928); William Banfield (b. 1961) and Anthony Kelley (b. 1965). Six-time Grammy Award-nominee Nnenna Freelon joins Mallarmé to perform Soul Gone Home by William Banfield, which, along with Grist for the Mill by Anthony Kelley, was commissioned by the ensemble. You can go to this link to hear a fascinating interview done by WUNC Radio in Chapel Hill with Nnenna Freelon, William Banfield and representatives from the Mallarmé Chamber Players and Videmus Records, who produced the recording.

Milos Raickovich, composer and conductor, has lived and worked in Belgrade, Paris, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Hiroshima and New York. He writes music in a unique style -- "New Classicism" -- that has been described as "...a combination of the American Minimalist style with European Classical and Romantic music." (John Schaefer, WNYC's "New Sounds") Love, passion and longing are the recurring themes in all the works on this disc. FAR AWAY includes six pieces, each based on a different type of scale, including various 3, 5, 6, and 7-note scales. The opening piece is the energetic and primal Flying Trio, for violin, cello and piano. The Romantic-sounding Sonata and Three Romances are works grounded in the Minimalist approach. A meditative, Asian influenced film score "El contorno" Variations is also included, as well as B-A-G-D-A-D, played by the RTS Symphony Orchestra from Belgrade. (Three other arrangements of the same piece are included in Milos Raickovich's antiwar CD B-A-G-D-A-D, Albany Records.) FAR AWAY concludes with the nostalgic Winter Waltz.