Catalog #: TROY0948
Release Date: August 1, 2007ChamberThis debut recording of the Stentorian Quartet reveals how popular the trombone has become as an ensemble instrument. Their exceptional playing of works by some of America's most important composers (including three Pulitzer Prize winners) has created an indispensable disc for fans and performers of brass music. Members of the Stentorian Consort include David Begnoche, Barney McCollum, Brent Phillips, and Jonathan Whitaker.
Catalog #: TROY1607
Release Date: December 1, 2015ChamberFlutist James Pellerite, having retired from a highly successful career as performer and teacher, became captivated in the 1990s by the Native American flute, and has now virtually single-handedly reinvented the playing of the instrument by commissioning dozens of composers to write for it. The resulting new works have necessitated Pellerite to develop new techniques for the instrument. His legacy for the instrument is both an entire body of literature and the development of techniques necessary to perform the new works. This recording is intended to showcase the Native American flute in its ability to blend in and contrast with a variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles in a range of contemporary styles. It is hoped that the listener will gain a new appreciation of this instrument through the disparate approach to writing for it by the six composers whose music is featured here, and the artistry brought to these works by James Pellerite, the man who re-imagined the Native American flute.
Catalog #: TROY1303
Release Date: October 1, 2011ChamberBarbara White's music subverts our presumptions and compels us to alter the way we listen, to discard tired preconceptions and generic expectations. She projects a sense of stillness in the midst of intense activity and activity within stillness: we are directed to find the calm center in the furiously moving; alternately, we are invited to listen deeply and actively to the quieter music, to sense a vast reservoir of unexpressed energy, to enter the depths of reverberaÂtion and enjoy the subtle decay of harmonics, to be thrown off balance by an unexpectedly delayed or anticipated attack. This music of transparent density and dense transparency compels us. Its surprises enlighten rather than shock. White's music has been presented by ensembles such as the Orchestra of St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, eighth blackbird, and janus. Honors and awards include a Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship. Ms. White is Professor of Music at Princeton University.
Catalog #: TROY1505
Release Date: September 1, 2014ChamberSOLI Chamber Ensemble, which includes Stephanie Kay, clarinet; David Mollenauer, cello; Ertan Torgul, violin; and Carolyn True, piano, was founded in 1994 and has been shattering stereotypes for classical music since then. This award-winning ensemble (recipient of the 2013 CMA/ASCAP award for Adverturous Programming, presents concerts featuring underappreciated giants of the modern and contemporary classical repertoire, plus they annually commission new works by emerging and established composers. Their dynamic performances are heard on this disc of four world premiere recordings all commissioned by SOLI. The music on this recording includes Timothy Kramer's Cycles & Myths, written in 1996; Robert Xavier Rodríguez's Música, por un tiempo (2008); David Heuser's Catching Updrafts; and Alexandra Gardner's Crows.
Catalog #: TROY0105
Release Date: November 1, 1993ChamberRoy Harris's life (1898-1979) was a singular phenomenon: humble beginnings on the family farm; truck driving to support his musical studies; study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger supported by a patroness; performances of his symphonies by Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Ormandy, and Bernstein; a series of academic positions around the country; marriage to a brilliant pianist; a large family of his own; and hard work up to the end of his days. Today's foremost authority on the life and works of Harris, musicologist Dan Stehman, has this to say about the piano works: "...the piano pieces reveal Harris's exceptional skill as a miniaturist, working concisely and unpretentiously to create clearly defined moods. For many listeners these compositions have served as the initial introduction to his music and, indeed, they remain one of the easiest approaches to his style and technique." In 1942 the Sonata for Violin and Piano was awarded the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for eminent service to Chamber Music. Yehudi Menuhin, Josef Gingold, Henri Temianka, Sidney Harth, and Eudice Shapiro are among the distinguished violinists who have programmed it. Although Harris sanctioned cuts in the first and last movements, the performance recorded here presents the sonata in its entirety.
Catalog #: TROY0074
Release Date: March 1, 1993ChamberRichard Wilson was born in Cleveland and studied piano, cello, theory and composition at the Cleveland Music School Settlement. In 1963, he graduated from Harvard and took his mater's degree in music composition at Rutgers in 1966. It was at this point that he joined the Vassar faculty, where he is currently Professor of Music. In 1992-93, he was the Composer-in-Residence with the American Symphony Orchestra. In that same year, he was also a Guggenheim Fellow. For those not familiar with Wilson's music, it is not avant-garde, nor is it abashedly tonal. It is well crafted and beautifully performed on this disc. Note the number of excellent musicians who perform on this disc including the great cellist, Fred Sherry, the great English flutist, John Solum, and Walter Trampler, one of the greatest violists who ever lived.
Catalog #: TROY0297
Release Date: September 1, 1998ChamberMarion Bauer and Ruth Crawford Seeger began their life-long friendship in the summer of 1929, when both enjoyed privileged living at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire - a haven for American artists since 1907. At a time when women in music had to face down Victorian stereotypes of dilettantism and sentimentality, the MacDowell Colony provided "a room of one's own." A Peterborough regular, Bauer came for her first visit in 1917. Within two days of arriving for what would be her only stay there, Crawford wrote how it was "glorious to be working again...I never knew the moon and stars could come inside me so." Considering their historical reputations, few people would suspect the meeting points between these two composers - Bauer, representing what Carol Oja in her forthcoming book calls the "forgotten vanguard," and Crawford, known today as a pivotal figure in the radical "ultra-modern" movement. But back then, both believed strongly in the manifest destiny of a similar kind of modernism: both spent the 1920s exploring frontiers of harmony; both greatly admired Scriabin, taking his mystical impressionism as their starting point; and both were influenced by transcendentalist aesthetics. After hearing some of Bauer's piano preludes, Crawford recorded her impressions in her diary: "I am bewildered by the strangeness of the experience, by our affinities. Our manner of building, our feeling very strongly the spirit of our work, our strengths and weaknesses - in all these, though we are individuals, yet we are very close. Though we have only just met, yet our spirits have been friends for years." And now their musics are joined on this beautifully performed new disc. There is no greater proponent of this music than Virginia Eskin, a proven, superb American artist.
Catalog #: TROY0465
Release Date: September 1, 2001ChamberThe fascinating career of composer, author, critic, and music professor Marion Eugenie Bauer developed from her initiative and steadfast determination to forge a professional life in music. Born in Walla Walla, Washington, the youngest of seven children of Jacques Bauer, a shopkeeper, and Julie Bauer, a teacher of modern languages. After her father died in 1890, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where, according to Bauer her oldest sister, Emilie, "became literally the father of the family, working with my mother to give the younger brothers and sisters an education and every opportunity for cultural development. To her I owe the fact that I went into the serious study of music." A music critic for the Portland Oregonian as well as a composer and teacher, Emilie was able to build a career as a critic, first in Boston and then in New York. In 1898, Marion joined her sister in New York where she continued her studies with Henry Holden Huss. In 1906 she sailed for Paris where she studied with Nadia Boulanger. She continued to study both in New York and Berlin and by 1912, had established herself as a composer. At 40 she decided she still needed more training so she returned once again to Paris to study with Andre Gedalge who had taught both Ravel and Milhaud. "As a member of the American Music Guild, I had the opportunity to measure my powers and my limitations with those of my colleagues...The result was a period of study in Europe". In 1926, her sister Emilie became ill and died, so Marion moved back to New York. She was hired by New York University as an instructor of music. She remained at NYU until 1951. She also taught part time at Juilliard from 1940.
Catalog #: TROY1393-94
Release Date: January 1, 2013ChamberLaura Kaminsky is an astute and voracious listener. For decades, the journeys her ears have taken have benefited audiences in her native New York City through all the concert programs she has presented at venues like Town Hall, the 92nd Street Y, Miller Theater, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Roulette, The New School, and Symphony Space, where she currently serves as Artistic Director. But in addition to the staggering amount of music of others she has made available to the public, she has also crafted a formidable oeuvre of original musical compositions that are deeply individual responses to the world around her. Social and political themes have been common in Kaminsky's work, as has an abiding respect for and connection to the natural world. Her music has also been deeply informed by her extensive travels -- from Eastern Europe and West Africa, to throughout the Americas. All seven works featured in this recording -- the first devoted exclusively to her music -- share common elements. Prevalent is the persistent use of irregular rhythms, repeating patterns that shift constantly as well as the narrative aspect of the solo and chamber works.
Catalog #: TROY1566
Release Date: May 1, 2015ChamberBritish composer Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton and Professor of Music at Stanford University in addition to his positions at Sussex Un9versity. An invitation from Pierre Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s set the composer on a path that has characterized his whole career, and which has resulted in eight realizations at the Institute and two for the Ensemble Intercontemporain. His music has been showcased at all the major new music centers and festivals. The works on this recording, all performed by the illustrious New York New Music Ensemble, include a work for solo clarinet; one for clarinet and piano; a trio for violin, cello, and piano; one for flute, clarinet, and piano; and one for flute, clarinet, cello, piano, and percussion.
Catalog #: TROY0199
Release Date: September 1, 1996ChamberJohn Davison (b. 1930) grew up in upper New York State and New York City. He studied music at the Juilliard lower school, Haverford College, Harvard and Eastman. Among his teachers were Randall Thompson, Walter Piston, Bernard Rogers, Howard Hanson and Alan Hovhaness. He has taught at Haverford College since 1959. His musical idiom is rooted in the great Western classic-romantic tradition with Baroque, Renaissance, jazz, modernist and folk elements mixing in at times. His Sonata for Horn and Piano was composed for the bicentennial of Franklin and Marshall College in 1987. It is a big, romantic work. The Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano was composed for the violinist who performs it on this disc, Carol Stein Amado, who gave the work its premiere in the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1976. All the works on this disc are receiving their world premiere recordings. Mr. Davison's music is most pleasing and can be easily enjoyed by anyone who has an interest in twentieth century American music.
Catalog #: TROY0099
Release Date: September 1, 1993ChamberJay Weigel was born in New Orleans and graduated from Tulane University in 1981, while studying composition privately with Roger Dickerson. After receiving a Masters of Music Degree in Composition from the University of Southern California, he returned to New Orleans. In 1984, he was appointed Music Director of the Contemporary Arts Center and Lecturer of Composition and Theory at Xavier University. Most recently, Weigel's work on the R.E.M. hit album "Out of Time" earned him a quadruple-platinum award. About his music, he writes: "The music on this compact disc was composed between 1987 and 1992. This music documents a period of personal discovery and revelation. As I wrote each work, I felt a step closer to discovering the elusive voice I've always strived to find. That voice is ultimately expressed through my use of the raw musical material present in New Orleans and its music. My personal experience with New Orleans music has shown me the wealth present in its musical culture, a culture that served as the catalyst for all modern, popular music; a culture whose melodic improvisations spawned jazz; a culture whose rhythmic patterns breathed new life into the field cries that turned into the Blues as it made its way up the Mississippi River to Chicago; a culture whose musical traditions are passed from parent to child and friend to neighbor; a culture still growing, experimenting, playing and influencing music world-wide; a culture whose emphasis on acoustic instrumentation defies the vagaries of modern electronic renderings; a culture relatively untapped by most composers working in the written tradition. The compositions on this disc reflect my New Orleans spiritual heritage. They reflect the unique feel of heart-pounding parade drumming, the smell of fresh rain on the sub-tropical streets; the unique blast of a heavy left hand on an upright piano." Wisdom from program notes on a CD and fine, accessible music as well.
Catalog #: TROY0337
Release Date: August 1, 1999ChamberA native of Philadelphia, Jan Krzywicki has studied with, among others, Vincent Persichetti, Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud. He is active as a composer, conductor and educator. Since 1990 he has been conductor of the Philadelphia contemporary ensemble Network for New Music. He is a professor of music theory at Temple University, teaching courses in analysis, performance practice, and ear training.
Catalog #: TROY0987
Release Date: January 1, 2008ChamberBorn in Cienfuegos, Cuba, Ileana Perez Velázquez earned her degrees from the Higher Institute of Arts, Havana, in 1987. When she moved to the United States in 1993, she was already receiving acclaim as one of the bright lights of Cuban composition, having won several awards. She would later continue her studies at Dartmouth College and Indiana University, where her teachers included John Appleton, Charles Dodge, Claude Baker and Eugene O'Brien. She writes music that, while challenging for both performer and listener alike, is deeply expressive and accessible; her music may be uncompromising in its demands, but it also remains intensely dramatic and poignantly evocative. What's more, her rich harmonic language and rhythmically intricate, multi-layered textures reveal a true debt to her Cuban heritage.
Catalog #: TROY0061
Release Date: November 1, 1991ChamberHunter Johnson was born near Benson, North Carolina in 1906. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Eastman School of Music, graduating from the latter institution in 1929. He did graduate work with Bernard Rogers at Eastman, and then worked with Alfredo Casella in Rome. He is perhaps best known for the Piano Sonata recorded here and for his music for the Martha Graham ballets: Letter to the World and Deaths and Entrances, which have had hundreds of performances in the United States, Europe and Asia given by the Graham Dance Company. His music has been variously described as neo-classic, neo-romantic and nationalist. It is most likely a combination of all three. Throughout most of his career, Johnson has been deeply involved in teaching, having taught advanced theory and composition at Cornell University, and at the Universities of Michigan, Manitoba, Illinois and Texas. In June, 1991, Hunter Johnson was named Composer Laureate of North Carolina, the first such award to be designated by the state. This disc, now at mid-price, is a wonderful introduction to the music of this sorely under-recorded American composer.
Catalog #: TROY0402
Release Date: June 1, 2000ChamberHarold Farberman’s career as a conductor has overshadowed his achievements as a composer. In fact, while a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Farberman turned first to composition as a further creative outlet, which in turn led to his more visible conducting career. From the mid-fifties onward, when he composed his first work, Evolution, for soprano, French horn and seven percussionists, Farberman has never stopped creating music. Farberman was born in New York City’s Lower East Side. Coming from a family of musicians (his father was the drummer in a famous 1920’s Klezmer band; his eldest brother was also a drummer) it seemed inevitable that he pursue music as a career. After graduating from Juilliard on a percussion scholarship in 1951, he immediately joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra percussion section. With a performer’s knowledge of percussion instruments and a dissatisfaction with their conventional treatment, he became an early advocate for the use of percussion sonorities as a major voice in compositional structures. His very first work, Evolution, written in 1954 before he began formal studies in composition, is scored for over 100 percussion instruments and has been recorded four times, once by Leopold Stokowski. Note the special way we are featuring Mr. Farberman this month; not only as the conductor of the fine Bazelon orchestral disc (TROY370), but here he also is represented as a composer.
Catalog #: TROY0537
Release Date: November 1, 2002ChamberFor five decades Ezra Laderman has been privileged to be performed by the musicians of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Symphony has collaborated with him a number of times; in 2003 the orchestra will feature its bass clarinetist, Richard Page, in a new Laderman concerto that it has commissioned. Other of the city's ensembles over the years have been equally staunch supporters of the composer's work. The newest of them, The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project, commissioned and premiered Laderman's 1997 Sextet for English horn, bass clarinet and string quartet. Laderman is an attentive collaborator. He gets to know the musicians as people, and in composing his works often chooses the performer's personalities as a point of departure. Certainly he has done so in a number of his string quartets, a genre for which he is deservedly celebrated. The composer's Violin Duets were composed in 1998. Like the works by Bartok and Berio, they are miniature meditations, each composed in a single session, a day, a few hours, that performed together accumulate artistic weight through comparison and contrast. A year after graduating from Columbia University in 1952, Laderman began work on a Concerto for Bassoon and Strings. He completed the concerto in 1954, and it was given a reading by Bernard Garfield (who, later, for many years, was the principal bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra) and the National Symphony under Leon Barzin. But, aside from a student performance at Juilliard, the work remained on the shelf for more than forty years. Laderman completely overhauled the work in 2000 and the result is what is recorded here.
Catalog #: TROY0454
Release Date: September 1, 2001ChamberCellists don't normally travel in herds. Usually, when playing chamber music, they individually seek out their natural partners. In certain environments, though, they do gather: to comprise the cello section of a symphony orchestra, or to learn as pupils of a master teacher. The development of such groups takes place more naturally in the cello studio of a conservatory teacher. There the teacher may view the ensemble as a vehicle to share musical and technical ideas at once with many of his students. Take the Yale Cellos, for instance. For more than four decades their technique has been refined, their sound shaped by Aldo Parisot, cello professor at the Yale School of Music. The trilogy of works, Aldo, Simoes, and Parisot heard on this recording, comprise the most significant contribution to the cello repertory since Villa-Lobos wrote his two works for cello ensemble. When Laderman composed Aldo, the earliest of his three works for the Yale Cellos, he had heard the group perform with regularity for six years. So he knew already the special capabilities of multiple cellos, with its range of highs and lows approximating the vocal range of a chorus, its center of gravity pitched lower than that of a string orchestra. When Aldo was composed, Laderman did not yet know that he was embarking on a three-work cycle. Only later did Laderman regard the piece as the first in a series, the title for each work drawn from a different one of Parisot's names.
Catalog #: TROY0473
Release Date: January 1, 2002ChamberIn the seventies and again in the eighties, Ezra Laderman had issued weighty statements, entire worlds for two violins, viola and cello. The first was his three-movement Fifth Quartet, composed in 1976; it lasts three quarters of an hour, incorporates historical models including a sonata form and a Baroque dance suite, and draws on "a rich palette of composing: tonal, serial, aleatoric." But its size makes the Laderman Fifth Quartet impractical to program in its entirety. More often, quartets program the work's movements individually, finding each to be a coherent and satisfying statement. This performance history of the Fifth Quartet led Laderman to re-think his approach to the medium and to multi-movement compositions. A trilogy of single-movement quartets - the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth - comprised the next such weighty statement. The Sixth Quartet was complete by December 1980; the double bar line was put on the Eighth almost five years later, the composer having reached sixty-one years of age. The composer regarded these three quartets as "the payoff from this mother lode" of the Fifth. Each of the three was performed many times before the first performance of the entire trilogy took place, in May 1989 at Merkin Concert Hall's Music Today series in New York City. There the performers - the Audubon, Blair, and Colorado Quartets - gathered to celebrate Laderman's 65th birthday.
Catalog #: TROY0434
Release Date: May 1, 2001Chamber"When I was accepted as a student at the High School of Music & Art, created in 1934 by Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York, my family decided to move a block away from the school in Manhattan. The move to 492 West 136th Street was significant because it brought us across the street from Lewisohn Stadium, the summer home of what was essentially the New York Philharmonic. It also brought me to within a fifteen minute walk of the old Juilliard School of Music. What precipitated the move was that living in Brooklyn we were one and one half hours by subway from the High School. I came home from school the first day in September 1936 lugging a full size double bass. The next morning my resolute mother paraded me to confront Alexander Richter, head of the music section at the School. Before my mother uttered a word, he calmly took away the double bass and handed me a flute." What an amusing incident from the life of the wonderful American composer Ezra Laderman. Here is another one. "When I reflect over the nineteen thirties and how I was shaped in those early years, the record library at Juilliard looms awfully large. For the first time in my young life I was able to listen to recordings while reading scores of the main body of music. Whether it was Sibelius's Second or the Grosse Fugue, it was absorbed with enormous excitement. I would spend countless hours listening, my ears covered by huge ear phones, my eyes buried in the print. Over and over again, score in hand, I would listen while the librarians, wonderful in helping and guiding me through this newly discovered wonderland looked on with amusement. I was hooked." A fine composer was born and you can now listen to his chamber music on this new CD. What goes around certainly does come around. (Hear also volume 1, TROY399.)
Catalog #: TROY1192
Release Date: June 1, 2010ChamberThe nine recordings of Ezra Laderman's chamber music on Albany Records are now offered in a slipcase edition at a special price. Included are his string quartets, music for piano, and chamber works for various instrumental ensembles. Performers such as the Cassatt String Quartet, violinist Erick Friedman, and flutist Ransom Wilson offer critically acclaimed performances of this distinguished American composer's music. Taking 10 years to complete, this series offers a comprehensive survey of Laderman's solo instrumental and chamber music.
Catalog #: TROY0399
Release Date: October 1, 2000ChamberEzra Laderman writes: "The world I grew up in living in Brooklyn, always close to Ebbets Field and the Children's Museum, consisted of all those things kids did as first generation Americans. To that heady mix there was, as well, music. My parents, Isidor and Leah, were born in Galicia, Poland; came to the United States early in the 20th century, met, married, settled in Brooklyn, and when I arrived June 29, 1924, there was an upright Worthington piano in the apartment and my brother Jack practiced on it daily. When my younger brother Gabriel arrived in 1929, I was already deeply involved in music. When I was three I heard my first children's concert at Carnegie Hall led by the debonair Ernest Schelling. During the height of the depression I used to sit next to the fountain of the Sculpture Court at the Brooklyn Museum while the WPA Orchestra performed. On Saturday nights I would occupy an empty box overlooking the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as some musicians from the pit Orchestra ate sandwiches and drank Chianti as the Salmaggi Opera Company performed Italian repertoire. On Friday afternoons at school we would hear Walter Damrosch take us on musical journeys over the airwaves. When we finally got our Atwater Kent radio, Sunday afternoons belonged to the New York Philharmonic (What a difference between children growing up then and children growing up now! Is it any wonder our classical music is in such trouble today?) One day when I was six, I was brought to the Brooklyn Community Music School, just down the street from BAM and suddenly my musical education in the guise of the Dalcrosse method began. This musical world competed with growing up a city boy, never knowing how desperately poor we were, going (on scholarship) to the Ethical Culture School, where learning Greek history was essential, moving, one step ahead of the landlord, to seven apartments the first decade of my life, and having the extraordinary sense that everything was possible. At four, I was improvising at the piano; at seven, I began to compose music, writing it down. I hardly knew it then, but I had at a very early age made a giant step to becoming a composer."
Catalog #: TROY1031
Release Date: July 1, 2008ChamberThe moods of the works on this survey of Eleanor Cory's chamber music range from serious introspection (Three Songs) to playful exuberance (Chasing Time). Beginning to be recognized as a major force in contemporary music, Ms. Cory has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund and the Fromm Foundation, among many others. Her music is performed by orchestras and ensembles ranging from the Gregg Smith Singers to the New Jersey Symphony to Earplay. Ms. Cory is on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music Prep Division and Kingsborough Community College.
Catalog #: TROY0595
Release Date: October 1, 2003ChamberEdwin 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.
Catalog #: TROY1230
Release Date: October 1, 2010ChamberWith the exception of the Six Valses Caractéristiques, these are the first recordings of these compositions by Edward Joseph Collins. Born in Illinois, Collins studied piano with Ganz in Chicago and composition with Bruch and Humperdinck in Europe. Collins was hired in 1914 as an assistant conductor for the Bayreuth Festival, a brief engagement ended by WWI. After the war, his music attracted the attention of Frederick Stock, who conducted many of his orchestral compositions with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Catalog #: TROY0641
Release Date: February 1, 2004ChamberThis is the first recording of Collin's songs and instrumental duos, including the 1933 Suite for Violoncello and Piano, a major addition to the repertoire for this combination of instruments. Born in Joliet, Illinois, Collins studied piano with Ganz in Chicago and composition with Bruch and Humperdinck in Europe. A 1912 Berlin debut and subsequent concerts in the USA and Europe earned strong critical praise. Collins was hired as an assistant conductor for the Bayreuth Festival in 1914; that engagement was ended by World War I and service in the US Army. After the War, Collins began a teaching career in Chicago, continuing to conduct, perform and compose. His music attracted the attention of Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Director Frederick Stock, who conducted many of Collins's orchestral compositions. Those include a symphony, three piano concerti, and a secular cantata. Collins also composed dozens of songs, piano solo works and other chamber music. The songs presented on this CD were composed between 1917 and 1944. As a former opera house assistant conductor at New York's Century Opera and at the Bayreuth Festival, Collins understood voices and had a thorough appreciation for the best of them. Having coached many singers, he knew what to expect in regard to range, color, tessitura and expression. He did not, therefore, approach song writing as if composing for instrumentalists. A man who was an avid reader of the classics, he brought a literate acuity to his choice of texts and even wrote some fine ones himself; the best songs merit the attention of any sensitive singer.
Catalog #: TROY1086
Release Date: May 1, 2009ChamberThis volume of Albany Records' series of the music of Edward Joseph Collins features first recordings of songs, piano solo works and the Piano Trio, Op. 1. The Illinois-born Collins died in 1951, leaving an oeuvre comprised of 12 major orchestral works, three piano concerti, a secular cantata, an opera, several chamber works, more than 20 songs and a dozen piano solo and duo scores.
Catalog #: TROY1158
Release Date: December 1, 2009ChamberDonald Wheelock is the Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor of Music at Smith College, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1974. His works include five string quartets, several pieces for solo instruments, eleven song cycles, and many larger ensemble and orchestral works. Among his awards are a first prize in a competition sponsored by the Hartford Symphony, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Guggenheim Foundation. This compact disc, a retrospective recording of Wheelock's music, offers a wide-ranging survey of his music for chamber ensembles.
Catalog #: TROY0106
Release Date: January 1, 1994Chamber"All the works on this recording are from the late 1970s and early 1980s," comments Dan Asia. "They reflect my interest then I combining the energy of vernacular music (pop and jazz), with the structural and linguistic possibilities of contemporary classical music, and all of this refracted through the sonic possibilities suggested by the current nascent world of electronic music. While some of the works presented are solely electronic, and others are for acoustic instruments alone, my interest was in the cross fertilization that can occur between these genres." Dan Asia, composer-in-residence with the Phoenix Symphony, was born in Seattle, Washington in 1953. He has been the recipient of the most competitive grants and fellowships in music including a Meet The Composer-Reader's Digest Commission, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four NEA Composers Grants and ASCAP and BMI composition prizes. After receiving his B.A. degree from Hampshire College, where he studied music and European History, Mr. Asia attended the Yale School of Music, receiving the Master of Music degree. His major teachers include Jacob Druckman, Stephen Albert, Gunther Schuller, Isang Yun, Arthur Weisberg, Bruce MacCombie, Ron Perera, and Randall McClellan. He presently teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Catalog #: TROY0158
Release Date: June 1, 1995ChamberChris Theofanidis was born on December 18, 1967 in Dallas Texas. He studied with Sam Adler, Joseph Schwantner, and Jacob Druckman. His father, Iraklis, was a classically trained pianist and composer from Greece. These are the basic facts. At Albany Records we feel we have an obligation to search out new, young composers and bring their music to you. This recording contains a wide variety of music written in an accessible, tonal idiom.
Catalog #: TROY1476
Release Date: February 1, 2014ChamberComposer Bevan Manson has received commissions for both classical and jazz music from numerous ensembles including the Sierra Chamber Society and the San Francisco Symphony. He is a founding member of the Los Angeles composers' group Improvisatory Minds, an organization that provides a platform for concert music written by composers who have jazz as an extensive part of their musical backgrounds. A noted jazz pianist, Manson was director of UC Jazz at Cal Berkeleyand has served on the faculties of New England Conservatory, Berklee College and the Thelonious Monk Institute. This recording, the first devoted entirely to his music, combines his classical and jazz roots in a unique style that is complex but very tuneful.
Catalog #: TROY0163
Release Date: August 1, 1995ChamberThis disc features a sampling of the chamber music of Arnold Rosner who was born November 8, 1945. He is a prolific composer whose works have been performed in the United States, Europe and Israel. Today, his works exceed 100. As the notes point out, "he has managed to steer clear, generally, of both the post serial avant-garde movement of the sixties and the minimalist movement that followed. His treatment of harmony and counterpoint, along with the occasional recourse to an ethnic, Middle Eastern flavor, places his music in the esthetic milieu of Paul Hindemith, Ernest Bloch, and Alan Hovhaness. Rosner is currently on the faculties of Kingsborough Community College and Staten Island College of the City University of New York, where he teaches both standard and ethnic music. Having composed since the age of nine, he received advanced degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo while studying with Leo Smit, Allen Sapp, Henri Pousseur and Lejaren Hiller, a group from which in his own words, "I learned practically nothing." Of the works on this disc, "Of Numbers and Bells," was composed for two pianos in 1983, "Sonata for French Horn and Piano," was composed in 1979, "Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano," was composed in 1968 and revised in 1977, and "Nightstone" for tenor and piano was composed in 1979.