An Idyll For The Misbegotten / Vox Balaenae / Madrigals, Books I-IV
George Crumb's (b 1929) music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles. The references range from music of the Western art-music tradition, to hymns and folk music, to non-Western musics. Many of Crumb's works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in beautiful and meticulously notated scores.
Crumb's expressive content is heard to good effect in the works on this recording, which reflect several obsessions: the four books of Madrigals (th…
Symphony No. 4 / Session I
William Bolcom was born on May 26, 1938, in Seattle, and trained at the University of Washington and Stanford University, as well as with Darius Milhaud. He has written four symphonies, concertos for piano and for violin, chamber and solo instrumental music, and the mammoth setting of the forty-six Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, nearly thirty years in the composing.
In the early 1960s Bolcom worked with improvisational theater groups. Between 1965 and 1967 he wrote four …
Works By Faye-Ellen Silverman And Ralph Shapey
Faye-Ellen Silverman has been prolific throughout her career. She has written a wide variety of orchestral and chamber-music works, which have been performed by major ensembles throughout America and in Europe and Asia. A graduate of Barnard College, Harvard University, and Columbia University, she studied composition with, among others, Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Leon Kirchner, and Jack Beeson. Silverman's Passing Fancies (1985), whose patron, Paul Fromm, is remembered in the initials …
String Symphony / Sunday Morning / Eagles
Perhaps best known for his vast catalogue of vocal music－operas, song cycles, and choral works－Ned Rorem (b. 1923) also has composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, and an impressive array of other orchestral and chamber works. He received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for the orchestral suite Air Music.
This collection features three of his orchestral works, String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles. String Symphony dates from 1985 and was completed in the space of just eight weeks. Mr. Ro…
Symphony No. 2
The premieres of John Knowles Paine's two symphonies－the First in 1876, the Second in 1880－may be said to mark the effective beginning of the American symphonic tradition. American composer George W. Chadwick, who had been a young man in Boston in the 1870s, recalled that the Paine symphonies were "a stimulus and an inspiration to more than one ambitious musician of that time." Paine (1839-1906) studied with a German immigrant musician in Portland, Maine, then went to Berlin for several years. U…
Symphony No. 7/Balada: Steel Symphony
William Schuman was born in 1910 in New York. His earliest musical interests were at first confined to current popular music. In 1930, after hearing his first concert of symphonic music－Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic in a program of music by Wagner, Kodaly, and Robert Schumann－he redirected his life. Schuman later graduated from Columbia University and studied privately with Roy Harris. Symphony No. 7 premiered on October 21, 1960, under the direction of Charles Munch, who succeeded Kou…
Piano Concerto / Variations For Orchestra
While a student at the Horace Mann School, Elliott Carter came to know Charles Ives. Carter continued his education at Harvard and then studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Ives and Boulanger were formative influences: Carter's music draws on American experimentalism (Ives, Cowell, Crawford, Nancarrow, Varèse) and European modernism (Debussy, Stravinsky, the Viennese). Ever since he reached his stylistic maturity with the String Quartet No. 1 of 1951, Carter has continued to pursue an original…
Piano Works
Pianist Peter Serkin is renowned for his performances and recordings of contemporary music. He has worked closely with composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Toru Takemitsu, Luciano Berio, and Peter Lieberson; he also was a founding member of the chamber group Tashi.
Igor Stravinsky's 1925 Serenade en La was originally composed to suit phonograph players, with each movement designed to fit the three-minute capacity of each of four ten-inch 78rpm sides. The title, Stravinsky explained, did not mea…
Concerto For Oboe And Orchestra / Prism
George Rochberg seems an unlikely revolutionary, yet it was he, more than anyone else, who dealt the crushing blow to serialist orthodoxy. A student of Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Rochberg began as a modern mainstream composer. He later became involved with serialism, but with Contra mortem et tempus (1965), written after the death of his son, Rochberg hesitatingly but irrevocably re-embraced not only tonality but the whole universe of emotional states commonly as…
Works By: Hugh Aitken, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller
Perhaps from the habit of our nineteenth-century parlor-music tradition, perhaps from the frustration of trying to get orchestral works performed, American composers seem to have remained more active in the genre of the chamber sonata than their European counterparts. In America, the genre has received particular attention from composers of a classical or neoclassical bent, as the works on this recording, varied as they are in style and technique, bear out.
In 1945, when he wrote the Sonatina, W…
Hidden Sparks
This recording contains four works for violin by four disparate American composers with unique conceptions of the instrument and its possibilities, technical and expressive. Elliott Carter's Riconoscenza is a short work for unaccompanied violin imbued with a craggy, rough-hewn grandeur and arching melodic lines characteristic of his mature music. Fantasy for Violin and Piano by Ralph Shapey (b. 1921) typifies the unusual blend of astringency and lyricism of his dense, passionate and deeply rewa…
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, John Nelson (5), Jennie Hansen, Neil Rosenshein, Charles Martin Loeffler
La Mort De Tintagiles / Five Irish FantasiesThe music of Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) was a rarity in the United States. Much admired for its artistry, it was yet so individual and its Symbolist aesthetic so unusual that Loeffler acquired a reputation that set him apart from other American composers of his generation. Loeffler came to America at the age of twenty. Behind him he had a cosmopolitan European background: He was born in France and had lived there and in Germany, Hungary, Russia, and Switzerland.
As a composer Loeffler w…
Sinfonia / Symphony No. 1
John Harbison's music draws together gestures and ideas from musical worlds that reflect such favorite composers as Robert Schumann and Heinrich Schutz, the songs of George Gershwin, and the hieratic qualities of Igor Stravinsky. His work has always been expressive, though never with a heart-on-sleeve emoting of personal angst, a mode that simply does not interest him. Recently Harbison has shown an interest in recapturing such historical genres as the formal set of variations (as in his Variati…
The Cloisters
The vocal music on this recording documents three generations of American music, each characterized by its own ideals yet shaped by its relationship to the past. Heard together on one disc, this music provides a glimpse of the rapid and often radical aesthetic upheavals that American music has undergone during the twentieth century. The three settings by Arthur Shepherd (1880-1958) - Golden Stockings, To a Trout, and Virgil - were composed shortly before World War II and exhibit a sensitive …
Piano Concerto
The Piano Concerto was Peter Lieberson's first orchestral work and was, from the outset, conceived with Peter Serkin in mind as the soloist. He wrote it after a long period of immersion in the study of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. Throughout what Lieberson regards as the "journey" of the Piano Concerto, the character of each movement changes dramatically, though the very tune that unfolds at the opening of the work returns in full just before the end. Each of the three movements reflects in a mus…
Antony And Cleopatra
This is the premiere recording of Samuel Barber's Antony & Cleopatra, written for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. Along with Vanessa, it is one of the peaks of Barber's output and one of the great American operas. Though it is rarely staged, this recording allows us to enjoy the fruits of Barber's accomplishment: the glamour of much of the vocal writing, particularly for Cleopatra; the richness, color, variety and imagination of the orchestration; the s…
Winter Cantata, Other Works
Vincent Persichetti's choral music plays an important part role in his output. In many ways his Mass is an orthodox a cappella Mass, its Renaissance heritage reflected in its use of a Gregorian chant as the unifying theme, and in its reliance on imitative counterpoint as its chief developmental technique. His Winter Cantata, based on a collection of haiku, is scored for women's chorus, flute, and marimba. Without any overt musical references, the work is Japanese in spirit, largely as a result o…
Concerto For Clarinet And Orchestra / Third Essay For Orchestra, Opus 47
The Third Essay was Samuel Barber's last completed work and its drama and lyricism are entirely characteristic of the neo-Romantic style he composed in for his entire life, a style which won him a large and faithful audience. In his avowed concern for writing music that communicates with the listening public, John Corigliano could be seen as an inheritor of Barber's mantle. The Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra is a large-scale work that demonstrates his eclectic style at its finest. Corigli…
Form
Comet-like radiance, conviction, fervent intensity, penetrating thought on many levels of seriousness and humor, combined with breathtaking adventurousness and originality, marked the inner and outer life of Stefan Wolpe, as they do his compositions. -- Elliott Carter
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is an acknowledged master of modern music whose oeuvre has had a lasting influence on both classical and jazz musicians. Though receptive to prevailing musical trends, Wolpe was an individualist who forg…
Music of the Federal Era
Music of the Federal Era is an excellent overview of late 18th and early 19th century compositions by Benjamin Carr, Oliver Shaw, Raynor Taylor and others, performed on period instruments. The variety of styles represented on this disc reflects two kinds of music that existed quite separately: one centered in the cities, essentially European in origin, and the other in villages and the countryside. For while America found itself politically independent at the end of the Revolutionary War, cultur…