Music of Ezra Laderman, Vol. 5

For five decades Ezra Laderman has been privileged to be performed by the musicians of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Symphony has collaborated with him a number of times; in 2003 the orchestra will feature its bass clarinetist, Richard Page, in a new Laderman concerto that it has commissioned. Other of the city's ensembles over the years have been equally staunch supporters of the composer's work. The newest of them, The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project, commissioned and premiered Laderman's 1997 Sextet for English horn, bass clarinet and string quartet. Laderman is an attentive collaborator. He gets to know the musicians as people, and in composing his works often chooses the performer's personalities as a point of departure. Certainly he has done so in a number of his string quartets, a genre for which he is deservedly celebrated. The composer's Violin Duets were composed in 1998. Like the works by Bartok and Berio, they are miniature meditations, each composed in a single session, a day, a few hours, that performed together accumulate artistic weight through comparison and contrast. A year after graduating from Columbia University in 1952, Laderman began work on a Concerto for Bassoon and Strings. He completed the concerto in 1954, and it was given a reading by Bernard Garfield (who, later, for many years, was the principal bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and the National Symphony under Leon Barzin. But, aside from a student performance at Juilliard, the work remained on the shelf for more than forty years. Laderman completely overhauled the work in 2000 and the result is what is recorded here.