Catalog

This is a recording of new American music for wind ensemble and brass expertly performed by the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble and Triton Brass. The oldest work on the program was written in 2004 by Nico Muhly. Lansing McLoskey's works were written in 2007 and 2011, as was Justin Barish's and the most recent work by Keith Kusterer was written in 2013. Indeed these are all extremely talented composers, whose careers span teaching at Miami Frost School of Music and winning the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (McLoskey); collaborating with singer Bjork on her DVD and writing an opera for the Metropolitan Opera (Muhly); winning the John Lennon Songwriting Competition and the 2012 Boston Conservatory Wind Competition (Kusterer); and being featured at the Focus Under 40 Boston Conservatory New Music Festival (Barish).

This disc of chamber music by Lansing McLoskey includes works for large chamber ensemble as well as smaller ensembles and songs. Lansing McLoskey came to the world of composition via a somewhat unorthodox route. Instead of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, his three "B's" were the Beatles, Bauhaus and Black Flag. His first experiences in composition were writing for punk rock bands in San Francisco, which is where he developed his love for classical music. His music has an emotional intensity that appeals to audiences and defies traditional stylistic pigeonholes. His music has been performed across the U.S. and in 14 other countries on six continents. A graduate of Harvard, UC Santa Barbara and the USC Thornton School of Music, with additional studies at the Royal Danish Academy, McLoskey is on the faculty at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami.

This recording of music for flute and piano contains three works by Canadian composers in addition to works by Liszt, Franck and Ibert, taking the program into new and interesting listening experiences. William David Smith is a Trappist monk, while Larysa Kuzmenko is a Juno-Awards nominated composer and composer-in-residence with the Toronto Symphony and Reeves Medaglia-Miller is on the faculty of George Brown College in Toronto. Pianist Yaroslav Senyshyn has an impressive career with his performances winning critical acclaim in the major concert halls of the U.S., Russia and Canada. His wife, flutist Susan O'Neill-Senyshyn, has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in England and Canada. Dr. O'Neill has a PhD. In Psychology and has held faculty positions at Simon Fraser University and the Don Wright Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario.

Described as a pianist of "enormous power" by the Washington Post, Canadian Yaroslav Senyshyn is an exponent of the grand tradition of piano playing. In addition to his concert activities, he is a professor of aesthetic and moral philosophy at Simon Fraser University and publishes extensively on these topics. For this recording, Senyshyn couples well-known works by Rachmaninoff with two pieces by Atsushi Yoshinaka, who is a professor at Gakuin University and spent a year as a visiting professor at Simon Fraser University, where he and Senyshyn collaborated. His two works were inspired by a trip taken to the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia and are reminiscent of Rachmaninoff's homesickness and longing for his ancestral home.

Yulan, an acrobatic, dance and visual extravaganza featuring the Dalian Acrobatic Troupe of China came about as a collaboration between dancer/choreographer Dennis Nahat, his Chinese colleagues, and composer Paul Chihara. Nahat, who was artistic director of the Ballet San Jose and founder of Theatre Ventures International School and Productions, was invited to China by Zhao Bin to create a work of international scope for the Dalian Acrobatic Troupe of China. Nahat enlisted Paul Chihara to compose music for the production and subsequently to conduct the orchestra for the performances and recording. The premiere took place November 28, 2012 in Dalian, China. Yulan means a magnolia flower and is one of the earliest flowers to bloom in the spring in Shanghai. Paul Chihara has composed scores for more than 100 motion pictures and television series. He was awarded the Composer-of-the-Year by the Classical Recording Foundation in 2008 and is on the faculty at UCLA.

A major historical recording featuring George Walker as composer, with the 1977 recording of his Mass by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergiu Comissiona and George Walker as pianist in a live concert from 1956 with the Eastman Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson. In addition there are two works for choir performed by the Morgan State College Choir conducted by Dr. Nathan Carter.

Influenced by music he heard in the synagogue as a young child, composer Burton Beerman had never infused any of this influence into his compositions until he met Philip Markowicz, a living Holocaust survivor and Torah scholar. The fruit of this association is Tikvah, a chamber oratorio that sets Markowicz's life and philosophy as well as his Torah insights to music. Tikvah is the Hebrew word for hope and hope was key to Mr. Markowicz's survival. Performed by his granddaughter, Cantor Andrea Markowicz with the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet and the Uzee Brown Society of Choraliers, with Philip Markowicz as narrator, Tikvah is a powerful, emotional and timely work, touching on the big issues of life, love, death, survival, meaning, existence, faith, morality, happiness, and tragedy.

Born in Berkeley to a mother of Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela Lena Frank explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Franks has traveled extensively throughout South American and her pieces reflect and refract her studies of Latin-American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology and native musical styles into a western classical framework. Winner of a Latin Grammy and nominated for Grammys as both composer and pianist, Ms. Frank holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship. This disc includes four works composed over a seven-year period and all feature the piano — one for solo piano; one for flute and piano; another for flute, clarinet and piano; and one for piano quintet, beautifully performed by Ensemble MEME and pianist Molly Morkoski.

Recorded at the premiere performance by the Center for Contemporary Opera in March, 2011, The Secret Agent, with libretto by J.D. McClatchy based on Joseph Conrad's story, has since been presented at the Armel Opera Festival in Hungary and the Opéra Théatre d'Avignon in France. Though the original story was written in 1907, it remains chillingly relevant today in our terror-haunted world. OnStage noted that " in the tradition of "Makropulos Affair," "From the House of the Dead," "Wozzeck" and "Pelléas et Mélisande"— its music is urgent, agitated and intense, with occasional lyrical interludes." This is composer Michael Dellaira's third opera and his first collaboration with the noted librettist J.D. McClatchy.

Love is what fascinates poets at all times and Broadway lyricists are often poets extra-ordinaire. Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter and so many others help us with our enjoyment of life and compel us to sing. The songs on this disc include ones we all know and some we may have heard and a few that are recent and obscure enough to be a pleasure to discover. But mostly, each of these songs is a work of art and beautifully sung by Jean Danton. Danton's artistry has led to acclaimed performances through the United States and Europe in opera, oratorio, recitals, and as a soloist with symphony orchestras. She is a favorite soloist for musical theatre and pops concerts appearing with the Boston Pops Orchestra and New England Light Opera among others and her versatility extends to jazz as well. She has several recordings on Albany Records and Newport Classics. Her television credits include documentaries for PBS and Lifetime. Collaborating with Ms. Danton are pianist Doug Hammer and drummer Steve Chaggaris.

Two world premieres — one by Lori Laitman who is known as one of America's most prolific and widely performed composers of vocal music — and the other by Richard Pearson Thomas, who is who is on the faculty at Teachers College/Columbia University and whose operas have been produced nationally — are enhanced by additional song cycles by these two esteemed composers. Soprano Natalie Mann is an active recitalist and champion of contemporary music, whose Carnegie Hall debut received critical acclaim. A recipient of a Metropolitan Opera Encouragement Award, Ms. Mann studied at Indiana University, Butler University and the University of Wollongong in Australia. Her colleague, Jeffrey Panko, has received performed as a solo artist and collaborative pianist throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is a member of the contemporary music group MAVerick Ensemble and on the faculty of the New Music School in Chicago. You can watch a video of Ms. Mann performing Old Tunes by Lori Laitman on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URnMQebyQuQ.

The second half of the 20th-century saw a great blossoming of choral singing in America, from the emergence of the great choral singing schools to increased professionalism in church music programs and the founding of major professional choral groups and associations. One result of this overall rise in choral excellence was an expansion to the body of sophisticated, secular art-music for choruses as American composers responded to the increasingly skilled, nonreligious choral ensembles practicing the craft. This recording, expertly performed by the Washington Master Chorale, offers some of the best of this art-music. Founded in 2010, the Washington Master Chorale is a semi-professional chorus in Washington, D.C., conducted by Thomas Colohan. Their purpose is to advance American choral excellence by combining skilled vocal artistry with superb poetic choral literature; to contribute to the choral canon through commissioning leading American composers and to present choral works in the context of their culture and time.

In a seemingly unlikely marriage of ideas, this recording presents new works by four American composers for a fabled instrument of China, the pipa. Building on the instrument's long history, these composers present a new vision of how an ancient instrument from another culture can provide inspiration to an even broader audience. The composers on this recording, Donald Reid Womack, Jeff Myers, Thomas Osborne, and Takeo Kudo, blend idiomatic performing techniques with inventive textures and widely divergent harmonic contexts. They build on the instrument's traditional repertoire by extending the range of cultural influences and reinventing the music that can be played on pipa. The performances are by the renowned pipa virtuoso Yang Jing, whose distinct mix of virtuosity and lyricism, tradition and innovation brings these new works to life.

Originally written as a song cycle, Timothy Nelson re-composed Songs of the Fisherman for the forces seen on this video. Tenor Brian Arreola and choreographer Gretchen Alterowitz hoped to find a way to synthesize the lyrical power of operatic singing with the kinesthetic narrative potential of dance. The singer-dancer relationship is fluid throughout the work, with the dancer taking on shifting roles of lover, rival and society. A three-movement piece for solo violin, Jorge Grossmann’s La Ricerca della Spiritualità Transcendente deals with the subject of spirituality and even symbolizes an open-ended journey in search for inner growth. The work is performed by Wei-Wei Le, who has performed around the world and won numerous international violin competitions.

With this recording, double bassist Anthony Stoops embarks on an unlikely project — that of enlarging the repertoire for solo double bass music in order to legitimatize the double bass as an important solo instrument. Performing five new works by American composers, some of them commissioned by him, Stoops is a strong advocate for his project. An international acclaimed soloist, pedagogue, orchestral and chamber musician, Stoops is Associate Professor of Double Bass at the University of Oklahoma and Co-principal Bass of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. A graduate of Northwestern University, the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan, Stoops performs on a custom double bass made for him by American luthier Aaron Reiley.

Ross Bauer's music is intensely lyrical, powerfully dramatic, harmonically rich and variegated, beautifully proportioned, rhythmically agile and dynamic, vibrantly hued, and emotionally and expressively generous. The stellar performances on this disc will bear this out for the listener. Bauer is a consummate composer, deeply committed to writing music exhibiting not only the utmost skill and integrity, but also the desire to connect with his listeners. On the faculty at the University of California, Davis, Bauer's music appears on the Albany, GM, Centaur and New World record labels. He received a 2005 Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Walter Hinrichsen Award.

This recording of the hilarious Gilbert & Sullivan 1878 comic opera was made at the 2013 Ohio Light Opera Festival and includes complete music and dialog. H.M.S. Pinafore has been the most frequently performed work at the Ohio Light Opera and an audience favorite on both sides of the Atlantic since its initial run.

Born in California, composer Alva Henderson studied at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Conservatory, where he concentrated on voice and composition. Henderson is known for his operas and vocal music, reflecting his interest in the potential of the human voice. His collected songs presented on this 2-CD set are gems of the American song genre. Sung by soprano Melanie Emelio, a versatile performer and noted pedagogue on the faculty at Pepperdine University and baritone John Kramar, who has performed in opera and concert productions around the country, these songs possess great color, style and sheer beauty.

The association of composer/conductor Gregg Smith, the Gregg Smith Singers and Saint Peter's Church in New York City dates back to 1970. Smith wrote works for the church, some of them commissioned for special occasions, and conducted the Gregg Smith Singers along with the Long Island Symphonic Choral Association and the Saint Peter's Choir in performances of this music. This disc commemorates this association with a collection of six of these works, written and performed between 1972 and 2005. Music for an Urban Church celebrates this American composer's continuation of the tradition of "singing unto the Lord a new song." As a composer Gregg Smith has more than 400 compositions to his name and he is also celebrated as the founder and conductor of the world-famous Gregg Smith Singers.

Colleagues at the University of Arizona, flutist Brian Luce and harpist Carrol McLaughlin perform a program of original compositions and arrangements for their instruments. Known as an expert on Soviet-era Music, Dr. Luce has given lectures and recitals based on his award-winning dissertation on the subject of Edison Denisov's music for flute. A prize-winning performer, his recordings appear on the Albany and Citadel record labels. Ms. McLaughlin has performed in al the major concert halls of the world and as concerto soloist with orchestras from Russia to Japan. A prolific composer and writer, McLaughlin has published books, music and has 15 recordings in her discography.

Captivated by the sound of the native American flute, virtuoso flutist James Pellerite has virtually single-handedly reinvented the playing of the instrument by commissioning dozens of composers to write for it. The resulting new works have challenged Pellerite to develop new techniques for the instrument. His legacy is therefore both an entire body of literature for the instrument and the development of techniques necessary to perform the music. Former principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pellerite has also had a long and distinguished career as Professor of Flute at Indiana University. This recording showcases the native American flute in a range of contemporary styles by eight composers, performed by the man who re-imagined the instrument.

Lynn Klock has been an enthusiastic participant in new music for the saxophone for more than 40 years, with dozens of composers having written new works for him. This recording features Klock with conductor Dennis Zeisler and the Virginia Wind Symphony in new concertos for soprano and alto saxophone and wind ensemble. It follow a previous recording on Albany Records of new music written for Lynn Klock for baritone saxophone and piano. Lynn Klock has appeared as a soloist throughout North America as well as in Russia, Europe, South America, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Canada. Klock has presented master classes at national and international conferences as well as at educational institutions across the United States and overseas. He is Professor of Saxophone at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.

The Buckley Chamber Players, named in honor of its home venue, Amherst College's Buckley Recital Hall, was founded in 2008. Its members are on the faculty at Amherst and Smith College and the University of Massachusetts. Playing a varied repertoire, it is dedicated to a close collaboration with composers who write works for the ensemble. This recording is representative of their concerts, and includes three works written for them, two of them by composers on the faculty at Amherst (Eric Sawyer and Lewis Spratlan).

Led by conductor Giselle Wyers, the Solaris Vocal Ensemble performs a program of contemporary American music that includes works by Meredith Monk, the 2012 Musical America Composer of the Year; Ingram Marshall, whose music concentrates on combining tape and electronic processing with ensembles and soloists; Anne LaBaron, whose compositions embrace an exotic array of subjects; and Frances White, whose study of the shakuhachi informs and influences her works as a composer. All world premiere recordings, these works reflect a renaissance of innovation in the field of choral music.

To celebrate their 100th anniversary, the Pro Arte Quartet commissioned works from four distinguished American composers (Walter Mays, Paul Schoenfield, William Bolcom and John Harbison), which were given their world premiere performances in 2011-2012. The Pro Arte Quartet was founded in 1911-12 by teenage prodigies who were students at the Brussels Conservatory. Stranded in the USA in 1940 by the outbreak of World War II, the Quartet became established at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they became the first professional string quartet in residence at an American university. In all, the Quartet has commissioned more than 100 new works so it was fitting that the centerpiece of their centennial celebration include commissions, performances and recordings of these new works.

Known as a champion of contemporary music, percussionist Tom Kolor has performed with all the major new music ensembles, including the New York New Music Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music and Speculum Musicae, to name but a few. Kolor is a member of Talujon Percussion, which has given countless world premieres and made a significant contribution to the percussion quartet repertoire. He is on the faculty at the University of Buffalo SUNY, where he directs the percussion ensemble. For this disc of masterpieces for solo percussion, he has chosen two of America's composers who led the way in 20th century music development -- John Cage and Milton Babbitt.

Florencio Asenjo's music is inspired by literature and the visual arts as these three works so aptly show. El Gran Teatro del Mundo (The Great Stage of the World) is the title of a sacramental play by Calderon de la Barca, while Gleanings from the World of Lafacadio Hearn comes musicially from parts of Hearn's stories. The Birth of Venus reflects Asenjo's reaction to Sandro Botticelli's Nascita della Venere. This is the sixth release of Asenjo's orchestral music to be released on Albany Records.

Compositional clarity of purpose amid a counterpoint of ideas and materials brings together this generous collection of Jeffrey Mumford's music, all of which are heard in thoughtful and sensitive performances. A native of Washington, D.C., composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions including the Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Formerly on the faculty at Oberlin College, he is now Distinguished Professor of Music at Lorain County Community College. Mumford was in residence at the National Gallery of Art in 2013 and some of the works on this 2-CD recording come out of this residency.

Thomas Sleeper enjoys an active dual career as composer and conductor. His compositions include three symphonies, six operas, 14 concerti and numerous chamber works. His music is regularly performed through the U.S., in Europe, Asia and South America. He is director of orchestral activities at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music and music director of the Florida Youth Orchestra. With this world premiere recording of four of his concerti, we discover a composer in full control of his considerable faculties. His musical voice is oblique, as language in a dream, which tends to evaporate the more you attempt to sharpen your focus. These works display a composer with something interesting and important to say in a voice that is uniquely, authentically and unmistakably his.

Composer Bevan Manson has received commissions for both classical and jazz music from numerous ensembles including the Sierra Chamber Society and the San Francisco Symphony. He is a founding member of the Los Angeles composers' group Improvisatory Minds, an organization that provides a platform for concert music written by composers who have jazz as an extensive part of their musical backgrounds. A noted jazz pianist, Manson was director of UC Jazz at Cal Berkeleyand has served on the faculties of New England Conservatory, Berklee College and the Thelonious Monk Institute. This recording, the first devoted entirely to his music, combines his classical and jazz roots in a unique style that is complex but very tuneful.

Robert Xavier Rodriguez has been called “one of the major American composers of his generation” (Texas Monthly), and his music has been described as “richly lyrical” by Musical America. He first gained international recognition in 1971 when he was awarded the Prix de Composition Musicale Prince Pierre de Monaco. Other honors include the Goddard Lieberson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has served as Composer-in-Residence with both the San Antonio and Dallas symphonies, and he is on the faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas. Composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez comments that his teacher Nadia Boulanger told him “that I would be only half a composer until I also learned to express in my music the same love of laughter that she knew I enjoyed as a person I think Boulanger would be pleased to see that all of the pieces on this CD, dating from the 80s to the present, incorporate humor in some way.” Noted pianist Jeff Lankov, who has edited Rodriguez’s piano works for G. Schirmer, gives informed, sensitive performances of this delightful music.

Albany Records continues its series of recordings devoted to the artistry of esteemed composer and pianist George Walker. This recording includes Walker performing Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto in a thrilling live performance from 1967. Coupled with the Beethoven is Walker's Violin Sonata performed by the composer and his son, Gregory for this recording. Gregory Walker, a professor at the University of Colorado is artistic director of the Colorado NeXt Music Fest and a champion of contemporary music.