Winter Pages, Bright Music
Ned Rorem's music strives for clarity. He distrusts the convoluted, the pompous, the grandiose. To some degree this is a legacy of his years in Paris and his exposure to figures such as Poulenc, Auric, and Cocteau. However, Rorem treated the neoclass…
Chamber Works
The woodwind quintet is to the wind instruments as the string quartet is to the strings. Composers have treated the heterogenous ensemble of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn as a unity for so long now that it has become a musical commonplace.…
H'un (Lacerations) And Other Works
The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. This is music, to paraphrase William Blake, of innocence and of ex…
Works By John Harbison And Ezra Laderman
Eclectic but distinctively original, John Harbison's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra reflects an artist of deep sensibility and training. Harbison (b 1938) is a recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and has received commissions from numerous ensemble…
Paula Robison, Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, Solisti New York, Alasdair Neale, Brian Zeger, Douglas Webster, Robert Beaser, Paul Schoenfield, Joseph Schwantner
FlutesIn 1986, three composers and three flutists met in a novel commissioning project supported by a National Endowment Consortium Commissioning Grant. Flutists Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, and Paula Robison, each a longtime supporter and performer of ne…
Works By Irving Fine, Gian Carlo Menotii, Carl Ruggles, Harold Shapero
At the outset of his career, Harold Shapero (b in 1920) was widely recognized as one of his generation's most promising composers. While in his twenties, he undertook to study closely the musical phraseology and rhetoric Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,…
The Flight Into Egypt ·The Natural World · Double Brass Concerto
A few years ago a German presenter asked me for my "artistic Credo," which seemed a characteristically European request, but in the spirit of international cooperation I furnished the following: "to make each piece different from the others, to find …
A Miriam Gideon Retrospective
There is in American painting a dynamic movement known as abstract expressionism, led by such well-known artists as Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.
In Music there is an equivalent--and equally important--development, which we cal…
Violin Works
Modern music－especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space－can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John H…
Divertimento, Sym No. 2, Night Scenes
Mario Davidovsky was a founding member of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. His compositions apply classical compositional form to electronically generated sounds. His Divertimento is rich and subtle, and might even be described as impr…
Aftertones of Infinity, Chiaroscuro, Into Eclipse
Of the three composers recorded here, it is Jacob Druckman (b 1928) who has changed the most in his approach to composition. After years of involvement with serial techniques, it was in Windows (1972) that he began to readmit elements of the musical …
Piano Works
The vastly divergent reactions to twelve-tone composition of George Perle, David Del Tredici and Nicholas Thorne are a vivid reflection not only of their different generations, but of the unfolding of musical style change in America. Perle, born in 1…
Works By Héctor Campos Parsi / Max Lifchitz / Roberto Sierra
Roberto Sierra (b 1953) is thoroughly versed in international composing techniques, yet dedicated to preserving the cultural identity of his Latin American origins. According to Sierra, he has “incorporated elements of folklore and of popular music (…
Sonata No. 2 ( "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860") - Sonata
“This is not a nice sonata for a nice piano player,” wrote Charles Ives about his most famous work, “but something the writer had long been thinking about.”
All four movements were programmatically conceived around figures in the Transcendentalist mo…
Piano Works
Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) was one of the great composers who wrote music at the keyboard. Although he is better known for his organ and choral works, his piano music is some of the richest and most original of his output. During the 1920s and early '30…
Symphony No. 1 / Overture To "As You Like It"
John Knowles Paine's Symphony No. 1 is a milestone in the development of American music. It was not the first symphony written by an American (George Frederick Bristow, for many years a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, had already written seve…
William Sharp, Steven Blier, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, Lee Hoiby, Richard Hundley, John Musto, Eric Klein (5)
Works by Thomson, Bowles, Hoiby, Hundley, Musto and KleinAmerican art song has traveled a long way from the parlors of 19th-century America. The turn of this century brought its adolescent rebellion in the iconoclastic hands of Charles Ives, followed by an impressive, if somewhat retrospective, era heralde…
Trio In C-Sharp Minor / Trio For Violin, Violoncello And Pianoforte
Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) lived for most of his career in Chicago where he spent more than 40 years on the faculty of the American Conservatory and nearly as long as organist-choirmaster of St. James Cathedral. His music can be described as "eclectic" …
Works By Stephen Paulus
Stephen Paulus's musical style is melodic and highly rhythmic. He tends to work in traditional forms, and his music is accessible to listeners possessing a wide range of tastes. Those seeking well-crafted contemporary music with a decidedly neo-Roman…
Arthur Berger, Gilbert Kalish, Joel Krosnick, Christopher Oldfather, Joel Smirnoff, David Starobin, Members Of The Boehm Quintette
An Arthur Berger RetrospectiveFor over fifty years Arthur Berger's output consisted of sturdily crafted pieces that reflected the mixed lineage of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Copland. Born in 1912 and raised in the Bronx, he first studied at City College and New York University, …