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 neoclassical aesthetic not with French irony and emotional distance, but with American openness and first-name intimacy, adding clarity of emotional expression to intelligibility of means. Winter Pages and Bright Music exemplify Rorem's subtle, direct style …
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. The challenge in composing for the woodwind quintet is to weave a consistent musical fabric while respecting the disparate characters of the five instruments. The four composers represented on this recording meet this challenge with imagination and …
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 experience. The innocence and experience are not simply those of a boy growing up amid the terrors of China's Cultural Revolution—they are also components of a well-trained composer's creative equipment: the beloved folk music of a land left behind and…
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 ensembles and foundations. The brittleness sometimes found in Harbison's harmonic language bears the imprint of Roger Sessions, with whom he studied at Princeton; yet the lyricism of Harbison's melodic line is very much his own, a quality strikingly apparent…
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 new music, asked Joseph Schwantner, Paul Schoenfield, and Robert Beaser to write new works for flute and orchestra. On this recording, each solo artist presents the orchestral work composed for him or her, as well as a flute and piano "encore" by the s…
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, as a discipline to help him sharpen melodic contours and better manipulate larger musical forms. When the brief piano sonata he set out to compose based on classical principles took only a few days to finish, he decided to write two more. Although t…
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 clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions." Grand and general though it is, the statement seems a good place to begin describing the music on this record.
Sketches for all the pieces preceded their commissions, but the institutions and frie…
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 call atonal expressionism. Its lineage stretches from Carl Ruggles and Roger Sessions to Stefan Wolpe and Elliott Carter. The work of Miriam Gideon stands out as a major and individualistic realization of this style.
One of the characteristics of abstra…
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 Harbison (b 1938), and Stephen Hartke (b 1952)－four American composers from different generations with different sensibilities, representing very different approaches to writing for the violin. Yet however much these works represent various facets of …
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 impressionistic.
Maurice Wright’s Night Scenes, although not program music per se, is loosely inspired by nocturnal imagery, from the fantastical turn the imagination takes in the late hours. It is alternately agitated and full of dreamy string harmonic…
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 past into his work.
The titles of Druckman's works—Incenters, Windows, Aureole, Prism—often display an interest in visual or spatial concepts. In Chiaroscuro, scored for a fairly large orchestra, including electric piano and electric organ, he set o…
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 1915 and educated here at a time when twelve-tone composition was little understood, felt the urge to revise Schoenberg's method so as to reconcile serial chromaticism with the hierarchical elements of tonal practice. The system he evolved, known as “…
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 (urban folklore) in order to create a music that in essence is Puerto Rican, and portrays the marvelous and contradictory world of [that] tropical island.”
Doña Rosita la Soltera (Doña Rosita the Spinster), for soprano and wind quintet, dates from 198…
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 movement (c. 1936-1860) in Concord, Massachusetts. The “Emerson” movement had begun as a piano concerto, the soloist representing Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the orchestra, the masses listen to him; “Hawthorne” was conceived for “a piano or a dozen pianos…
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 '30s, Sowerby often appeared as piano soloist in his concertos. He had very large, strong hands, and his treatment of the piano is vital, harmonically rich, and quite distinctive. He was a master of counterpoint and created an imposing body of piano wor…
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 several), but Paine's two essays in the medium are the first that could be received by the musical community here and abroad as works of a composer fully trained to the highest international (i.e., German) standards. Their premieres—The First Symphony in…
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 heralded by such composers as Bacon, Chanler, Nordoff, and early Thomson. But by mid-century, what should have been a time of full adulthood was instead a curiously fallow period (which Philip L. Miller attributes to composers abandoning melody and Ned Rore…
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" in the best sense of the word.
German theory, French composition, English and American folk music, liturgical music and jazz (he toured with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra) all figure among the influences on his vast body of work. He produced more than…
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-Romantic bent will find these three orchestral works very much to their liking.
As its title implies, Concertante is chiefly concerned with contrasts between solo instruments, small groups of players, and the full orchestra. Although, as the composer note…
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, later at the Longy School of Music and at Harvard. Berger completed his formal education with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. From 1939 to 1943 he taught at Mills College and Brooklyn College, then began writing music criticism for the New York Sun and, pr…