Catalog

American composer Benjamin Lees was born on January 8, 1924 to Russian parents. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to San Francisco where he began to study piano. After military service in World War II, Mr. Lees began the study of composition at the University of Southern California. He soon came to the attention of the legendary American composer George Antheil, the famous "Bad Boy" of music. Lees left the university and began studies with Antheil in advanced composition and orchestration that lasted almost five years. The recipient of numerous awards and commissions, Lees's works have enjoyed numerous performances by such legendary conductors as George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, Eugene Ormandy and Zubin Mehta, among others. Mr. Lees's music is unmistakably American in its rhythmic energy and directness. But it is markedly different from what audiences have come to identify as American music as associated with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. The influence of his eight-year stay in Europe, of the Surrealist ideas to which Mr. Lees was exposed there, the avoidance of folk material, a keen appreciation of the visual arts, an ascorbic wit, and an unerring sense of the true and expressive combine to make his a singular voice in contemporary music. His craft is formidable, but even more so is his awareness of the essence of music, and it is this awareness that is so appreciated by audiences.

Rodney Rogers has written music for a wide variety of media, including orchestra, chorus, wind ensemble and chamber groups. He first gained national recognition as a composer while in college with BMI Awards, the ASCAP Foundation Grant for Young Composers and a fellowship to Tanglewood. Named "Distinguished Composer of the Year" in 1989 by the Music Teachers National Association for his composition Riffing in Tandem, he has also received a NEA Consortium Commission and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yadoo Artist Colony. Today, he is on the composition faculty at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

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.

Cellist Gregory Sauer and pianist Heidi Louise Williams perform a program of works for cello and piano by North and South American composers, including world premiere recordings of works by André Mehmari and Daniel Crozier. Both performers are on the faculty at Florida State University and enjoy careers as recitalists, soloists with orchestras, and chamber ensembles. Ms. Williams appears on three previous Albany Records releases, all of which have received critical acclaim. She has also recorded for Naxos, Neos, and Centaur. Sauer’s discography includes recordings with MSR and Mark Records.

Formed in 1995 the Corona Guitar Kvartet's repertoire spans music written in the Renaissance to music written in this century. The Kvartet has worked with composers from Denmark, the US, Latvia, Germany, Italy, Canada and Lithuania and actively promotes new compositions for their medium. This second recording for Albany Records is a recital of works that reflects their musical interests.

Since its inception the Mirror Visions Ensemble has explored song repertoire from a number of angles. The initial interest was the back-to-back performance of multiple settings of a single text, leading to programs built around favorite portraits. This has been followed by musical travelogues and concerts at museums that feature music with a connection to the exhibit or museum. During the last decade, the ensemble has commissioned 69 new works, two of which are presented on this recording. Berg's Lincoln Letters is set to texts more personal than political, while Hagen's Songs from Dear Youth are set to letters from the Civil War. Platt's From Noon To Starry Night is a cantata based on a selection of Walt Whitman's poems, including the roughneck Whitman, the democratic Whitman, the transcendentalist Whitman, Whitman the "lover of comrades," and Whitman the bard of war.

Born out of a 2015 music festival at Rice University focusing on classical, contemporary, and cross-cultural music, this recording offers an interesting set of compositions, performed by the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra, that embody 21st century interculturality in distinctive ways. Crossings: Contemporary Music for Chinese Instruments features works by six composers who came into contact with Chinese cultural traditions and responded compositionally to that contact in different ways. Two composers (Shih-Hui Chen and Lei Liang) were born in Taiwan and China. The remaining four composers are American-born and non-Chinese, yet each has had varying degrees of engagement with traditional Chinese music. Thus, the recording offers a glimpse into what has become a global network of composers. The Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra is a group from Taiwan whose members perform new music on Chinese instruments. However, in almost every work, the silk and bamboo instruments of the ensemble are joined by additional sonority offering a rich and varied new expression, which is the essence of this recording.

In the nearly 30 years that Hi Kyung Kim has been living, studying and composing in the Western World, her music has established itself as Asian-American in voice and spirit. But for all the recognizably Korean musical ideas, rhythmic and sonic, in her music these seem to occur not as flags or labels but appear integrally in the music's fabric. And in the hearing of it, a personality emerges that is individual and not specifically or necessarily identifiable as Korean-American. As she has admitted, these Korean elements come into her music unbidden, unselfconsciously, and cites a conversation she had with the late Korean-born composer Isang Yun, in which he said "That he did not have to think about his musical elements intentionally utilizing Korean music, since (these were) already imbedded in him."

This recording of works for strings by women composers includes two works for string trio by Victoria Bond and Julie Mandel; a work for solo cello and two works for violin duo by Rain Worthington; and a composition for violin and cello by Adrienne Albert. The performers include Anna Cromwell, assistant professor of violin and viola and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point; Lisa Nelson, who is instructional professor of viola, violin, and string pedagogy at Illinois Wesleyan University; and Mira Frisch, associate professor of cello and director of string chamber music at the university of North Carolina at Charlotte. Both Anna Cromwell and Mira Frisch appear on Albany Records performing as a violin/cello duo.

This disc of music for flute and clarinet by Daniel Dorff includes his own compositions as well as his arrangements of Bach inventions for the two instruments. Born in 1956, Daniel Dorff studied at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. His music has been performed by the Atlanta Opera, Baltimore Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival and the Eastman Wind Ensemble, to name but a few. The Scott/Garrison Duo, featuring clarinetist Shannon Scott and flutist Leonard Garrison, has performed together since 1988 and has been featured at many national conferences of the National Flute Association and the College Music Society. Ms. Scott is on the faculty at Washington State University and Mr. Garrison teaches at the University of Idaho. This is their second recording for Albany Records.

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

The special appeal of this CD should be the presence of Ellis Marsalis as a composer, who is the father of Branford, Jason and Wynton. All the works on this CD are world premieres except the Marsalis piece and they represent a variety of styles both quoted and extracted from the various traditional idioms of the composer's heritage. The works offered here are representative of 20th century styles and techniques such as serialism and the tone row; atonality and polytonality; polymetric, multimetric and asymmetrical writings; the integration of Cuban and African rhythms; and the classical structure embracing the vocabulary of Jazz, Blues, Gospel, and Spirituals variously used by such composers as Ellis Marsalis, Adolphus Hailstork, George Walker, Alvin Singleton and others. The display of the breadth of artistic styles in these American compositions lends to the necessary integration of this music into the standard classical repertoire and helps facilitate familiarity with this music independent of color, race or gender.

Lee Hoiby writes about this recording: “The Ames Quartet worked closely with me on the development of Dark Rosaleen, collaborators from the word go, and continually bless it with loving insights and efforts. Together we have explored some evocative remnants of James Joyce c. 1900; Mangon, the deranged Dublin litterateur of the 1830s; and the dolefully passionate Hibernian ethos. As I myself am a Midwesterner who has chosen to express himself musically in a classic European vocabulary, it is gratifying to hear the Ames players of Iowa display their great reservoirs of nuance and schwung and historical imagination. They are simply superb musicians and I warmly thank them.” William Bolcom writes about the performance of his work: “Your performance is the most emotionally intense I have heard…you sustain the emotional curve extremely well…the slow tempo (of the last movement) pays off at the end – really frightening! I don’t compose quite as I did 30 years ago, but the feeling of the piece seems so present right now. Where we are today had its roots in that time. The Intermezzo seems particularly sad to hear at this moment, and you have played it with much personality.” Richard Willis’ Variants, commissioned in 1990 by Quadriga (a piano quartet then in residence at Texas Tech University), follows similar principles to Hoiby’s Dark Rosaleen. It, too, is a set of variations built upon a melody presented first by the viola, in which an internal interval (this time a minor second heard in the first two pitches), serves as the principal unifying element of the composition. Both begin with a haunting quality and then present the motive in a variety of guises ranging from virtuoso to angular to jazzy to lyric, highlighting the late 20th century composer’s dual interests in maintaining a tightly controlled form based upon restricted motivic material, while still exploring a wide range of moods.

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.

The four compositions here might seem very disparate: a string quartet; a piece for unaccompanied choir; a sextet with electronic ambience; and finally a trombone solo in which the electronic interventions come right into the foreground. On listening, however, the differences begin to dissolve, leaving behind them the outlines of a distinct creative personality. One feature they share is fearlessness; another is their rhythmic dynamism and another is the containment of rhythmic and harmonic tensions in small motifs. The composer, David Felder, has long been recognized as a leader in his generation of American composers. His works have been featured at many of the leading international festivals for new music and he earns continuing recognition through performance and commissioning programs.

Spectacular sonics are presented on this unique offering of a Blu-Ray surround stereo disc and a regular cd for those people who do not have Blu-Ray players. The Blu-Ray format permits recordings of works in multi-channel at a higher resolution as well as layering of separate mixes so that surround recording and stereo can be presented simultaneously and conveniently as options to listeners. The pieces written to include electronics are all written for eight channels of electronic sound surrounding the audience. The regular compact disc presents content at a lower bit and sampling rate in comparison with the Blu-Ray, making the music available to everyone with a cd player. Composer David Felder has long been recognized as a leader in his generation of American composer. His music is known for its highly energetic profile, its frequent employment of technological extension and elaboration of musical materials and its lyrical qualities. Felder is on the faculty at SUNY-Buffalo and artistic director of the June in Buffalo Festival.

The intensity and focus of David Glaser's music reflect the concentration of his life. He has lived in New York City for the entirety of it -- raised in Queens, and for the past 25 years, living in Manhattan. What characterizes virtually all of his music heard on this recording is its intentional direction towards New York concert-music performers, their ensembles, and the culture and tradition that they embody and extend. His music calls visual metaphors to mind: the luminous radiance of its sparkling timbral textures is a reflection of the focus of an intense conception, asking that an audience shut its eyes in order to see. Glaser is a graduate of Columbia University and is the recipient of awards and commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Alice M. Ditson Fund, and the American Music Center.

David S. Lefkowitz, a native of New York City, studied composition at Eastman, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. He has won international acclaim as a composer, with his works garnering performances around the world as well as numerous prizes and including recognition from the National Association of Composers, the Chicago Civic Orchestra and the Gaudeamus Music Week. As a theorist Lefkowitz has researched "meta-theoretical" issues such as the process of segmentation and the internal structure of set-classes. Lefkowitz has enjoyed creating music with different, often contradictory faces. The works on this disc in which tonality and atonality, consonance and dissonance exist in tension are not found at one particular point along the continuum from one stylistic extreme to another. Rather these pieces thrive on the tension between the contradictory characteristics.

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.

David Walther, the violist of The Debussy Trio, is an active commercial studio musician who has performed on more than 400 motion pictures, television shows, jingles and records. He is a self-taught composer whose influences range from the great past and present masters of classical music to the modern sounds of rock, pop and jazz. This recording offers a sample of this extremely talented musician's work, with the viola as one of the common threads of the compositions. The recording includes a trio for flute, viola and harp; a work viola and piano; one for solo viola; and ends with a trio for violin, cello and piano. Walther is the violist for the recording that features performances by The Debussy Trio and The Capital Trio.

David Sampson, born in Charlottesville, Virginia, makes his Albany Records debut with a disc of exciting, highly original music. In the past you may have heard such orchestral works as Hommage: JFK, Simple Lives, and Reflections on a Dance (for brass and percussion); you then know his music is rhythmically charged, intense in its emotions and dramatic in its orchestration, comparable to such composers as William Schuman and Benjamin Lees. One of his specialties is writing for brass; among his trumpet teachers were such stellar names as Gerard Schwarz, Gilbert Johnson, Robert Nagel and Raymond Mase. His composition teachers included Karel Husa, Henri Dutilleux and John Corigliano, so you have some idea of the exciting sounds to be heard here. This is an important disc for those with an interest in contemporary American music; brass fanciers will obviously find this very attractive too!

This recording of music by John Harbison and James Primosch contrasts their piano music with compositions for voice, with a major work for each by each of these esteemed composers. Harbison, a faculty member at MIT, has enjoyed a long and distinguished career. His more than 300 compositions have been performer around the world by premiere musical organizations and soloists. James Primosch serves on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and his discography includes more than 25 recordings of his compositions. Noted for her "dazzling, virtuoso singing" Lucy Fitz Gibbon is a dynamic musician whose repertoire spans the Renaissance to the present. She has performed at prestigious venues in the United States, Canada, and England and is on the faculty at Bard College. Pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough has an impressive career as soloist, lieder and chamber music collaborator, and recording artist. His discography includes many world premiere recordings and has taught piano and courses in electronic composition at Cornell University.

Composer Dave Walther enjoys an equally distinguished career as a violist, including working as a studio musician in more than 500 motion pictures and soundtracks, and being the violist for The Debussy Trio, which has performed hundreds of recitals in the U.S. and abroad. As a composer he has written works for The Debussy Trio, the Christiane Trio, the Capital Trio, Catherine and Jonathan Karoly, and pianist Duncan Cumming, among others. This, his second recording on Albany Records, includes a work for violin and piano; a string quartet; a work for solo piano; and a work for flute and cello.

The Stentorian Consort (David Begnoche, Barney McCollum, Brent Phillips and Jonathan Whitaker) offers a program of works for trombone that includes five world premiere recordings. Praised for inspired performances and innovative programming, the Consort has established itself as one of the nation's premiere trombone quartets. They maintain an active performance schedule of recitals and master classes and have performed by invitation at several trombone conferences. This, their second recording celebrates and reflects their continued interest in new repertoire. The Stentorian Consort is joined by guest soloist Joseph Alessi, principal trombone of the New York Philharmonic, for two works on the recording.

Donald Crockett is dedicated to creating music inspired by the musicians who perform it and this recording is no exception. It represents works composed across a span of about a dozen years and Xtet, the Los Angeles-based new music ensemble, with its highly variable instrumentation and composer/performer ethos, was the ideal vehicle to undertake the performance of this music. Donald Crockett was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006 and has also received the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and an Aaron Copland Award, among many other honors. Also known as a conductor, Crockett has presented many world, national and regional premieres with Xtet. He has also been active over the years as a composer and conductor with the venerable and famed Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles. Donald Crockett is on the faculty of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and serves as Senior Composer-in-Residence with the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East.

Donald Martino may be one of the last modern American composers who writes tough, uncompromising music for adventurous listeners, and this disc spans many years and the different facets of his personality. Notturno is one of his best-known works, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. He described this highly dramatic, colorful work as "a sort of 'night music' descriptive of the moments before I go to sleep, when I'm reviewing the day, when all the miseries and the beauties come together in a kind of chaotic swirl without pattern. It's about the diversity of feeling that I undergo daily when I contemplate my life at that moment before sleep." From the Other Side represents Martino in his "most sour mood, so disillusioned, so debilitated by the state of 'art'...that tears must turn to laughter." In between is the virtuoso, prize-winning flute work Quodlibets II. This is a disc that will reward the listener who really likes modern music.

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.

This recording features six chamber works by Donald Reid Womack combining East Asian and Western string instruments. Intertwined, the title of this album, offers just the right combination of simple imagery and layered meaning, not only with the intertwining of Eastern and Western string instruments, but also with Womack's compositions interlock and meld rhythmically, motivically, and stylistically. Womack, the composer of almost 100 works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, chorus and voice,has concentrated on compositions for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese instruments. His music has been performed and broadcast around the world and his composition appear on more than a dozen recordings. A faculty member at the University of Hawaii since 1994, Dr. Womack has chaired the music department and presently serves as professor of composition and theory, as well as a faculty member of both the Center for Japanese Studies and Center for Korean Studies.

This recording of five works for Japanese instruments by American composer Donald Reid Womack, places him in the vanguard of intercultural composition. Japanese instruments have been a major part of Womack's musical world since 2003 when he was asked to write a composition for the Asia Ensemble. His music for Japanese and other Asian instruments finds a balance in the connections that exist between his background as an American and the rich sounds that are available to the composer through these instruments. A faculty member at the University of Hawaii, his music has been performed and broadcast extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Oceania and South America.

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.

This recording of duos by American composer Ketty Nez span a ten year period, reflecting an ongoing fascination on the part of the composer with different ways of exploring musical responses to folk songs and instrumental melodies of the southern Balkans. Nez is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Eastman, Curtis, and Bryn Mawr. She also participated in the year-long computer course at IRCAM and worked with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam, co-founding the international contemporary music collective Concerten Tot and Met. Her music has been performed in festivals around the world. Ms. Nez joined the faculty at Boston University in 2005, directing the Time's Arrow new music ensemble for four years.

Double Entendre, an ensemble of double reeds, consists of oboists/English hornists Karisa Antonio, Sarah Davol, Kathryn K. Englehardt, Marsha Heller, Nancy Ranger, Christa Robinson, Elizabeth K. Scott, and Sherry Sylar and bassoonists Susanne Chen, Keith Kriendler, Atsuko Sato, and Dirk Wels. Based in New York City, Double Entendre Music Ensemble is a collective of like-minded musicians devoted to adventurous exploration of the double reed repertoire. This recording is the culmination of a multi-year project to commission, perform and record repertoire for these instruments.