Catalog #: TROY1424
Release Date: July 1, 2013ChamberBorn in 1959, composer Mark Gustavson studied at Northern Illinois University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Columbia University, Conservatory of Amsterdam, Tanglewood and the Banff Centre. He is on the faculty at Adelphi University and Nassau Community College. He has received numerous honors, including a composer award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Fulbright Fellowship. His music has been commissioned and performed by notable chamber ensembles including Speculum Musicae, Parnassus, The Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra and the New Music Consort, among many others. The five pieces on this recording, covering a period of 13 years, are representative of Gustavson's primary interests, which is composing instrumental music from works for solo instruments or orchestral music. His unique voice, influenced by approaches to music from around the world, often sounds spontaneous or improvised, although it is strictly notated.
Catalog #: TROY1685-86
Release Date: October 1, 2017ChamberA major new release of David Del Tredici's chamber works. One of the most admired and acclaimed composers of his generation, Del Tredici's music is impossible to describe without superlatives. His work is a brilliant splash of emotional color in a contemporary music landscape where monochromaticism is common. This 2-CD set includes five works composed between 2001 and 2013-- a piano trio, string quartet, variations for bass trombone, a duo for violin and bass trombone and Bullycide, a major work for chamber ensemble, inspired by the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. The performers are the elite of the new music world and include Del Tredici's nephew, the phenomenal bass trombonist Felix Del Tredici.
Catalog #: TROY0951
Release Date: October 1, 2007ChamberBorn in Buenos Aires, Jorge Liderman has studied under Mark Kopitman, Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran. He writes: "This album is a collection of solos, duos and trios I wrote during the last 20 years. They are all inspired by, based on, quote, or make reference to pre-existing musical sources...in this disc the sources range from tango to William Byrd, and from Guillaume de Machault to Andean folklore."
Catalog #: TROY1055
Release Date: October 1, 2008Chamber"I have had a life-long love affair with the borough of my birth -- Manhattan -- in the city of New York. Here many of my friends live, and here the compositions on this CD originate. Each piece tells its own story." Ms. Silverman holds a BA from Barnard College, an AM from Harvard and a DMA from Columbia. Currently on the faculty of Mannes College The New School for Music, she is a founding member of Music Under Construction and the International Women's Brass Conference. She is the recipient of many awards and commissions and her music has been performed by the Baltimore Symphony and the Brooklyn Philharmonic among many other orchestras and chamber ensembles.
Catalog #: TROY0588
Release Date: July 1, 2003ChamberSteven Mackey was born in Frankfurt, Germany to American parents. He attended the University of California for his BA, the State University of New York at Stony Brook for his MA and Brandeis University for his Ph.D. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. Since the mid 1980's he has resumed his interest in the electric guitar and regularly performs his own work, including two concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works. Mackey is currently Professor of Music at Princeton University where he has been a member of the faculty since 1985. He teaches composition, theory, twentieth century music, improvisation and a variety of special topics. As co-director of the Composers Ensemble at Princeton, he coaches and conducts new work by student composers as well as 20th century classics. Mackey writes: "I have always loved the string quartet. I was a musically illiterate, teenage rock musician when I first heard a string quartet and it deflected my fate towards concert music in general and composition in particular. The string quartet is a perfectly balanced ensemble in which each instrument can blend with the others or stand in relief, and where each has the possibility of infinite gradations of tonal nuance with a variety of bow strokes and placements, not to mention plucking. The quartet is capable of a wide range of expression, from light-hearted to profound and from bawdy to refined. We know this because some of the greatest music ever written - the greatest music imaginable - confirms these virtues."
Catalog #: TROY1644
Release Date: October 1, 2016ChamberThe New York New Music Ensemble's recording presents three of Lukas Foss's three best chamber works in reverse chronological order of composition. The recording opens with Tashi (1986), working its way backwards through Solo Observed (1982), and concludes with Echoi (1961-63). This presentation allows listeners to enjoy a musical narrative that begins at the end, with a work that represents the culmination of more than 40 years of compositional inquiry. The significance of Tashi's assimilation of stylistic elements is then understood retrospectively through the other two works, each more strongly associated with forward-looking compositional techniques than the last. Foss himself, who as a conductor was known for his innovative programming, would undoubtedly have appreciated this approach to the recording of his music. These three works provide an effective overview of Foss's eclectic compositional style and insight into his aesthetic and expressive motivation. The acclaimed New York New Music Ensemble has commissioned, performed, recorded, taught, and fiercely advocated for the music of our time, achieving international acclaim in its endeavors. The NYNME has more than 25 recordings to its credit and has commissioned and premiered more than 130 works by some of America's most distinguished composers.
Catalog #: TROY1734
Release Date: July 1, 2018ChamberLove Comes In At The Eye is a recording of songs and instrumental works by Kevin Puts, Ned Rorem, and James Scott Balentine. All Americans, these composers vary in age from 46 (Puts), to 70 (Balentine), to 95 (Rorem), so there a wide spectrum of compositional styles that offers an outstanding listening experience. With works for voice and piano; voice and chamber ensemble; a work for voice and cello; and two works for flute and piano, the recording gives the feel of being part of an audience for a chamber music concert. The performers each have distinguished careers and all participate in the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society concerts.
Catalog #: TROY0701-02
Release Date: October 1, 2004ChamberDan Locklair, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, holds a Master of Sacred Music degree from the School of Sacred Music of Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Presently, Dr. Locklair is Composer-in-Residence and Professor of Music at Wake Forest University. His prolific output includes symphonic works, a ballet, an opera and numerous solo, chamber, vocal and choral compositions. A professional organist at the age of 14. From 1973 to 1982, he was Church Musician of First Presbyterian Church in Binghamton, New York, and an instructor of music at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. His teachers have included Ezra Laderman, Samuel Adler and Joseph Schwantner.
Catalog #: TROY1699
Release Date: January 1, 2018ChamberZvonimir Nagy is a Croatian-born, American composer, performer, and music scholar based in Pittsburgh. He studied at Northwestern University, Texas Christian University, and the Academy of Music in Zagreb, Croatia. He is the recipient of composition awards and grants including the Seattle Symphony Composition Prize, the Iron Composer Award and the Croatian Music Institute Award. He is on the faculty at Duquesne University. This recording features chamber works for varying size ensembles ranging from a work for solo flute to a work for four cellos and one for piano, accordion, and electronics.
Catalog #: TROY1736
Release Date: August 1, 2018ChamberTaken together, the works on this portrait album of composer John Liberatore, are an eclectic mélange of instrumentations and affects, sometimes whimsical or wistful, dark or light. But each of them was composed in the same way, and in close proximity to each other. Liberatore is a composer, pianist, and one of the world's few glass harmonica players. Described by critics as "enchanting" and "truly magical," his music seeks poignancy through levity, ambiguity through transparency, and complexity within simple textures. The recipient of numerous awards and commissions, his music has received hundreds of performances in venues around the world, including The Kennedy Center, Carnegie's Weill Hall, and the Seoul Arts Center, among many others. A graduate of Eastman and Syracuse University, he is assistant professor of composition and theory at the University of Notre Dame.
Catalog #: TROY1177
Release Date: March 1, 2010ChamberThis recording, a collection of performances by some of the most celebrated performers of our time that Leon Kirchner considered extraordinary, continues the series on Albany Records devoted to this distinguished composer's music. Leon Kirchner, who died in December of 2009, performed regularly both as a pianist and conductor, but was always first and foremost, a composer. He left a legacy of masterworks and made an indelible mark on the history of contemporary music.
Catalog #: TROY1030
Release Date: June 1, 2008ChamberLeon Kirchner's life has been liberally peppered with moments of recognition for his powerful and innovative music. Both the first and second quartets heard on this recording received the Critics Circle Prize; the third received the Pulitzer. While still an undergraduate, he was accepted into Arnold Schoenberg's graduate composition seminar at UCLA. He has received many honors and prizes, including membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a professor at Harvard University for 25 years. This recording includes his fourth string quartet, written in 2007 when Kirchner was 87, for the Orion String Quartet, who are able champions of his music.
Catalog #: TROY1170
Release Date: February 1, 2010ChamberLawrence Dillon is best known for his chamber music, with commissions, performances and recordings by the American, Borromeo, Cassatt, Daedalus, Emerson and Mendelssohn String Quartets; this recording is the first to feature some of his many works combining words and music. Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Dillon began composing at the age of seven, despite the complete loss of hearing in one of his ears due to a childhood illness. Appendage and Other Stories is a collection of Dillon's works that combine words and music. Entrance and Exit use spoken text, Still Point is sung and Appendage alternates between spoken and sung text.
Catalog #: TROY1704
Release Date: January 1, 2018ChamberThe first composer to win the Berlin Prize, Laura Schwendinger is professor of composition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her music has been performed by all the leading new music artists and ensembles around the world and she has received numerous awards and commissions including those from the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations. Her second recording for Albany Records features four works for quartets: two for the traditional string quartet; one for mezzo soprano and three strings; and one for piano quartet. The music is performed by the acclaimed JACK Quartet, mezzo-soprano Jamie Van Eyck, and pianist Christopher Taylor.
Catalog #: TROY1752
Release Date: December 1, 2018ChamberEmbracing the unlikely combination of saxophone and harp, the Admiral Launch Duo (Jonathan Hulting-Cohen, saxophone and Jennifer R. Ellis, harp) performs groundbreaking commissions, unexpected transcriptions, and improvisations on this their debut recording. Named for the Admiral butterfly and launched at the Fresh Inc Festival in 2013, the duo has since appeared at new music venues coast-to-coast. Hulting-Cohen is on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Ellis is credited with more than 80 world premieres. The Duo has spent several years researching and commissioning repertoire for saxophone and harp and this recording will certainly gain recognition for this unusual but beautiful ensemble.
Catalog #: TROY0247
Release Date: June 1, 1997ChamberElias Tanenbaum was born in Brooklyn and studied trumpet at an early age and played with assorted jazz bands. After serving with the U.S. Army in World War II, he received a B.S. from Juilliard and an M.A. from Columbia. His composition teachers included Dante Fiorillo, Bohuslav Martinu, Otto Luening and Wallingford Riegger. To date he has composed more than 100 works in all idioms and his music includes works for the concert hall, jazz, theater, television and ballet as well as electronic and computer music. He is currently Visiting Composer at the California Institute for the Arts, on the composition faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, and Director of the Electronic Computer Music Studio. The largest work on the disc, Last Letters from Stalingrad, consists of excerpts from letters written by soldiers from the German Sixth Army who were surrounded at Stalingrad in 1942-43. Of the 300,000 men in that army, only about 5,000 survived. What happened to those German soldiers in 1943 can and does happen to people everywhere. What would any of us write if we knew we were surrounded and doomed and that we had been sold out and abandoned by our leaders. The German High Command, in order to ascertain the morale of the troops, allowed the soldiers to send letters home. The letters were then impounded, opened and the addresses and senders' names removed. They were then classified by content and general tenor, tied in neat bundles, and eventually stored in the archives. Although the Germans were our enemies in 1943, these letters are a human document that bares the soul of men in their worst hour. This is a most moving composition.
Catalog #: TROY0986
Release Date: November 1, 2007ChamberRecognized as a "major talent" by the Chicago Tribune, Larry Bell has been awarded the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Charles Ives Award. A student of Vincent Persichetti and Roger Sessions, his music has been widely performed in the United States and abroad, and as a pianist he has championed the works of American composers.
Catalog #: TROY1896
Release Date: May 15, 2022ChamberThis recording marks the debut recording by Lakeshore Rush, a chamber music ensemble based in Chicago. The recording consists of beloved recordings from their concerts as well as some studio recordings. The composers represented include a vast array of styles within the contemporary chamber music genre. Eight of the composers are American; seven are living; and the works by Jonathan Hannau and Pierre Jalbert were commissioned by Lakeshore Rush. The works by Philip Glass and Bill Ryan are the ensemble's creative reinterpretations of pieces that have entered the contemporary cannon, and the Radiohead is an arrangement commissioned and performed exclusively by Lakeshore Rush.
Catalog #: TROY1052
Release Date: October 1, 2008ChamberFor all the differences among them, Joaquín Turina, Alexandre Tansman, and Carlos Surinach were alike in one regard: each was sympathetic to making his music an affirmation of his cultural heritage. At the same time, their lives spanned a period when modernism was sweeping away the romantic tenets that had upheld 19th-century nationalism. Hence, each came to fashion a distinctive amalgam of nationalist tendencies and newly emergent techniques and modes of thought. Given beautiful performances by the Ames Piano Quartet, the recording ends with a work by Astor Piazzolla that was written as part of the incidental music for a play by Alberto Rodriguez Muñoz.
Catalog #: TROY0451
Release Date: July 1, 2001ChamberPreeminent in the American musical landscape not only as an artist but also as an administrator, Francis Thorne was born in Bay Shore, New York in 1922. A self-taught jazz pianist, he had hoped for a professional career in music but was deterred by active naval duty in World War II, a young family to support and a dismissive appraisal at Yale by the redoubtable Paul Hindemith. So for several years he worked on Wall Street, like his stockbroker father, and kept music essentially a hobby until a serendipitous recommendation from Duke Ellington led to a number of prestigious jazz engagements. With this rekindling of his musical ambitions, he ultimately traveled to Florence, Italy, studying under the American composer David Diamond, and remained there with his family until 1964. Thorne has served as executive director of the American Composers Alliance and helped organize the American Composers Orchestra and served for many years as its president. His many compositions ranging from symphonies to solo pieces reveal a love of tonality-based chromaticism, uniting the European musical heritage with the jazz tradition native to America.
Catalog #: TROY0489
Release Date: December 1, 2001ChamberLeo Kraft is active as a composer, educator, and author. After receiving degrees from Queens College and Princeton University, he joined the faculty of Queens College in 1947, and retired in 1989. While the bulk of his work consists of chamber music, he has written orchestral, piano and vocal music as well. The composer writes: "About the Six Pieces for Violin and Piano Obbligato, as the title implies, these pieces feature the violin, while the role of the piano is more than an accompaniment, but less than an equal partner, hence the term obbligato. Imagining the violin as a great actor capable of portraying many roles, I found a different kind of expression in each piece. Line Drawings was written for Paul Dunkel, who gave the first performance with Richard Fitz in 1972. The linear nature of the music suggested the title. Paul Maynard was an outstanding performer and scholar in Renaissance and Baroque music. He was a major presence on the faculty of the Aaron Copland School of Music, and it is to his memory that The Garden of Memory for harpsichord (on which he performed so marvelously) is dedicated. The poetry of e.e. cummings has delighted me since my student days, but only recently did I feel that I had the means to do justice to some of my favorite poems. I heard a tenor voice and a small group of instruments. My aim was to get beneath the surface of the elegant lines to the deeper meaning below. My second chamber symphony is indeed a symphony in the classical sense, which is to say that the work is highly developmental, spacious in gesture, and ambitious in scope."
Catalog #: TROY0597
Release Date: July 1, 2003ChamberEric Moe, composer of what the New York Times calls "music of winning exuberance," was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the graduate program in composition and the department's electro acoustic music studio. As a pianist and keyboard player, Moe has performed works by hundreds of composers from Anthony Davis to Stefan Wolpe. A founding member of the San Francisco based EARPLAY ensemble, he currently co-directs the Music on the Edge new music concert series in Pittsburgh.
Catalog #: TROY0213
Release Date: January 1, 1997ChamberTim Page tells Kevin Oldham's tragic story in the notes for this disc. "When I look back upon the mid-eighties and my apprentice years as music critic for The New York Times, it sometimes seems that I did only two things: cover debut concerts and write AIDS obituaries - alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, over and over again...Kevin Oldham was one of my debuts a handsome, vibrant, self-assured and splendidly virtuosic young pianist who played his first New York recital at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1985. Eight years later, he too would die from AIDS and I would write his obituary. But by then, he had become a composer, one who had fought a desperate battle to leave the world some fresh and lovely music...He died on March 11, 1993. In the case of Kevin Oldham, AIDS ended the life of a gifted composer who was just getting started. We'll never know what he might have created. We regret the music that will never be, and we mourn for Kevin a brave, funny, smart, articulate and compassionate man. But, through Kevin's own Herculean efforts, something has been saved. You hold the proof in your hands."f
Catalog #: TROY1169
Release Date: February 1, 2010ChamberComposer/pianist Ketty Nez joined the composition and theory department at the Boston University School of Music in the fall of 2005. Ms. Nez completed a residence of several months at the École Nationale de Musique in Montbéliard, France, prior to the premiere of her chamber opera An Opera in Devolution: Drama in 540 Seconds, at the 2003 Seventh Festival Avantgarde in Munich. She comments: "The five recent chamber works on this recording, Postcards from the 1930's, timed curves, between, before, and wind down ii, were written for myself to play, and were composed after moving to Boston in 2005 to start teaching at Boston University while the most recent work on this recording, and marking a departure of sorts, Postcards from the 1930's was the byproduct of my everlasting curiosity for the sounds and rhythms of my own ethnic backgrounds, a mixture of Slovenian and Slavic Macedonian.
Catalog #: TROY1940
Release Date: July 1, 2023ChamberWith the exception of far sight sun light, the compositions on this recording of music by Ketty Nez take their inspiration from East European folk sources, including an Anatolian Turkish folk song and Bartok's transcriptions of Rumanian folk tunes. Ketty Nez is on the faculty at the Boston University School of Music and was a guest teacher at the Liszt Academy in Budapest and has had residencies at the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Montbeliard, at CCRMA, and at the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique. Her music has been performed in Europe, North America, and Asia. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, the Eastman School of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Bryn Mawr College.
Catalog #: TROY1932
Release Date: June 1, 2023ChamberEsteemed composer Bernard Hoffer's eighth recording for Albany Records features three works for piano one with string; another with French horn and violin; and the third with two trumpets. Hoffer is known not only for his chamber and orchestral music but also for music written for films, television, and commercials. He scored the hit children's cartoon series Thundercats and the theme for the PBS News Hour. Winner of the First Prize at the New York International Artists Association Piano Competition and the Silver Award at the Paris International Competition, pianist Kayoung An made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2013. She has performed with orchestras both in the United States and abroad. On the faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, Ms. An studied at the Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, Colburn Conservatory, and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her collaborators include conductor David Gilbert, violinist Kurt Nikkanen, horn player Dan Wions, and Gil Hoffer and Christian Hinkle, trumpets.
Catalog #: TROY1565
Release Date: June 1, 2015ChamberComposer Kamran Ince's father was Turkish and his mother is American. He grew up partly in each country and now splits time between Memphis, Tennessee where he is on the faculty at the University of Memphis and Istanbul, where he teaches at Istanbul Technical University. Ince is first and foremost a composer in the Western classical tradition, but he is not bound by that tradition. He is also well versed in Ottoman classical music and grounded in Turkish culture. In ways sometimes explicit and sometimes subtle, his music reflects that dual heritage. The many musicians Ince gathered to record the varied chamber pieces on this recording have in common not only the big technique his music requires, but also the wildness and intensity it demands. They are Ince's triumphant champions, and he is their inspiration.
Catalog #: TROY0310
Release Date: January 1, 1999ChamberKamran Ince is rapidly emerging as one of today's most exciting and original young composers. He was born in Montana to American and Turkish parents. His early musical training was in Turkey at the Ankara and Izmir conservatories. Later he attended the Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music, where he earned a Doctorate. Among his teachers were Christopher Rouse and Joseph Schwantner. He is currently a member of the music faculty at the University of Memphis. About Fantasie of a Sudden Turtle the composer writes: "First of all the title has nothing to do with ninja turtles. The contradiction between sudden and turtle is a reflection of my love for contrast and also represents this particular turtle's desire to do a lot of things it cannot. The work consists of a sequence of fantasies, dreams that a turtle might have." About Kac! (Escape from "A") Ince writes: "Kac has the meaning in Turkish of How many? or Escape. The work contains extreme contrasts with sections ranging from complete stasis to raw, savage activity." And finally about Kocekce Ince writes: "Kocekce is the name of a folk dance found in the Black Sea region of Turkey. The music is always very fast with constant irregular meters. It is usually played by the Kemence, a string instrument similar in size to a small violin."
Catalog #: TROY1925
Release Date: April 1, 2023ChamberJustin Hellman came back to composing classical music on his 41st birthday. He started his involvement in music as a teenager by performing electric bass and writing songs. From there he moved to studying the acoustic bass and began focusing more on jazz. His jazz quartet performed regularly in the Bay Area and one of his compositions was featured on an episode of The Good Wife. He went back to school to pursue a medical degree, training in oculoplastic surgery. Garden of the Gods is Hellman’s first classical album. The Friction Quartet is known for its commissioning of new works, curating imaginative programs, collaborating with artists, and presenting interactive educational outreach. Since their formation in 2011, Friction has given world premiere performances of more than 80 works. Their performances appear on National Sawdust Tracks, Innova, Albany, and Pinna Records.
Catalog #: TROY1340
Release Date: May 1, 2012ChamberThis string quartet by noted American composer Joseph Summer is a musical interpretation of the named stories of the preeminent 20th century fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges. Born in 1956, Joseph Summer studied at Oberlin and was on the faculty at Carnegie-Mellon. Summer has written four comic operas based on the stories of The Decameron. These operas are part of a planned seven opera cycle, which follows the exploits of a half dozen characters over the course of a week in an imagined 14th century Naples. Founder of The Shakespeare Concerts, Summer's music inspired by Shakespeare appears on three previously released recordings on Albany Records.
Catalog #: TROY1933
Release Date: May 1, 2023ChamberJoseph Summer is familiar to audiences both as a composer and as the founder/director of The Shakespeare Concerts. Summer's oeuvre includes eight operas, chamber opera, cantatas, more than 100 vocal works, string quartets and many works for chamber ensembles. He studied at Oberlin and Carnegie Mellon University. This is the sixth recording of his music for Albany Records. The Ulysses Quartet was founded in 2015 and won a gold medal at the 2016 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and first prize in the 2018 Schoenfeld International String Competition. They have performed around the world to critical acclaim and advocate for music by underrepresented composers.
Catalog #: TROY1283
Release Date: August 1, 2011ChamberComposer John Aylward has been awarded a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant and First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music, among many other honors. His music has been praised for its rhythmic vitality, rigorous formal qualities and its lyricism and is performed in the US and abroad. He is on the faculty at Clark University and is the founder of the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble and the Etchings Festival. This recording offers some of his best chamber works including a song cycle based on the poetry of Louise Gluck, a piece for violin and cello and a large chamber ensemble work titled Stillness and Change.