Music of Andrew Imbrie

Andrew Imbrie has enriched the American contemporary music scene for over five decades. This recording pays tribute to his legacy with performances of three compositions from the late 1990s. His fluency at the keyboard springs from his early training in piano with such teachers as Leo Ornstein, Olga Samaroff, Rosalyn Tureck and Robert Casadesus. These teachers (and a summer studying with Nadia Boulanger) nurtured his interest in theory and composition, but it was during his undergraduate years at Princeton that he found his most significant musical mentor, Roger Sessions. Imbrie's senior thesis, String Quartet # 1 (1942), won a New York Music Critics' Award in 1944 and was recorded by the famed Juilliard String Quartet. After military service during World War II, Imbrie followed Sessions to the University of California,. Berkeley and received his master's degree there. Upon graduation, Imbrie was offered a faculty position at Berkeley that he held until his retirement in 1991. For over four decades, Imbrie has served as a teacher and mentor for composers ranging across the stylistic spectrum from experimentalist Larry Austin to the mischievously "traditionalist" David Del Tredici. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, New York University, and Harvard. About Spring Fever the composer writes: "This work was begun in Berkeley but completed in Chicago on November 26, 1996. Its title reflects, perhaps, my sense of the onset of winter in that city, and my yearning for spring, with its varying excitements and instabilities." Chicago Bells was commissioned by the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress. It was premiered there in May 2001, by the soloists heard on this disc. "This work was composed in 1997, while I was serving as guest professor at the University of Chicago. I would walk through the campus on my way to meeting with my students; and as I proceeded through the myriad quadrangles I would occasionally hear the sound of bells in the towers, echoing and clanging. This sound was the inspiration for the opening of the work and influenced it in various ways." Songs of Then and Now, settings of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, and e. e. cummings, explore the ebullience, disillusionment, love, and magic of growing up. "The title of this group of songs can have two meanings: one that draws attention to the variety of texts used; the other referring to the ages of the singers, who have just crossed the threshold and are now young adults. Then refers to vivid memories of recent childhood; now suggests a wide-open world of discovery."