Catalog

This CD of recent piano music by Allen Shawn provides the opportunity for repeated consideration of his very personal, confessional approach to the piano, as well as the sequel to musical topics more implicit than explicit in his first piano solo recording on Albany Records. Shawn's music reveals a unique and complete musical universe, the result of perfect fusion of the musical sensibility of the composer and the intellectual image of the work. Shawn's rare gift is his ability to confide his innermost thoughts and feelings through music that is at once well-crafted and emotionally accessible.

Tanya Bannister's career began with her victories at the Concert Artists Guild International Competition and the New Orleans International Piano Competition, confirming her status among the leading pianists of her generation. Ms. Bannister has a special affinity for contemporary music. As she says, "I find the experience of working with composers to be an enlightening and energizing one..." Three works on this recording Del Tredici, Farrin, and Theofanidis were commissioned for her by Concert Artists Guild.

Robert Schulslaper, a writer for Fanfare Magazine stated: "Reflections is a large-scale work in seven movements and Walwyn has the concentration, intensity and technique to focus attention on its every phrase and transformation. A large dynamic range, excellent pacing, attention to detail, and fleet-fingered dexterity serve her vision with grace and nobility...Walwyn has written music that will surely resonate with listeners' own reflections on 9/11. In my case, at least, it's left a lasting impression."

Like all of Wuorinen's music from the past three decades, the duos on this recording take the long view of musical history and align themselves not only with its expressive traditions, but much more importantly, with its secure and sustained future. The spare utterance of those works of the great European tradition that are composed for only two musicians, leave no margin for error: all is exposed when writing for two contrasting instruments. These duos, spanning slightly more than a quarter century of Wuorinen's oeuvre, never lapse in their intensity and invention. They display an impressive fecundity of sources and outward forms.

This fascinating program of music for flute and piano juxtaposes composers from the US and Russia whose compositions were all written during the sixties at the height of the Cold War. Composers in the US were subject to very different influences and pressures than their colleagues in the Soviet Union and the music reflects these influences as well as the turbulent decade of the 1960s. Beautifully performed by flutist Brian Luce and his pianist Rex Woods, the recording is a super audio compact disc.

Rhythmic vitality, lyricism, a fascination with folksong and virtuosity, and a distinctive American voice are traits that unite the four works on this recording performed by Leonard Garrison on flute and piccolo. Garrison, assistant professor of flute at the University of Idaho is the flutist for the Northwest Wind Quintet and principal flute of the Walla Walla Symphony. He has been flutist in the Chicago Symphony and the Tulsa Philharmonic, soloist on NPR's Performance Today and winner of the 2003 Byron Hester Competition. A graduate of Oberlin and SUNY-Stony Brook, Garrison received his DMA from Northwestern University.

Stephen Parsons, professor of trombone and director of the School of Music at Illinois State University, has assembled a collection of works for trombone from the 20th century. With French, Dutch, American and Danish composers, the recording showcases some of the best music written for trombone and is a beautifully performed concert program featuring a number of world premiere recordings.

Marthanne Verbit writes, "Long before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2001, I began to think about what role a musician might play in the environmental struggle our planet faces. In choosing to make a recording of five piano works from 1997 to 2007, this may be fiddling while Rome burns. However, it can do no harm to share these very personal musical visions of what is endangered, what is now lost, what needs to be celebrated or preserved, and it may give some pleasure." The noted environmentalist William deBuys, who provides an eloquent essay for the booklet says, "...Each piece tells its own deeply felt, inspired story, each in the language of solo piano, which itself is an endangered form..."

Calvert Johnson has put together a varied and fascinating program of music by Japanese and Chinese composers for harpsichord and organ. Johnson is Professor of Music and College Organist at Agnes Scott College. He is also organist at the First Presbyterian Church in Marietta, Georgia. Johnson earned the master's and doctorate in organ performance at Northwestern University and studied at the Toulouse Conservatoire where he was awarded the Premier Prix. He has performed throughout the U.S., Japan, England, Italy, France, Monaco, Switzerland and Germany. His extensive interests and expertise include books on early Spanish, Italian and English organ music and modern editions of works by women composers.

This memorial disc of solos and duos by Andrew Welsh Imbrie (1921-2007) and one of his most distinguished pupils, Hi Kyung Kim (b.1954), boasts performances largely by the musicians who commissioned and premiered them. Two of Imbrie's last pieces, To My Son and Melody for Gayageum, written while he was fighting with his illness are included on this disc. Imbrie first studied with pianist-composer Leo Ornstein between 1930 and 1942, with an eye to becoming a virtuoso pianist as well as a composer. He spent most of World War II in the Army Signal Corps. He studied with Roger Sessions at Princeton and then at the University of California, Berkley. He was appointed professor of music at UC Berkeley in 1949, a post he held until he retired in 1991.

José Luis Greco's premiere recording of works for strings and piano is a stunningly beautiful illustration of what can be achieved when one's personal philosophy of life is translated into sound. Indeed, what may not be known about the New York-born, Madrid based composer (whose musical output encompasses works for theatre and ballet, piano, orchestra, voice, and opera) is how much his philosophy, largely influenced by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, inspires his compositions. Dark Love in Wonderland may be heard as a metaphor for how we experience our world within the totality of its contradictions. Greco is a member of the Royal Spanish American Academy of Science, Arts and Letters and his music has been performed all over the world.

The virtuoso pianist Pedja Muzijevic was turned on to the music of John Cage by dancers. As he explains, "Mikhail Baryshnikov introduced me to the ethereal In a Landscape and we subsequently used it in our "Solos with Piano or not..." program. Then Trisha Brown choreographed a few of the Sonatas and Interludes and asked me to play them with her company... I promptly fell in love with the strange and interesting world of Sonatas and Interludes and started thinking that it would be wonderful to expose them to a variety of other music... Rest assured this program has no underlining story, title or deep meaning... Putting dried figs in a pork stew doesn't make any sense... It does taste good though!"

Lecolion Washington, Jr., a faculty member at the University of Memphis, has put together an intriguing mix of works for bassoon by African-American composers. Ranging from William Grant Still, who was born in 1895 to Daniel Bernard Roumain, born in 1970, the collection offers a concise history of African-Americans composers who have concentrated on classical music. Altogether a beautifully performed concert program of music for bassoon.

The collection of classic and original rags offered by Gary Smart on this recording celebrates the lyrical side of this quintessentially American music. The ragtime genre is diverse, more so than the casual listener might think. There is the folk rag tradition, the brilliant, aggressive Eastern rag tradition, and the many interesting takes on ragtime composition that span the entire twentieth century from Artie Mathews to Charles Ives to William Albright and beyond. But Scott Joplin's classical musicality remains the source of Smart's inspiration. Joplin's marriage of a singing African-American rhythmic polyphony with the harmonic and textural structures of the European classical tradition is dazzling in its effectiveness and Mozartian in its elegance.

Pianist and composer James Adler made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the age of 16, the start of a varied career in the United States and Europe. He has appeared throughout the world at leading concert venues, including New York City's Alice Tully and Carnegie Halls. He made his London debut at the famed Wigmore Hall. Known as a pianist who "can create whatever type of music he wants at the keyboard" (Chicago Sun-Times), he has had particular success with his account of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, the final work on this disc. His succinct description of the whole program perfectly sums it up: "I wanted to prepare a CD program that is fun. Has rhythm. That is danceable. That is a little jazzy with depth and lyricism, and celebrates American traditions in music. Though not necessarily in chronological order."

Genevieve Feiwen Lee received her degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Boris Berman. As an open-minded, generous and expert proponent of new music, she presents two significant composers, the French-born Bodin and the American Tom Flaherty. As Kyle Gann writes, "The 21st Century composer for piano faces tremendous competition from the past, yet for many, the medium still offers irresistible temptations. This recording offers compositions commissioned from Bodin and Flaherty; apart from making extensive use of the piano's ability to display different tempi simultaneously, these composers approach piano composition in different way: Bodin shows interest in layering and complexity, while Flaherty's approach is more linear and sound-oriented."

Music from an ancient land meets an instrument of antiquity: the result is a fascinating collection of music by composers either born in Israel or settling there from many points in Europe. Soloist Marina Minkin herself came from the Ukraine in 1981. A student of Mark Kroll, she is active in both Israel and the United States and is a founding member and director of the Ad Libitum Ensemble.

Robert Weirich leads an extremely active career as a pianist, teacher, author and composer, with many awards and articles to his credit, and with more than 30 concerto performances with such conductors as David Zinman and Jose Serebrier. Of Copland’s piano music, he writes, “Aaron Copland had a life-long love affair with the piano…he entrusted the piano with three of his most important, iconically personal works. These compositions hold their own with those of any composer from any period – a pianist can program them alongside Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, without fear that the American work suffers in comparison. For sheer originality, compositional craft and profundity of utterance, here is music with a complete mastery of voice – no one but Copland could have written these pieces.”

An advocate of contemporary music, the highly-acclaimed Ms. Risinger has played throughout the United States and abroad, often presenting world premieres of works written for and dedicated to her. She is currently Principal Flute in the Illinois Symphony. She is also a member of the Sonneries Wind Quintet and has performed with the Ohio Light Opera and the Washington Bach Sinfonia.

The saxophone has been an active participant in new developments in classical, jazz and popular music, especially in the past half-century. Equally at home in Classical music and jazz, Noah Getz explores the mixture of these two genres from the classical perspective. Crosscurrents is a diverse exploration of contemporary classical repertoire containing a variety of jazz elements.

Described in WIRE as "sonically beautiful yet unnerving," and by Graz's Kleine Zeitung as possessing "unusual emotional intensity," Daniel Rothman's music has been likened to the unlikely combination of Luigi Nono (Opera News) and Robert Ashley (All Music Guide). But these piano works trace another facet of Rothman's sensibility, powerfully and poetically interpreted by pianist Eric Huebner, whose performances of Ligeti and Messiaen have earned him high praise from conductors such as David Robertson and Oliver Knussen, with whom he has performed.

Naomi Niskala writes, "It is with great pleasure that I present this second and final volume of Robert Helps' complete works for solo piano (Vol. I is on TROY925)...Helps' piano works vary tremendously in style and language (and) to answer the question of what Robert Helps' music is like, I would have to answer: genuine, honest, and heartfelt, lacking any and all superficiality." Classicstoday.com in reviewing the first volume said "...What most impresses me about Naomi Niskala's solid, intelligent, and caring virtuosity is that she is fully attuned to the substance and spirit of these works, yet does not feel compelled to emulate Helps' own performances...."

Ezra Laderman is one of the last of that great generation of composers who first made a mark in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These are recent pieces, B'Shert having been written for Hsu. As she writes, The Sonata No. 3 is a spectacular work, with a depth that is both despairing and sublime! Since making her stage debut at age four, Hsing-ay Hsu has performed at such notable venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, Weill Recital Hall and abroad in Asia and Europe. Born in Beijing, Hsu began piano lessons with her parents, and later studied with Fei-Ping Hsu, Herbert Stessin at Juilliard, and Claude Frank at Yale. This recording adds to the comprehensive discography of Laderman's chamber works.

This CD showcases works by five living American composers born between 1951 and 1977. A thread binds the pieces together, for each work was written in response to significant outside influences: Irish folk music, the environment, or literature. All of the music was written specifically for the duo of Wolfgang David and David Gompper.

As renowned trombonist James Pugh writes, "If there's anything (these works) have in common, it's that, while they can all be heard as serious works, they each contain elements of popular music of their time - they combine traditional classical elements with popular harmony and rhythm..."

British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the son of an English mother, Alice Hare, and a Sierra Leonean father, David Hughes Taylor. Early in his life, Coleridge-Taylor's music education was directed by Colonel Herbert A. Walters, a fellow parishoner and choir member. After passing an audition for the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1890, Coleridge-Taylor studied composition with and became a protTgT of Charles Villiers Stanford. Coleridge-Taylor possessed extraordinary musical sensibilities, and his rise to credibility as a composer of note was at least partly the result of his Royal Academy pedigree. Arguably his greatest work was Hiawatha's Wedding Feast of 1898. What set him apart, of course, was his mixed heritage and his promotion of pan-Africanism, which sought to unify and uplift native Africans as well as those of the African Diaspora. Coleridge-Taylor would incorporate the indigenous music of Africans and African-Americans and sought the preservation of such music. This major piano cycle can best be summed up in the composer's own Forward to the published score: "What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk-music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro Melodies. The plan adopted has been almost without exception that of the Tema con Variazioni. The actual melody has in every case been inserted at the head of each piece as a motto. The music which follows is nothing more nor less than a series of variations built on said motto. Therefore my share in the matter can be clearly traced, and must not be confounded with any idea of "improving" the original material any more than Brahms' Variations on the Haydn Theme "improved" that."

Robert Helps was one of the few musicians of the 20th century who identified himself as both a pianist and composer, a tradition of musical life that was more akin to previous centuries. To Helps, these dual facets of life were equally important and highly dependent on each other. As a teenager he studied piano with Abby Whiteside and composition with Roger Sessions. Helps often wrote about Whiteside's "outlining" or "the magic of rhythm:" the importance of feeling one's way through a piece not by individual notes, but by larger sections that draw one towards a much longer destination. And it was Sessions who jump-started Help's career as one of the leading American new music pianists of the 1940s and 1950s, when he handed Helps a copy of his From My Diary. Helps would eventually give the New York premiere of Sessions's Sonata No. 2. As a composer Helps forged his own way, identifying with no single style. His works have been described as neo-romantic and tonal, impressionistic, twelve-tone, and minimalist. Albany is proud to present this first volume of the complete works for solo piano as performed by Naomi Niskala, a pupil of Gilbert Kalish and Claude Frank. Helps did so much for American music with his classic recordings of the past forty years or so, and it's time to hear his own remarkable piano works in a complete edition.

Cyrille Rose was one of the most respected clarinet performers of the 19th century. A student of Hyacinthe Klose at the Paris Conservatory, he won the First Prize in clarinet in 1847. Rose taught there from 1876 to 1900. From 1857 to 1891 he served as clarinetist at the Paris Opera. Renowned especially for his insistence on careful phrasing, many of his students went on to win first prizes. Today, Rose is remembered for his series of clarinet etudes, most of them arrangements of earlier works for other instruments. This CD presents his best-known collection, the Thirty-Two Etudes. Rose based all but one of these studies on Franz Wilhelm Ferling's Forty-Eight Etudes for Oboe, Op. 31. He generally preserved the outline of Ferling's original etude, but transposed the key and made alterations at times in the melody, rhythm and articulations to render the pieces stylistically idiomatic for the clarinet. His goal was to develop control and good phrasing in the performer. They are in the keys of C, G, F, D, B-flat, A, E-flat, E, B, and D-flat Major, plus a, e, d, b, g and c minor. During his eleven years with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sean Osborn traveled throughout the United States and the world. He has also appeared as guest principal clarinet with the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Seattle Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra. Currently clarinet teacher at the University of Washington, he is also an award-winning composer.

Morris Rosenzweig was born in New Orleans, where he grew up among the tailors, merchants and strong-willed women of an extended family which has lived in southern Louisiana since the mid 1890s. His works have been widely presented throughout the United States, as well as in South America, Europe, Mexico and Israel. His catalog of works includes pieces for orchestra, various chamber ensembles, compositions for live instruments and electronics, two song cycles, two piano cycles, solo pieces and one opera. He was educated at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Points and Tales is a cyclic composition for piano in 12 movements. What is striking about the work is the overall austerity of its language: its searching, spare and unadorned expression. The listener is invited to savor the beauty of harmonies exquisitely voiced, the play of simple, unhurried melodies, and the pure tones of the piano. A Certain Round of Events, based on original, Italian and Chinese texts and words of Rilke, consists of nine songs plus a prelude, interlude and postlude, and Rosenzweig conceives of the texts in terms of three concurrent "senses of time": subjective, seasonal and unchanging.

Albany is proud to present this generous selection of piano music by one of America's most important composers. Leon Kirchner is one of the last of that stalwart breed who first came to prominence in the late 1940's and early 1950s. A pupil of Bloch, Schoenberg and Sessions at the University of California, Berkeley, Kirchner's music definitely shows affinities with Schoenberg in outlook and temperament. No less than Schoenberg, Kirchner is both an ardent modernist and a volatile Romantic, a composer whose sophisticated awareness of the past informs a restless search for authenticity. A classic example would be his Piano Concerto No. 1, first recorded over 50 years ago by the composer himself with Dmitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic. Like much of the music on this disc, there is edginess and a tough demeanor, but there is real music present, in the "traditional" sense. This significant new release reissues classic performances by Leon Fleisher and Peter Serkin as well as presenting important recent pieces such as the Sonata No. 2 and The Forbidden.

Albany is proud to present another, truly unique recording by horn player Eric Ruske. His previous albums for horn with piano or orchestral accompaniment (TROY456, 615, 782) have been among best sellers among horn aficionados and players alike. This release presents Ruske strictly solo, with a wonderful blend of familiar and unusual works, particularly the colorful Persichetti and Ketting compositions. At the age of 20, Ruske was named Associate Principal Horn of the Cleveland Orchestra. He also toured and recorded extensively during his six-year tenure as hornist of the Empire Brass Quintet. His impressive solo career began when he won the 1986 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, First Prize in the 1987 American Horn Competition, and in 1988, the highest prize in the Concours International d'Interpretation Musicale in Reims, France. An active chamber musician, he has appeared with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Moab Music Festival, the Newport Music Festival and the Spoleto Festival, just to name a few. An Associate Professor and member of the faculty of Boston University since 1990, Mr. Ruske also directs the Horn Seminar at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

Award-winning composer Alvin Singleton has written music for theatre, orchestra, solo instruments and a variety of chamber ensembles. A composer-in-residence with the Atlanta Symphony in the late 1980s and a student of renowned Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi, Singleton's works have been performed by the orchestras of Boston, Pittsburgh, Houston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit and many more. Sing to the Sun is a set of five chamber works ranging from solo flute to large ensemble with chorus. Singleton exhibits in the recording of these five works the patience, appreciation of quiet subtlety, and psychological control that make for fine chamber music. Traditionally, chamber music is players' music and in that, traditionally "serious" (as are all five of the present works). But Singleton fans also expect to be caught up in the Singleton wit on one level or another - be it some unusual title or a certain odd presentation of notes laid out, usually early, in the piece itself. Both average listeners and cognoscenti find themselves caught up in wondering "what's next?" With this composer the listener is given clues that he or she is invited to participate fully in the musical experience about to unfold, something thought anathema by many recent composers.