Catalog

David Maslanka was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts and attended Oberlin where he studied with Joseph Wood. He spent a year at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and did graduate work in composition with H. Owen Reed at Michigan State University. He has served on the faculties of various universities and colleges and presently resides in Missoula, Montana. He writes: "Song Book is a set of pieces that are song-like - that is, intimate and expressive, though not necessarily quiet. The solo flute feels like a voice to me, a voice which has a complex story to tell, in the form of musical dreams. The 371 Four-Part Chorales by Bach have been a long-time focal point for my study and meditation. These chorales are the models for melodic and harmonic movement used by every beginning music theory student. I had my first encounter with them as a college freshman in 1961. Ten years ago I returned to singing and playing them as a daily warm-up for my composing. I have come to experience the chorales as touchstones for dream space. I have used many of them as the jumping off point for my own compositions. The feeling is one of opening an unmarked door and being suddenly thrust into a different world. The chorales are the doors." Daron Hagen was born in Milwaukee and studied at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. He continued his studies at the University of Wisconsin, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School, working with teachers as diverse as Ned Rorem, Joseph Schwantner, David Diamond and Witold Lutoslawski. Mr. Hagen writes: "Excited by the technical challenges that making winds and voices work well together posed, I discussed with conductor Michael Haithcock the possibility of adding to the repertoire for voice and wind ensemble. The result was The Heart of the Stranger, a song cycle for baritone voice and orchestral winds, which was first performed September 20, 1999 at Baylor University by the Baylor Wind Ensemble, Paul Kreider, baritone soloist under the direction of Michael Haithcock."

Paul Seiko Chihara was born in Seattle, Washington and received his DMA from Cornell University in 1965 as a student of Robert Palmer. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in Berlin and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. With Toru Takemitsu, Chihara was composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont in 1971, and was the first composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (Neville Marriner, conductor). He is currently on the music faculty of UCLA. Chihara's prize-winning concert works have been performed in most major cities and arts centers in the United States and Europe. Perhaps due to the extraordinary color sensitivity of his music, he has had an illustrious parallel career composing for stage, TV and film. He has composed the scores for over 90 motion pictures and television series including the film Prince of the City and the television series China Beach. He has also worked on Broadway, serving as music consultant and orchestrator for Duke Ellington's hit musical Sophisticated Ladies, and as composer for Shogun the Musical. He was composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Ballet from 1973-1986. While there, he composed many trailblazing works, including the first full-length American ballet The Tempest.

Steve Margoshes is the composer of the international hit musical Fame. The inspirational musical about New York City's High School of Performing Arts (written with lyricist Jacques Levy) has been performed on every continent in the world in a dozen languages. This CD continues Steve's collaboration with Fame creator, David De Silva aka Father Fame, to produce a new body of work for symphony orchestra. He has composed and orchestrated these "symphonic pop" pieces under the banner Symphonic Fame. Steve's work as an orchestrator in the theater includes the Who's Tommy, Smokey Joe's CafT (the songs of Leiber and Stoller) and the Elton John/Tim Rice musical, Aida. Barnabas Kelemen was born in Budapest in 1978. He has studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest since 1990 and in 2002 was named the gold medalist at the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis. This is the first release in a new series from Albany Records called "American Light" which is classical music presented with a lighter touch. The British have been doing this sort of thing for years: presenting "light" music by serious composers and we feel that it is time we catch up. This series will present well-crafted music by serious composers whose music should appeal to a larger audience without pandering to it.

Junctures written in 1979 and Spirits of the Night in 1976, are alike in the sense that the musical materials used in both works are similar with the startling exception of the soprano in Junctures. But the listener will probably experience each of the works as vastly different from one another. Junctures uses the same orchestral forces as Spirits of the Night but sparingly, less overtly. The energy one senses is more subdued, with more "air" surrounding unfolding events. Sunday Silence is a 15-minute work for solo piano completed in November 1989 and premiered by Alan Mandel on October 1, 1990 at Weill Recital Hall in New York. Characteristic of Bazelon's late style, and reflecting the composer's passion for horse racing, it is named for the winner of the 1989 Kentucky Derby and racing horse of the year - Sunday Silence. Concatenations was commissioned by Frank Epstein for the New England Conservatory of Music Percussion Ensemble. The first performance was on May 1, 1977 with Frank Epstein conducting and Burton Fine, violist at Jordan Hall in Boston.

Born in Paris of Czech parents, Tomas Svoboda spent the years of World War II in Boston where he began his musical education on the piano. Showing a early talent for composing, Svoboda completed his first opus, now published, at the age of 9. After his family's return to Prague in 1946, he continued his music studies entering the Prague Conservatory in 1954 as its youngest student. The premiere of the First Symphony (recorded on this CD) in 1957, performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vaclav Smetacek, caused a sensation, for until Svoboda walked onto the stage to acknowledge the applause, many in the audience had not realized the 36-minute symphony had been composed by a 16 year old boy not yet even formally schooled in composition or orchestration. In 1962, after graduating from the Prague Conservatory with degrees in percussion, composition and conducting, Svoboda entered the Academy of Music in Prague. By this time, performances and radio broadcasts of his orchestral works had brought him national recognition, clearly establishing him as one of the finest young composers of his generation. In 1964, his family escaped communist-ruled Czechoslovakia and settled in the United States where Svoboda enrolled in the University of Southern California as a graduate student in 1966. His skills were already so far advanced that the department allowed him to forego the usual courses and study privately with Ingolf Dahl and Halsey Stevens, the Chairman of the Department, a composer and Bartok scholar. Stevens has written: "It was almost embarrassing to have him come to lessons with his work so completely and satisfactorily realized that it needed almost nothing in the way of criticism." After receiving a master's degree in 1969, Tomas Svoboda accepted a teaching position at Portland State University in Oregon where he taught composition and music theory. He retired from active teaching duties in June 1999.

Steven Stucky was half-finished with a brief work for large orchestra before deciding on the French term son et lumiere for his title. Meaning "sound and light," the coinage originated in Chambord in the early 1950s to refer to outdoor evening spectacles that featured brilliant lighting effects and recorded music as the background for talks about historical buildings. In Stucky"s resulting "orchestral entertainment whose subject is the play of colors, bright surfaces and shimmery textures," the composer explains that his aim was to "recapture the Tlan and immediacy that regular meters and repetitive rhythms make possible." Today, Stucky is professor of composition and director of the new music group, Ensemble X, at Cornell. A short, highly evocative - almost mystical - work for solo English horn and chamber orchestra, "Watercolors is not about the substance of water," says the composer Gabriel Ian Gould, "as much as it is about our perception of water. It also has very little to do with watercolor painting, as the title might suggest, although there is something in this piece of the technique's soft edges and blended colors. I have attempted to represent not water itself, but rather its fluid qualities of refraction and reflection, opacity and translucence, lightness, darkness and the myriad shades and tones in between." This work won Gould his second BMI Student Composer Award. John Harbison's Cello Concerto was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Scored for large orchestra, it features an especially varied percussion section, with an array of pitched and unpitched gongs suggestive of the sort of East Asian ensemble called a gamelan. Dedicated to and premiered by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, it debuted in Boston on April 7, 1994, with Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. These first performers, according to the composer, considerably determined the concerto's character and flavor. Harbison notes that the three connected movements "all move without warning between slow and fast, expressive and virtuosic, domestic and exotic. These moods are connected by the solo cello line, which rises from the East, eventually to descend, refracted, in the West." Almost joltingly catchy, straightforward and down-to-earth after the light sensitive works of this disc's other composers, Morton Gould's Symphony No. 2 (the handwritten score gives two subtitles: "On Marching Tunes" and "Symphony on Marching Tunes") was commissioned by the Young Men's Christian Association for its hundredth anniversary and dedicated to "the Freedom-loving Youth of the World." The premiere took place during a radio broadcast by the New York Philharmonic, under Vladimir Golschmann, on June 4, 1944. An anecdote, courtesy of Gould's biographer, Peter Goodman, attaches to that first (and apparently, before the Albany Symphony Orchestra's 1999 concert, the only) performance of the complete work: Golschmann had scheduled a rehearsal of the symphony the day before broadcast and asked Gould whether he planned to attend. The composer - known for his unrelenting work ethic - surprisingly said no, claiming some pressing engagement about whose nature he was surprisingly tight lipped. After the broadcast, Golschmann met the composer at the Russian Tea Room, where Gould introduced him to his companion, his wife Shirley. "I had no idea you were married!" the conductor said. "When was the wedding?" "Yesterday," said Gould. The timing of the premiere is also interesting on the level of global, not just intimate, affairs. Two days later, in the climactic military thrust of World War Two's European theater, Allied forces would invade Normandy. This led ultimately to victory, but victory built on a mound of many, many lives. The structuring of Gould's symphony may be reflective of the true cost of triumph.

The works on this CD present a collection of songs that reflect the richness and sophistication of the American song tradition from the 19th century up through the end of the 20th century. The first half of this recording includes Battle Pieces, a song cycle written by Warren Michel Swenson; the second half contains 11 19th century songs by European and African American composers. All the works on this CD interact with two central themes: the Civil War era and the interconnections between the Black and White culture in America. In his song cycle, Swenson, a contemporary American composer, sets Herman Melville's Civil War poems, Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War. Also included on the disc are 19th century songs that come out of the minstrel and parlor song tradition. With easily available published sheet music, the dissemination of popular music in the 19th century reached a large audience that both reflected and helped shape values of that time. Considered all together, this collection presents two views, a century apart, of how music can articulate the culture and themes surrounding the Civil War era.

For seven years, the New York-based contemporary music ensemble Sequitur has been re-defining the concert by finding new contexts for new music. Through staging events incorporating theater and dance, or producing tantalizing cabarets on themes like lust and greed, Sequitur turns the traditional sanctimonious contemporary music experience upside down. On this disc, they re-examine the contemporary American concerto. Although it dates back to Baroque composers in the late 17th century, the concerto reached its artistic pinnacle with Romantic composers of the 19th and early 20th century. But what does the concerto mean in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, when personal freedoms are threatened both by indiscriminate acts of terrorism and by responses that many find necessary in order to preserve safety and stability? For starters, the paradigm of “us versus them” – the message behind the concertino and ripieno of the Baroque concerto grosso as well as the heroic romantic solo concerto – seems outmoded. We shun the model of a group controlling an individual, just as we shun this model turned inside out. And our view of an individual now is rarely one of hero, or anti-hero, or even of complete self-determination. All of these ideas affect the concerto of today, where the role of the soloist is not always clearly defined, where other players may rise as soloists at times and then disappear again into the fabric, where sub-groups may compete with the soloist and with each other for prominence, where the soloist may not be poised to interact and hopefully to triumph. Even the word “concerto” may be suspect: Only Elliott Carter’s work among the four on this disc employs the word “concerto” in its title.

Edward Joseph Collins was born in Joliet, Illinois and was the youngest of nine children all of whom were musical. He studied first in Chicago with Rudolf Ganz and then in Berlin with Max Bruch and Engelbert Humperdinck, among others. He returned to the United States in the fall of 1912 and began to concertize. During 1913/14, he was appointed assistant conductor of the Century Opera Company in New York. In 1914, he traveled once again to Europe where he was engaged as an assistant conductor at the Bayreuth Festival, where his duties also included playing the timpani. In August 1914, the outbreak of hostilities in Europe necessitated his return to America. When the U.S. entered the War, he began as an infantry private, but soon rose to the rank of Lieutenant. When Collins returned to Chicago, he resumed his performing career and married a young voice student named Frieda Mayer whose father was Oscar Mayer, the owner of the Chicago Meat Packing Company that bears his name. Erik Eriksson, Collins' biographer has written: "The music of Edward Joseph Collins deserves closer attention and more frequent performance. Collins was highly original in his organization and employment of ideas, in the flow with which they were assembled, and in the unforced introduction of American idioms to works that were conceived with great seriousness of purpose. With strength of character and courage that must be admired, Collins composed music that also exhibits an endearing capacity to convey genuine and enduring emotion." See also TROY267 for more of Collin's music.

Karl Boelter's music ranges from contemplative to visceral, from serious to playful. He was born in Milwaukee and studied composition at Ball State and the University of Michigan. He has studied with William Bolcom, Leslie Bassett and William Albright. For several years, he resided in Atlanta where he served as music curator at the High Museum of Art. This experience provided direct involvement with performances by some of the 20th century's greatest artists as well as a personal exploration into the diversity of artistic expression: classic blues and jazz, Cajun two-steps, the music of Africa, and Cowboy poetry. Dr. Boelter is professor of music composition at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, where he currently serves as Chair of the Department of Music, Theater and Dance.

Edwin London's music, sometimes literary or sacred, often theatrical, and at times humorous, is the product of his broad experience in diverse styles. London has been a major figure in the field of new music for more than 40 years. Best described as "a champion of new American music" he has formed two highly acclaimed ensembles: Ineluctable Modality, a new music choral ensemble in 1968, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in 1980. As a composer, conductor, teacher, administrator and persuasive advocate for the value of music as a civilizing force, his influence has been extraordinary. Born in Philadelphia, he began his career with characteristic disregard of rigid musical categories, as a horn player in both symphony orchestras and the Oscar Pettiford jazz band. Everything London has done in his long career has reflected his ability to move easily between the worlds of "concert hall" and "popular" music - with occasional stops at places in between.

Wayne Peterson was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota and has lived in San Francisco since 1960. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1992, crowning a distinguished career which began in 1958, with the Free Variations premiered and recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra under Antal Dorati. His catalog of more than 60 works included works for orchestra, chorus and chamber ensembles. Peterson has been professor of music at San Francisco State University for more than three decades and from 1992-94 was a guest professor of composition at Stanford University. He studied at the University of Minnesota and the Royal Academy of Music in London. Eric Moe writes: "Listening to Wayne Peterson's music is awfully rewarding. Luscious on the surface, it amply repays the most intensive listening. It's a little like taking a journey through a gorgeous Alpine landscape - you soon lose passivity and are drawn into expectation, anticipating the view of the waterfall around the bend in the road, the unfolding of the mountain's shape as it is gradually revealed, the surprise of the robin's egg blue color in the pool of melt water at the bottom of the snowfield. As with all great music, you become less of a somnolent passenger and more of a backseat driver as the music unfolds. And with repeated listenings, you can privately partake of the delight small children have in telegraphing details of the narrative to those around them."

Elizabeth Hoffman holds degrees in music from Swarthmore College, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Washington. She studied composition and analog electronic music with electronic music pioneer Bulent Arel at Stony Brook. During her doctoral composition studies at the University of Washington, she began using computers for musical ends. Elizabeth Hoffman's recognition includes awards from the Seattle Arts Commission; American Composers Forum Jerome Foundation; Bourges International Competition Residence prize; and Prix Ars Electronica Mention. She is currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, Department of Music at New York University, where she also directs the Washington Square Computer Music Studio.

Robert Lombardo was born in Hartford, Connecticut to Sicilian immigrants. He graduated with a master's degree in composition from the Hartt School of Music where he studied with Arnold Franchetti. He was awarded a Ph.D. in composition from the State University of Iowa. Lombardo holds the title of Professor Emeritus from Roosevelt University where he was Professor of Theory and Composition and Composer-in-residence from 1965 until 1999. The composer writes: "Although the mandolin has occasionally been used by composers in contemporary literature, e.g., Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Crumb, I always thought of the instrument in the folk category. About a dozen years ago, my perception of the use of the mandolin changed. In 1991, Dimitris Marinos, a student who recently arrived from Greece, came to my studio at Roosevelt University for his first composition lesson. He had a mandolin case tucked under his arm. After his lesson, I was curious and asked him if he wouldn't mind playing his mandolin for me. I guess I expected him to play a folk tune, and was pleasantly surprised - amazed would be a better word - when he played a very complex work replete with multiple stops, fast chromatic passages that covered the entire range of the instrument - in an apparent effortless fashion. I was captivated by this young man's musicality and virtuosity. After he showed me some of the instrument's technical capabilities, I thought about writing a short composition for him." That is the origin of how the compositions that appear on this disc came about.

Horn soloist Eric Ruske has established himself as an artist of international acclaim. Named Associate Principal horn of the Cleveland Orchestra at the age of 20, his impressive solo career began when he won the 1986 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, First Prize in the 1987 American Horn Competition, and in 1988, the highest prize in the Concours International d'Interpretation Musicale in Reims, France. Of his recording of the complete Mozart Concerti with Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, The New York Times stated, "Mr. Ruske's approach, firmly positioned with the boundaries of balance, coherence and good taste that govern the Classical Style, enchants by virtue of its confidence, imagination and ebullient virtuosity." A member of the faculty of Boston University since 1990, Mr. Ruske also directs the Horn Seminar at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

This is the third release on Albany Records of the music of Edward Collins. (Irish Rhapsody) from 1929, is the fullest realization of Collins's thoughts on the Irish folksong "O! The Taters they are small over here!" a tune he used in several compositions between 1927 and 1932. In Hibernia, the composer's imagination, his gift for orchestral tone painting and his ability to establish a reflective mood are lovingly in evidence. No doubt Collins's Irish heritage manifested itself, permeating the nineteen-minute work with an atmospheric mixture of gaiety and wistful melancholy. While it reflects all the technical facility Collins had gained from his musical training, it is the antithesis of an academic piece. It is scored for a large orchestra. Considering Collins's training in composition and success as a concert pianist, his urge early on to tackle a piano concerto was not surprising. Ultimately, Collins wrote three concerti, manifesting growing assurance as a composer with numbers two and three. The first, which William Wolfram describes as a "pastoral" work, came before stylistic influences had jelled into something more personal. The first performance took place in December, 1924 under Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with the composer as soloist. On November 18, 1940, Collins reminisced in his journal somewhat enviously about his friend Alfred Wallenstein. Once a section cellist in the Chicago Symphony, "Wally" was invited by Toscanini to audition for the solo cello position with the New York Philharmonic. Collins wistfully remarks that his friend "took the job and shook the dust of Chicago from his shoes." Collins went on to note that Wallenstein later became music director of New York City's WOR radio station and then conductor of several concerts immediately following the Toscanini series. In the same journal entry, Collins wrote: "Wally asked me to make some arrangements for him and I intend to begin with 'Li'l David." The work heard on this recording was completed in 1940. Submitted by Collins in response to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra commission on the occasion of its Golden Jubilee, Lament and Jig was the sixth of a set of twelve variations written by a dozen different composers under the collective title, Variations on an American Folk-Song. Other composers included Leo Sowerby, John Alden Carpenter and Rudolf Ganz. The theme was "El-A-Noy, an Illinois pioneer recruitment song, perhaps selected by Frederick Stock who conducted the premiere on April 17, 1941.

Gena Branscombe was a major figure in song writing from the turn of the century through the 1930s, the period when the solo recital was a viable venue for the professional singer. Gena grew up immersed from an early age in the musical life in the small Canadian town of Picton, Ontario. She studied with local teachers, finished high school with honors at 15, and then went to Chicago where she enrolled in the Chicago Musical College as a scholarship student of Rudolph Ganz. Basically on her own from age 16 onwards, she taught piano students and accompanied singers to supplement her income. In 1901, she joined the Musical College as a piano teacher. In 1907, she moved to Walla Walla, Washington, to establish the music department and teach at Whitman College. In 1909-1910, she studied in Berlin with Ganz and Englebert Humperdinck. She returned to America in 1910 and married and then settled in New York City where she and her husband had four daughters. She then moved to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, where she began to participate in local choruses. She wrote much choral music and succeeded Mrs. H.H.A. Beach as the second president of the Society of American Women Composers. The 1930s marked the creation of the Branscombe Choral, a women's chorus. The chorus was finally disbanded in 1954, when Gena was 73 years old. She spent the rest of her life traveling with her daughters and composing. Her first songs were published in Chicago in the 1890s, while she was still a student. Her last song was published in 1957. Her greatest activity as a published song composer was between 1906 and 1922, after which her attention turned to choral works.

This recording was sparked by concerts in New Hampshire and North Carolina performed by the Ciompi Quartet with guest artists, Susan Narucki and Steven Tharp. The Quartet loved working with both singers, and had the idea that a disc of music featuring a solo singer with string quartet would be both unusual and intriguing. Each of the four works on this disc is wonderfully evocative, and each exploits the medium extremely well. The title for the CD, Melancholie, is taken from the Hindemith cycle, but it also expresses the overall feeling of the four works. The two larger pieces on this CD, Hindemith's Melancholie and Vaughan-Williams' On Wenlock Edge, have interesting parallels. Both are works by young men who went on to have long and distinguished careers, both works represent a coming of age for their respective composers, and both composers must be counted among the major figures of 20th century music with many works now in the standard repertoire. Both of the other works, by Kim and Part continue the theme of melancholy.

Arthur Kreiger holds degrees from The University of Connecticut and from Columbia University. His teachers have included Hale Smith, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Chou Wen-Chung and Mario Davidovsky. His catalog contains pieces for orchestra, chorus, mixed chamber ensembles, piano, solo voice and the electronic medium. He is presently on the faculty of Connecticut College in New London. This recording collects compositions with electronic sounds from a 23 year period (1974 to 1997) of the composer's life. The music was created during the composer's 27 year association with the Electronic Music Center of Columbia University, where he worked as a student, technical assistant and teacher. Although the technological means of producing electronic sounds has evolved rapidly over the last half century, Kreiger's commitment to the formation of tightly interlocking mosaics of electronic and acoustic sounds has never wavered. Yet existing simultaneously with the frequent partnerships between electronic and acoustic means is an idiomatic electronic language that distinguishes itself from the acoustic instruments, enveloping those instruments in a universe of exotic sounds.

William McClelland grew up near Goodison, Michigan, and received a degree in composition from the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His works have been commissioned and presented by ensembles and organizations throughout the US and internationally. As a performer McClelland has played keyboards for productions at the New York Shakespeare Festival and Dance Theater Workshop, and has premiered works by composers including Carl Ruggles and John Cage. He has taught piano at the University of Massachusetts (Boston) and was director of the music program at the Elizabeth Seeger School in New York City. He is leader of the jazz septet The Feetwarmers for which he writes, plays piano and sings. He lives in North Bergen, New Jersey, and, in addition to music, has been active in many environmental efforts.

Composer Charles Fussell was Artistic Director of New Music Harvest, Boston's first city-wide festival of contemporary music and Co-Founder and Director of the New England Composer's Orchestra. He is currently a member of the Composition faculty at Boston University. The composer writes: "The Astronaut's Tale was mostly written during a generous two month fellowship at Yadoo in Saratoga Springs in June and July of 1996, and was completed the following winter. It is conceived as a numbers-opera; arias, duets, trios, with preludes and interludes, all connected by a narrator. The story traces a young man's life from his first experience of loss, his dog killed by a car, the appearance of a mysterious Einstein-like guide, his youthful desire to become an astronaut, marriage, and the fulfillment of his ambition. The setting is our own time with its confrontation of science and religion. The opera concludes with a meditation on the nature of the cosmos and our experience of life and death within."

Composer Judith Lang Zaimont is internationally recognized for the expressive strength, color and dynamism of her distinctive style. Many of her 100 works are prize-winning compositions; these include three symphonies, chamber opera, oratorios and cantatas, music for wind ensemble, a wide variety of instrumental and vocal chamber works for varying ensembles, and solo music for string and wind instruments, piano, organ, and voice. Her major works for piano are primarily recent, most of them composed since 1998. This is perhaps unusual in that the piano is her own instrument (she began studying at the age of five), and one might have reasonably expected considerable creative attention on her part from the very first to an instrument she knows so well.

For those of us involved in Albany Records, we feel that the music of Don Gillis is really "cross-over" music - music that can indeed make the interested listener cross-over to our side of the street where those of us are found who enjoy "serious" classical music. Real "cross-over" classical music is music that can be enjoyed by all who love serious music. There ARE many sides to classical music: Schoenberg and Charles Wuorinen are one side, Beethoven and Brahms are another and Don Gillis is another. They ALL can be loved by the serious listener! American Light represents music by composers we feel are legitimate composers of lighter music or music that will appeal immediately to a larger audience. Don Gillis knew the craft. He could make an orchestra sound as good as anyone. Toscanini knew this. This is why he hired him as the arranger for his NBC Orchestra. He could create memorable tunes with the best of them; tunes that would stick with you in your mind; tunes you would want to hear over and over again. And Gillis had his own unique character more so than so many other composers. You hear a piece of music by Gillis, you know it is by Gillis from almost the first measure. Actually, this is the second volume of the music of Don Gillis on Albany Records. Volume 1 is on Albany (TROY391) and is conducted by David Alan Miller with the Albany Symphony Orchestra. If you know that volume than you know what to expect from Gillis' music. If you do not, get this volume and go back and get the first one. Happily, here is music that is infectious, music that truly belongs to the "cross-over" genre in the best sense of the word.

Steve Margoshes is the composer of the international hit musical Fame. The inspirational musical about New York City's High School of Performing Arts (written with lyricist Jacques Levy) has been performed on every continent in the world in many languages. This CD continues Steve's collaboration with Fame creator, David De Silva, to produce a new body of work for symphony orchestra. He has composed and orchestrated these "symphonic pop" pieces under the banner Symphonic Fame. Steve's work as an orchestrator in the theater includes The Who's Tommy, Smokey Joe's CafT (the songs of Leiber and Stoller), the Elton John/Tim Rice musical, Aida, and the Boy George musical, Taboo. The Romantic Suite from Fame - The Musical features the lyric and ballad side of Fame. The Dream Symphony (for piano and orchestra) is inspired by the idea of a youthful dance company performing a contemporary version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ballade for Trumpet is an uplifting and romantic melody developed in a free-form style. It is performed by Gyorgy Geiger, Hungary's most respected trumpet soloist. This is Forever is inspired by Mildred Cram's novella, Forever (1935). In Search of Hidden Treasure is a Symphonic Adventure inspired by Paolo Coelho's enchanting novel, The Alchemist.

What is the American Spirit? How can a country of such diversity and individualism have a national spirit? Perhaps the diversity and individualism ARE the American Spirit. That is certainly true in American music: everything from European influenced classicism to home-grown fusions of jazz or rock. This CD represents a great many different American styles spanning the twentieth century, from two of her greatest early masters, through mid-century serialism and pop-influence, to late century experimentation and codification. Sean Osborn has traveled the US and Europe as soloist and traveled the world during his eleven years with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He has also performed as principal clarinet with the New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, the Seattle Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times dubbed him "...an excellent clarinetist," and the Boston Globe called him "...a miracle." Making his recital debut at the Kennedy Center at the age of 17, Sean is a top prize winner in both the ARTS Competition and the International Clarinet Society Competition, and in 1984 was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. He studied at the Eastman School and the Curtis Institute of Music. He is also a respected teacher and has given numerous master classes at such institutions as Rice University, Baylor University, the University of Puget Sound and two at the Manhattan School of Music. He is also an award winning composer.

Elizabeth Brown grew up on an agricultural research station near Camden, Alabama. She studied piano, sang in the church choir, and played mallet percussion in the school band until she started playing flute at 16, and fell in love with it. She attended the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, then moved to New York and received a Master's degree in flute performance from the Juilliard School in 1977. In her late twenties she began writing chamber pieces for her colleagues, never having formally studied composition. Since then, there have been hundreds of performances of her music worldwide. Kyle Gann in Chamber Music Magazine writes: "Elizabeth Brown writes the only music I know of in which the flute might be playing "London Bridge is Falling Down" while the cello is sliding through a long glissando underneath, yet nothing feels incongruous. There's a kind of imaginary quality to her music. It's as if not only each piece but each passage is based on some strange conceit: a bird sings while a pianist plays Mozart and a cellist shakes like a bowl full of Jell-O. Each conceit morphs into the next in a stream of non-sequiturs, and yet every juncture is smoothly blended, no seam visible. It's elegant, quiet, thoughtful, well-crafted music, and as bizarre as hell. Imagine walking into a Magritte painting: fish protrude from the vase instead of flowers, the chairs are bolted to the ceiling, but the wallpaper is lovely and the furnishings tasteful. That's a little what listening to Elizabeth Brown is like." The composer writes: "I think and dream in music, and to listen to my chamber music is to eavesdrop on an intimate, lyrical, melancholy interior world. The sound landscape is resonant, smooth, and extremely elastic - ideas can wobble or completely dissolve and slide away. Fragments of familiar tunes sometimes drift through, disappearing so quickly you're not sure if you actually heard them. While it can sound improvisatory, the music is honed over a long period of time and carefully notated. Pieces often include exotic or non-western instruments, and the playing techniques and musical styles of these other instruments influence all my writing. I use subtle microtonal gestures and inflections within a predominantly tonal language, and explore the sound world of each instrument in an unorthodox yet idiomatic way."

Patti Monson is the flutist for the New York new music ensemble Sequitur and The Curiously Strong Wind Quintet. She has been a guest artist on many recital series dedicated to new music and holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Yale University School of Music. Her teachers have included Robert Dick, Bonita Boyd and Samuel Baron. She is currently on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, as director of the MSM contemporary ensemble TACTUS. She writes: "High Art - chamber music for solo flute is the second disc in a series of recordings to be dedicated to multi-voiced works for one flutist. I have always been enchanted by the Telemann Fantasies, Bach Partitas and other such magical works where pitches transcend their rhythmic values, and allow the solo musician to be playing multiple melodic lines at once. In the 20th and 21st century, composers are sharing similar passions. I am thrilled to present these works, which represent for me an exciting union: the personalities of musics composed during my lifetime and the traditions of my Baroque heroes. In this recording, the composers were invited to be the producers of their recordings."

Here we have the first complete CD recording of the final Gilbert and Sullivan romantic comic operetta written in 1896, set in the imaginary land of Pfennig-Halbpfennig. It was recorded at the Ohio Light Opera Company's 25th anniversary season in 2003. After Utopia Unlimited (1893), Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated -- briefly and unsuccessfully -- with other partners. D'Oyly Carte brought the two together again in 1895, when they began work on what would be their 14th and final light opera. With an unintended symbolism, The Grand Duke brought their joint careers full circle: many of the ingredients of this plot echoed those of their first collaborative efforts of more than twenty years earlier. When The Grand Duke opened at the Savoy Theater on March 7, 1896, the reviews ranged from enthusiastic to disappointed. It ran for 123 performances, not a success by G & S standards, and was never again performed professionally in England until D'Oyly Carte presented a concert version in 1975, with a recording of only Sullivan's music (omitting Gilbert's extensive, but very entertaining, dialogue). After the premiere, Sullivan wrote a friend: "Why reproach me? I didn't write the book...another week's rehearsal with W.S.G. and I should have gone raving mad." Of the work itself, librettist Gilbert complained: "I am not a proud mother, and I never want to see the misshapen little brat again." Their well-documented dysfunctional relationship aside, The Grand Duke contains much hilarious material and charming music. It is great to have it here in its first complete CD recording with all the delightful dialogue included.

Since 1998, Benjamin Coelho has been a member of the University of Iowa's School of Music faculty, where he directs the bassoon studio. As a founding member of the Manhattan Wind Quintet, Mr. Coelho performed numerous recitals and concert tours throughout the United States. He has commissioned, performed, and recorded many works by American and Latin American composers, some of which are included on this recording. Before coming to Iowa, Mr. Coelho was the Vice-Dean and Bassoon Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). He also worked extensively as a performer in his native Brazil, holding principal positions with symphony orchestras in Rio de Janeiro, Campinas, and Belo Horizonte. In the United States, Mr. Coelho has played with the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony, and the Camerata Chamber Orchestra. Currently, he performs as the principal bassoon with the Cedar Rapids Symphony and the Iowa Woodwind Quintet. He is also a member of the Wizards, A Double Reed Consort. Mr. Coelho received degrees from Tatui Conservatory (Brazil), Purchase College and the Manhattan School of Music, and is working on his Doctorate of Music at Indiana University.

Hailstork received his doctorate in composition from Michigan State University, where he was a student of H. Owen Reed. He had previously studied at the Manhattan School of Music under Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond, at the American Institute at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and at Howard University with Mark Fax. Dr. Hailstork has written numerous works for chorus, solo voice, various chamber ensembles, band and orchestra. Dr. Hailstork was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music to write Festival Music for the Baltimore Symphony. Other performances of his music have been conducted by Lorin Maazel, Daniel Barenboim and Kurt Masur. In 1999, the composer's Second Symphony (commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra), and his second opera, Joshua's Boots (commissioned by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and the Kansas City Lyric Opera), were premiered. In 2002, James Conlon conducted his oratorio Done Made My Vow at the renowned Cincinnati May Festival. Currently, Hailstork is Eminent Scholar and Professor of Music at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

The composer writes: "Somerset Maugham's short story Rain was suggested to me for an opera by Bob Brewer, who had been the stage director for the premieres of two of my operas in New York, Mary Dyer and Abigail Adams in which my wife Lynn had sung the title roles. Bob knew what kind of a dramatic story I would be attracted to and what Lynn's vocal and dramatic gifts would bring to the role of Sadie Thompson. I was fortunate to have been invited in the early 1990s to participate in an ASCAP four-week film scoring workshop in Los Angeles, getting insight into the focus and condensation of musical effects that later the Rain libretto demanded. I was also writing this opera for my wife who has vast operatic experience around the world, and had sung Minnie, the miners' saloon keeper in Puccini's Girl of the Golden West at the Metropolitan and elsewhere, a perfect background for her to give life to Sadie Thompson who struggles to extricate herself from her barroom world. The premiere of this opera took place in Alice Tully Hall in February, 2003."

Composer Barbara White was born in Boston and was educated at Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a faculty member at Princeton University, and she spent a recent sabbatical year as a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She writes: "Apocryphal Studies is a sonic scrapbook of sorts, a compilation and documentation of my musical memories. Anyone who has ever been haunted by a fragment of a melody knows how enduring such memories can be; yet by the time we hear a sound, it has already begun to decay. In assembling my memories into new work, I play in the field between these apparent extremes: ever presence and impermanence. Musical reminiscences are simultaneously lasting and ephemeral, palpable and immaterial, indelible and fleeting. The marriage of persistence and elusiveness recalls other familiar paradoxes, for musical fictions are untruths we choose to believe - lies that, like an apocryphal story, contain an element of psychic, if not literal, truth. The four works on this recording embrace pre-existing music, in ways that range from veiled allusion to explicit paraphrase to willful mutilation."