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…
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…
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…
When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd
Of the numerous settings of Walt Whitmans poetry, and this poem in particular, Sessions's is generally agreed to be one of the very finest and most sensitive. His mature style - a highly personal, instantly recognizable mix of severity and control with passion and serenity - projects the poetry now in simple chordal declamation, now in the long, high-arched melodies of which he is the master, conveying wonderfully the feel and variety of Whitman's lines. Over the years, Sessions's elegy has ta…
Quartet Romantic
The generation of American composers who came of age in the 1920s are now generally acknowledged as seminal figures in the creation of a truly indigenous American art music. Quartet Romantic makes available for the first time on CD several important chamber works by four of these figures - Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Wallingford Riegger, and John Becker - as well as an early work by Cowell's most famous pupil, Lou Harrison.
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, John Alden Carpenter, Henry F. Gilbert, Adolph Weiss, John Powell
Orchestral WorksIf diversity and independence are definitive American traits, it would be hard to find four roughly contemporaneous native composers more unmistakably American. Markedly different in personality, each going his own stubbornly separate way, each spoke his uniquely individual dialect. They were born in successive decades (the last four of the nineteenth century) in different regions, and they were even more diverse in their musical training, affinities, and styles, yet they managed to create music…
The Sound of Arvo Pärt
2025 stock The sound of silence: Estonian-born Arvo Pärt is considered the contemporary composer par excellence, a cult figure of the avant-garde, a man who redefined modernism with music of hypnotic tension and fascinating spirituality. The performers of the orchestral and choral music on this release are top-quality artists and ensembles from Pärt’s native Estonia, notably the conductors Paavo Järvi and Tõnu Kaljuste, who present uniquely authentic readings.
Der Maurer, Vol.1
2010 release ** "A multifaceted personality and artist in ethics, as well as aesthetics, Enrico Gabrielli has collected in the space of a few years what an average independent musician collects in a lifetime. Specifically, a series of important collaborations with the major world (Afterhours, Vinicio Capossela, Niccolò Fabi, Morgan), esteem and excellent feedback for shared projects (Mariposa and Calibro 35) and a status as a third-party arranger universally recognized in the Italian musical env…
Orbits • Western Springs • Hieroglyphics 3
1999 release ** "In 1950 Henry Brant began to write spatial music of a particular kind in which the planned positioning of the performers throughout the hall, as well as on stage, is an essential factor in the composing scheme. This procedure, which limits and defines the contrasted music assigned to each performing group, takes as its point of departure the ideas of Charles Ives. Brant's principal works since 1950 are all spatial; his catalogue now comprises nearly 100 such works, each for a di…
The Henry Brant Collection, Vol. 2
2004 release ** Let no-one say that Henry Brant, America’s senior experimental composer, doesn’t have a sense of humor. If Charles Ives had been into Monty Python it would not have reached the heights of epic grandeur and inspired lunacy heard on this second volume of Henry Brant works. Here are three concertos: a triple concerto for Oberlin College’s zaniest, a violin concerto for Daniel Kobialka (violin wizard of the San Francisco Symphony), and a double bass concerto for Lewis Paer (who has r…
Savage Altars
2006 release ** "Savage Altars alternates rather abruptly between spooky and harrowing sections of rhythmic choral chanting and drop-dead gorgeous interlocking scalar passages that almost seem to float in suspended bliss. Its structure is somewhat episodic: one section begins and ends, followed by the next section, and so forth, which creates the feel of an unfolding procession or ritual (and does so more effectively in its concise 20 minutes than John Taverner's bloated The Veil Of The Temple d…
Luciano Berio, Salvatore Sciarrino, Luca Francesconi, Ludovico Einaudi, Armando Gentilucci, Giorgio Federico Ghedini
Ricorrenze1990 release ** Luciano Berio: Ricorrenze Salvatore Sciarrino: Quintettino #2 Luca Francesconi: Attesa Ludovico Einaudi: Ai margini dell' aria Armando Gentilucci: Cile 1973 Giorgio Federico Ghedini: Quintetto #1 "The collection here draws together pieces from the "hard" wing of post-World War II composers. The Arnold Quintet plays all this music with flair, wit, and understanding. Berio is probably the best-known name on the disc, and I enjoyed his Ricorrenze ("Recurrence") more than the other p…
Memoires D'Oubli - Stream - Portrait de Genevieve Asse - Empreintes Nocturnes
1993 release (RARE) ** "This disc, which brings together recent works with two pieces from 1981, allows for a very interesting journey. It is here with Bernard Noël, a relentless questioner of our language, that these Mémoires d’oubli open. With a philharmonic orchestra at its best, which is not always the case when playing contemporary music, the singer Helen Merrill and Bernard Noël himself bring to life a text that goes from simple phonemes to a beautiful poem on the theme of the face. Instru…
Episodes And Collisions: Chamber Music And Songs
2008 release ** "The composer Jørgen Plaetner (1930-2002) is well known as one of Scandinavia's electronic music pioneers. His electronic works from the 1960s remain among the most original of their kind. However, Plaetner also has a more traditional side and wrote a large number of acoustic works.One of the big chamber works from Plaetner's late period is the trio Episodes and Collisions. It was written in 1996 for LINensemble with its combination of clarinet, cello and piano. Jørgen Plaetner h…
Live 2
1990 release **
Early Piano Music
2002 release ** "This CD mainly consists of very early pieces by Arthur Vincent Lourié, heavily under the spell of Scriabin & Romanticism."
Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone
For her new and most radical album "Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone", Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.
Luigi Nono w/ Ludwig van Beethoven, First Visit
The relationship between Ludwig van Beethoven’s "op. 132 string quartet" and Luigi Nono’s "Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima" spans 155 years while sharing several conceptual dimensions – among them, their respective composers’ intense idealism in the pursuit of art as a transformational, unifying experience; their utopian visions of political and social justice; and the struggle to translate a profound personal expression into a consequential public reality. - Art Lange
Obras Electroacústicas 1969-1981
Eduardo Polonio (1941–2024) was one of the foundational figures in the emergence and development of electroacoustic music in Spain. The anthology "Eduardo Polonio: Obra electroacústica 1969–1981" revives his legacy with a selection of essential pieces from his early electroacoustic period. The album includes eight compositions created between 1969 and 1981, spanning from Polonio's early experiments at the Alea Electronic Music Laboratory in Madrid to his later work at the Phonos Laboratory in Ba…