William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Two figures who occupied positions of considerable institutional authority in American musical life alongside their careers as composers - and whose music has suffered from that association, as if institutional prominence and compositional seriousness were mutually exclusive. William Schuman was president of the Juilliard School from 1945 to 1962, and subsequently the first president of Lincoln Center: positions that placed him at the administrative heart of American musical culture while he continued to compose orchestral and chamber works of genuine ambition. His Symphony No. 9, subtitled The Ardeatine Caves, responds to the 1944 massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine in Rome - the Nazi reprisal killing of 335 Italian civilians - with a music that neither commemorates decoratively nor aestheticises atrocity, but attempts something harder: a sustained formal response to historical horror. Vincent Persichetti, who taught at Juilliard for decades and whose output spans band music, piano sonatas, orchestral works, and vocal music in an almost bewildering range, is represented here by his Sinfonia Janiculum. On RCA Red Seal - one of the period's more prestigious classical imprints, giving these composers a platform commensurate with their institutional standing.