Catalog

The compositions of Amy Williams have been presented at renowned contemporary music venues in the United States, Australia and Europe. Her works have been performed by leading contemporary music soloists and ensembles including the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the International Contemporary, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and the California E.A.R. Unit. Ms. Williams is the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Fromm Music Foundation Commission and a Creative Development Grant from the Heinz and Pittsburgh Foundations. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. This recording, the first devoted exclusively to her music, features compositions for piano and strings, all given virtuosic performances by some of the finest performers of contemporary music including the JACK Quartet, Jeffrey Jacobs, Amy Williams and the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo.

There is a wonderful photo on the front cover of this new disc which perfectly sets the nostalgic mood: Congress Street, looking east, in Portland, Maine, c. 1920's (looking surprisingly like Pearl Street of the same time in our hometown of Albany). As organist Harold Stover writes: "There was a time in America when technological progress was equated with mechanical complexity, when radio and talking movies still lay in the future, and when the recording industry was barely out of its infancy. In those days, pipe organs joined the great ocean liners and the mighty steam locomotives on the cutting edge of modernity and were a central component in the listening experience of the American public. They were found almost everywhere that music was a part of life: in churches, to be sure, but also in concert halls, theatres, school auditoriums, hotel ballrooms, mortuaries, sporting arenas, carousels, and the mansions and even the yachts of the well-to-do. They provided a world of sound more varied than the commonplace parlor piano, more sensual at its softest, more awesome at its loudest. In an era when aspirations of personal advancement included cultural as well as material goals, the organ and the music played on it were benchmarks of social arrival in civic, ecclesiastical and domestic life." Harold Stover is a native of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and a Juilliard graduate. He has appeared at Riverside Church in New York, Westminster Abbey in London and many other distinguished locales. He presently serves as Organist and Director of Music at Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland, Maine. He presents here a wonderful selection of old and new works (with his own compositions based on traditional forms) giving the organ enthusiast a chance to hear some familiar names and the means of meeting new ones. And thanks to the newest technology of CD, we get to relive the wonderful sounds of one of the organs of that bygone time.

This collection of music for solo voice and chorus includes compositions by American composers Aaron Copland, John Duke, Jackson Hill, Richard Hundley, William Duckworth, Rudolph Palmer and Lee Hoiby. Several of the works were written expressly for D'Anna Fortunato (the mezzo-soprano soloist) and the Rooke Chapel Choir. Since her debut in 1971 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Fortunato has appeared as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the orchestras of Cleveland and Louisville, and the Detroit, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Minnesota symphonies. Ms. Fortunato has been featured in leading operatic roles with the New York City, Glimmerglass, Kentucky and Connecticut operas, as well as the Opera Company of Boston, Monadnock Festival, and Rochester Opera Theater. Andrew Porter of The New Yorker called her a "Handelian of crisp accomplishment," and Leighton Kerner of The Village Voice proclaimed her a "mezzo-soprano of profound musicality and technical aplomb." She has recorded on the Harmonia Mundi, Nonesuch, MusicMasters and Vox labels. Her album of songs by Amy Beach was voted "Best Record of the Year" by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and New York Magazine. The Rooke Chapel Choir of Bucknell University, under the direction of William Payn, has gained international recognition for its creative interpretations of some of the most significant twentieth-century American sacred repertory.

Sigurd Rascher became an instant celebrity when he appeared as a soloist with orchestra at the German Composers' Festival in Hannover in 1932. There was no precedent for a saxophone concerto to be performed at a composers' festival. Reviews of the concert appeared in all parts of Germany. This triumphant orchestral debut, with a concerto by Edmund von Borck (1906-1944), led to repeat performances a few weeks later with the orchestra in Berlin, this time under the baton of the celebrated Eugene Jochum. This was followed by orchestral engagements for Rascher throughout the world. During his long career as a concert artist, he performed with virtually every major orchestra and conductor in the world. With the exception of Debussy's Rapsodie (1904), the enormous number of concerti in Rascher's repertoire were all composed for and dedicated to him. All of these came about as the result of mutual artistic enthusiasm; not one was commissioned. One of Rascher's lifelong goals was to make sure a suitable repertoire was established for the saxophone. This CD contains a sampling of the many works for saxophone and orchestra that he inspired from the pens of American composers. For many years, he was the only person in the world with the ability to perform most of this repertoire. That others now perform it is largely a tribute to Rascher's own influence as the teacher and role model for succeeding generations of saxophonists.

Two works for soprano and orchestra by American composers comprise this recording. Frank Ticheli composed An American Dream as his fifth and final work for the Pacific Symphony Orchestra during his seven-year tenure as the orchestra's Composer-in-Residence. Based on a text by Philip Littell, the work addresses the conscious and unconscious sea of anxiety during the winding down of 20th-century America. Lansing McLoskey has chosen to excerpt lines for his text for Prex Penitentialis from two works by Petrarch: the Canzoniere, a collection of love poems, and Septem Psalmi Penitentialis, in which the civil war between body and soul is made explicitly and profoundly clear.

Debra Wendells Cross holds the position of Principal Flute in the Virginia Symphony. She also serves on the faculties of the College of William and Mary and Old Dominion University, and during the summer is Principal Flutist of the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Seattle native graduated with honors from the New England Conservatory. She also studied in Paris with Michel Debost. Barbara Chapman holds the position of Principal Harp for the Virginia Symphony and the Virginia Opera. She has also performed at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival in New York and continues to perform annually at the Virginia Waterfront International Arts Festival.

Howard Hanson (1896-1981) was a distinguished American composer, educator and preeminent advocate of American music. He belonged to that select group of American composers born in the last decade of the nineteenth century - Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, Randall Thompson, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland - who personified the emergence of American classical music as a distinctly national, as opposed to European, cultural force to be taken seriously. He was the leading practitioner of American musical Romanticism, much in the tradition of Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg and Carl Nielsen in Scandinavia. Hanson dedicated his professional life to the encouragement, creation and preservation of beauty in music, believing it to be an art form possessing unique power to ennoble both performer and listener, and, by extension, mankind. Throughout his career, Hanson never departed from his cherished ideals of beauty, clarity and simplicity of utterance and his conviction that musicians and audiences would respond openly to each other on this basis. He abhorred ugliness in music, dismissed as worthless intellectual abstraction for its own sake, and fought what he perceived to be the growing alienation between composer and audience. A lifetime of composition reflects this conviction, as did his lengthy tenure as a teacher and administrator.

From Billings to Bolcom - the subtitle of this recording dedicated to the American art song is a compilation of the best American has to offer from our musical beginnings to today. "Some of our best American composers have not been prolific songwriters," says Paul Sperry. "I think William Schuman's Orpheus with His Lute has everything a song needs: it is simple, moving and beautiful. But it is a single song, written for a proposed production of Henry VIII and has no companion pieces. Elliott Carter's three settings of Robert Frost constitute almost half of the solo songs he wrote, and Elie Siegmeister's arrangement of William Billings is the only solo Billings song I have seen. That is why I have compiled this American Sampler - to be able to record songs I love without having to worry about assembling a group by each composer. I have simply picked 31 of my favorite songs and put them together the way I would in a recital: organized to show each one to greatest advantage. I have deliberately not grouped the songs by composer, period or style, except for John Musto's little cycle, Shadow of the Blue: I kept it together because it is so powerful as an entity." Paul Sperry is recognized as one of today's outstanding interpreters of American music. Although he is equally at home in a repertoire that extends from Monteverdi opera and the Bach Passions to Britten's War Requiem and hundreds of songs in more than a dozen languages, he brings to American music a conviction and an enthusiasm that has brought it to life for countless listeners.

Here is Albany Records' tribute to Randall Thompson in his centennial year. There can never be too many recordings of this wonderful composer's music. His relatively small collection of works is dominated by a cappella choral music, most of it composed to English texts, all of it characterized by splendid craftsmanship and painstaking workmanship, with vocal lines gratefully shaped and rewarding to sing. Not surprisingly, his music is oftentimes classified as neo-classic in its inspiration, a personalized blend of 16th and 17th century contrapuntal techniques with a conservative yet recognizably 20th century harmonic base. His stated goal throughout his career was to create music of sensibility and good taste, which both musicians and audiences would appreciate. He favored simple melodies and harmonies over abstract modernist styles, which he felt to be antithetical to the natural use of the human voice. "Writing for voices has a purifying and refining effect on any composer's work," said Thompson in describing his approach to music. "Choral music makes terrifyingly simple demands. Good texts for choral music must be based on universality of appeal... After choosing a text, then sing it a thousand ways to yourself until you latch on to a tune. Let the tune and the words develop the form, (and when the composition is complete) sing every part yourself. If you can't sing it yourself, there is something wrong."

A brand new name to the catalog - wonderful music. Robert Nelson was born in Phoenix and studied at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl and Halsey Stevens. He is currently a Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Houston Moores School of Music. He has long been interested in theatrical music, as both a composer and coach/conductor. This meshes with a life-long interest in the widest range of musical idioms - from the most avant-garde contemporary effects to current jazz and popular styles. Writing for the theater has allowed him to explore all these various idioms and employ whichever were most appropriate to the project at hand. His theatrical experience has included a long involvement as composer for the extraordinary mime troupe of the University of Houston School of Theater.

Born in Chicago, William Kraft has had a long and active career as a composer, conductor, timpanist/percussionist and teacher. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served for 11 years (1991-2002) as Chairman of the Composition Department and Corwin Professor of Music Composition. He is of that generation of American composers who came to prominence starting in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s whose music is characterized by a distinct brashness, tinged with the energy of jazz and a definite sense of the dramatic. As an avid percussionist, many of the works which first brought him fame spotlight that part of the orchestra, and as director of the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble, he premiered many now important works. This diverse collection, ranging from solo to orchestral works, exemplifies the wonderful range of this dynamic American composer.

The Museaux Trio (Sydney Carlson, flute; Denise Fujikawa, harp; Brian Quincey, viola) is an outgrowth of Debussy's creation of a work for flute, viola, and harp, which has inspired composers ever since. Debussy was captivated by Japanese culture and incorporated Asian influences into his music. Toru Takemitsu credited the music of Debussy as his most important western influence. Embracing the juxtaposition of these two composers, the Museaux Trio takes it's name from a 12th century Zen Monk, Muso Soseki, who designed the legendary moss garden of Kyoto. The name Muso means Dream Window in Japanese. For their debut recording, the Museaux Trio performs Debussy's classic work for this ensemble; Toru Takemitsu's work, And Then I Knew 'Twas Wind, which pays homage to Debussy's Sonate; and finally, a commissioned work by Karim Al-Zand, inspired by the captivating illustrations of biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel.

Most music lovers' first acquaintance with the music of Andrei Eshpai was with the Concerto for Orchestra on the old Melodyia LP. If you remember this disc, then you will remember two things; how delightful the music was and what a great recording it was. Well, here in great sound, we have this very same performance for everyone to enjoy. Even though the performance of the Piano Concerto is in mono sound, we felt that because of the historical significance of this performance, it should be included in this series. The excitement is palpable - every measure bristles with energy. To complete the disc, a more somber work, Symphony No. 7. Here is an example of Eshpai's more recent music - still beautiful and appealing.

In volume three of this very well-received series, we have early, middle and late examples of the works of this fine composer. If any of these performances have appeared anywhere before here, on this new CD, they appear in the best sound they have ever received for the performances have all been remastered for this series of recordings. We feel that Eshpai is a composer of sufficient stature that his music deserves the best sound possible, so the listener can judge more appropriately the quality of the music. This has been done.

You are probably thinking, with the reputation of Albany Records for American music and composers, what are we doing introducing a series of recordings devoted to the music of Andrei Eshpai? The answer is simple. For the same reason we have so much of the English composer George Lloyd's music in our catalogue. He is a good composer who is under-represented in the catalogue as a whole. In short, we think his music is terrific and will appeal to a large audience if only they have a chance to hear it. So we are going to give you the chance. Besides, as with George Lloyd, here in Albany, we have had a special relationship with Mr. Eshpai. In February 1992, he was here in Albany when the Albany Symphony Orchestra performed his Concerto For Orchestra. From that time on, we have maintained close contact so much so that the master tapes from which this series of recordings will be drawn have been supplied to us directly by the Eshpai family. So, there will be many treasures to come. Andre Eshpai was born on May 15, 1925 in the ancient city of Kozmodemynsk on the Volga River in the autonomous republic of Mari of the RSFSR. His father, Yakov Andreevich Eshpai (1890-1963), was one of Mari's first professional composers. He was also a choral conductor, folklorist and educator. He composed the first Mari instrumental works, collected the folksongs of his region, and for many years was on the faculty of the Mari National Institute of Language, Literature and History in Ioshkar-Ola (the capital of the Mari Republic). The Eshpai home was a gathering place for many creative individuals - musicians, artists, writers and other intellectuals. It was in this enriching environment that Andrei grew up. In 1928 the family moved to Moscow where his father attended the Conservatory and his mother the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. Soon young Andrei began taking music lessons as well. He studied at Gnessin from 1934 to 1941. He served in the Soviet Army from 1943-1946. When he got out, he returned to the Moscow Conservatory where he studied the piano and composition with Miaskovsky and Orchestration with Nicolai Rakov. He graduated in 1953 and then entered the post graduate program with Aram Khachaturian. Today, he is the President of the Russian Author's Society (the equivalent of our ASCAP or BMI). The music of this fine composer should have a wide appeal.

Here is one of Maestro Eshpai's greatest scores. This music was once available as a 2-LP Melodiya set and was long sought after by collectors. The sound has been re-mastered and is here presented on CD for the first time. In essence "A Circle" is a ballet symphony. So significant is the theme of the ballet, the landscape of the infinitely changing world, that one is naturally led to the idea of its treatment by purely orchestral, symphonic means outside any imagery. Lyricism occupies a prominent place in the ballet as does music from previous ages. There is the Viennese waltz, the military march, a gracious old-fashioned arrangement of the minuet. Of course rhythms of the 20th century permeate the work as do echoes of music from jazz bands and even a hint of rock. There are the sounds of bells throughout the work symbolizing death and there are lovely, lyrical themes from the strings symbolizing the two lovers. Here is music in the mainstream of Russian ballet. If you enjoy Shostakovich, you will love this new composition by Eshpai.

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.

Composer Andrew Waggoner notes that these are five recent pieces that grew somehow out of the narrow space in which experience is transformed into history. Time, memory, the spell of love and the long-sounding echoes of terror inform each of these works, which while stylistically varied, share a common set of musical and emotional concerns. Bookending these pieces are two group improvisations by Open End. They frame and comment on the works they enclose. Born in 1960 in New Orleans, Andrew Waggoner studied at Eastman and Cornell. He has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Academy of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields and the Saint Louis Symphony, among others. He is the recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Roger Sessions Prize. He is Composer-in-Residence at the Setnor School of Music of Syracuse University and a co-founder of the new music ensemble Open End.

This new American opera by Evan Mack had its genesis in a lecture in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Mack heard the story of the murdered nun, Dorothy Stang. His research led him to the Ohio Province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur where he was given access to Stang's letters from 1969 until the week before her death. In five years time, the opera went from page to stage and won the Boston Metro Opera Main Stage Award. This recording is of the original New York City production. Evan Mack, a noted composer and pianist, has composed five musicals as well as numerous popular songs and classical works. He received his DMA from the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music.

If you're of a "certain age," you grew up in the late '50s and early '60s hearing the music of Angelo Musolino without even knowing his name. He was responsible for original music and arrangements for the Ed Sullivan Show, a dozen nationally televised game shows, the Children's Television Workshop, and many more. At the same time, his concert works were being performed in the United States and Europe. He was born in New York City, learned his craft in "formal" institutions during the day while playing with such names as Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Mandel and Oscar Pettiford at night. He carries on the traditions of Copland, Bernstein, and Henry Mancini and Nelson Riddle, writing in a style that freely combines pop elements with a traditional orchestral scoring. This new disc, a companion to his earlier CD Opening Doors (TROY708), reveals a master of light musical forms. You may not know his name now, but you will definitely remember it after hearing this delightful disc.

The custom of teaching Bible stories by means of sacred drama is an old and venerable one. Angels follows this tradition. Working with librettist John Vorrasi, William Ferris has created a striking portrait of the Archangels Michael, Uriel, Gabriel and Raphael. During the summer of 1988 William Ferris was commissioned by Keynote Arts Associates of New York to write a short work for a chorus and orchestra of young performers. The only condition stipulated was that the orchestra be "Classical" in its layout and size so that the text could be clearly articulated and readily understood and enjoyed by listeners. "I was irresistibly drawn to the delightful Modern Music text by the 18th century American William Billings" writes composer Ferris. "The words are a composer's dream. The energy, color and rhythmic vitality of the text as well as the endless opportunities it provided for word-painting with vocal, harmonic and orchestral effects made it a sheer joy to set to music. The form of my composition is easy to grasp and follows text in all of its leaps, bounds and commands!" Ferris is the first American composer to teach at the Vatican. His Holiness Pope John Paul II conferred a Papal knighthood upon him in 1989 and Radio Vatican broadcast a concert of his music worldwide. In 1971 he founded the William Ferris Chorale, an ensemble dedicated to celebrating music of the 20th century. For seven years he was organist of Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral. During Fulton J. Sheen's episcopacy as Bishop of Rochester, New York, Ferris was organist and choirmaster at Sacred Heart Cathedral. Sir William Walton said: "What a splendid chorus the Chorale is. How lustily they sang. It is really first class!"

For his third recording on Albany Records, tuba phenomenon Tim Buzbee has produced an excellent selection of recorded works for the tuba, this time featuring an eclectic group of composers (including Buzbee himself) and their unique styles. One could say that Buzbee's approach to music and playing the tuba is emotionally charged and perhaps even spiritually driven, and that underlying energy clearly reveals itself through the music in the pieces recorded here. Adding to that energy is a certain spiritual dichotomy that conjures up mental images of angels and demons or good versus evil. Many of the pieces presented here delve deep into the soul triggering a range of emotions from sadness and pain to exuberance and joy. The music is so emoÂtional and moving that it is easily forgotten you are listening to a tuba, and in doing so Buzbee has achieved what every musician strives to accomplish.

Baritone Stephen Swanson and pianist/composer David Gompper perform a program of songs about animals, including the world premiere recording of The Animals by David Gompper, which is a cycle of nine songs based on poetry by Marvin Bell. Ravel's Histoires naturelles is based on prose poems by Jules Renard. Ravel experimented with new methods of setting text in this elegant song cycle. Reger's songs were based on nursery rhymes and dedicated to his children. The selections from The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann include some of the most popular of this team's collaboration. Beautifully sung by Stephen Swanson, a professor of voice at the University of Iowa, these bestiaries offer animal songs in English, French and German.

Six pieces of chamber music by Anna Weesner (one solo, two duos, two trios, and one large-spirited piece scored for six musicians) make up this recording. The works were composed over a span of 10 years between 1999 and 2008. Anna Weesner is on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Described as animated and full of surprising turns, her music has been performed by the leading contemporary music ensembles.

Formed in 2009, the Anglo-American Duo Timothy Schwarz, violin; Jane Beament, piano) has evolved into a prominent ensemble that regularly tours in the United States and Europe. Praised for its energetic and sophisticated performances, the Anglo-American Duo specializes in music from the U.S. and Britain. For their first commercial recording, they perform music by British composer David Osbon. Osbon's music has been performed, broadcast and recorded around the world. The recipient of numerous awards, Osbon studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently he is on the faculty at the London College of Music.

Highlighting this recording is the chamber opera, The Birth of Something on a libretto by Will Eno. Commissioned by Da Camera of Houston, The Birth of Something represents an important, elegant, and highly personal contribution to the genre. An associate professor of composition at Rice University, composer Anthony Brandt earned his degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and Harvard. Among his many honors and awards are a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New England Foundation for the Arts. He is co-founder and artistic director of the Houston-based contemporary music ensemble Musiqa.

Anthony Iannaccone was born in New York City and studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Eastman School. His principal teachers were Vittorio Giannini, Aaron Copland, and David Diamond. During the 1960's, he supported himself as a part-time teacher at the Manhattan School and as an orchestral violinist. His catalogue of approximately fifty published works includes three symphonies, as well as smaller works for orchestra, several large works for chorus and orchestra, numerous chamber pieces, a variety of works for wind ensemble, and several extended a cappella choral compositions. Since 1971, he has taught at Eastern Michigan University, where he conducts the Collegium Musicum in 18th century music for chorus and chamber orchestra. Another disc of his music is available on Albany Records (TROY280), which features his music for wind ensemble.

Composer Anthony Paul De Ritis began studying with David Wessel at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies after returning from his studies at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. Wessel exerted a tremendous influence on De Ritis, both as a teacher and as a person. This recording of De Ritis' music is a tribute to David Wessel.The pieces on this recording span more than 25 years. Listening to the music is captivating. Written for Western instruments or Asian instruments, the music sounds like a successful syntheses of East and West, where real-time processing devices transform the sound of acoustic instruments into a rainbow of sound colors. Having received a thorough Western education and then traveled the world, Anthony Paul De Ritis has come up with a music that is far more than the sum of its parts -- music that is imaginative and a wonderful balance of tone colors.

Composer Barbara White was born in Boston and was educated at Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a faculty member at Princeton University, and she spent a recent sabbatical year as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She writes: "Apocryphal Studies is a sonic scrapbook of sorts, a compilation and documentation of my musical memories. Anyone who has ever been haunted by a fragment of a melody knows how enduring such memories can be; yet by the time we hear a sound, it has already begun to decay. In assembling my memories into new work, I play in the field between these apparent extremes: ever presence and impermanence. Musical reminiscences are simultaneously lasting and ephemeral, palpable and immaterial, indelible and fleeting. The marriage of persistence and elusiveness recalls other familiar paradoxes, for musical fictions are untruths we choose to believe - lies that, like an apocryphal story, contain an element of psychic, if not literal, truth. The four works on this recording embrace pre-existing music, in ways that range from veiled allusion to explicit paraphrase to willful mutilation."

The University of Western Ontario Wind Ensemble makes its debut on Albany Records with a program of contemporary works by composers from the U.S., Canada, England and Japan. The youngest composer, Newfoundland-born Jason Noble (b.1980) offers the most recent composition with Doppelpolitik, written in 2009, followed by Yo Goto's Lachrymae, completed in 2005 and Jim Territo's Fanfare: 1, written in 2004. Richard Rodney Bennett's Elegy for Miles Davis was completed in 1993, with Apparitions by Anthony Iannaccone dating from 1986. The oldest work dates from 1951, the Suite of English Folk-Dances by Ernest Tomlinson.

To bring together two pieces by Charles Wuorinen with seminal works of Arnold Schoenberg is, in part, to underline a continuity. Wuorinen, exceptionally among his generation, has developed implications of Schoenberg's 12-tone method to his own musical ends with a strong awareness of the works of others of his predecessors, including Stravinsky, Webern, and Milton Babbitt. Wuorinen's two pieces date from the mid 1970s, a period during which Wuorinen was reconciling serialism with tonally-centered music. Schoenberg's work is represented by his pupil Webern's 1912 two-piano arrangement of the Five Pieces for Orchestra and Wuorinen's arrangement of the Variations. In these arrangements, the important details of pitch, rhythm and motivic relationships stand out in relief.

This second recording of chamber music by Armand Qualliotine on Albany Records features music for piano, vibraphone and marimba. Qualliotine (b.1954) earned his degrees from the Hart College of Music, SUNY-Stony Brook and Brandeis University. His post-doctoral work included studies with Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt. He is now a professor of composition at Berklee College of Music. He has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, and the Paul Jacobs Commission for orchestral composition from the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra.