Following critical acclaim from The New York Times, Gramophone, and BBC Music Magazine for his album Forgotten Sounds, clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson returns to Delos with Windsync. "A major force in the American chamber music landscape," the wind quintet has performed throughout the United States and abroad, presenting largely self-generated repertoire - commissioned by the group or arranged in-house. On this album, the musicians trace the stylistic diversity of American music back to a single source: not a founding father but a French mademoiselle, Nadia Boulanger. The composer, conductor, music theorist, and legendary composition pedagogue wielded immense influence over American music and musicians. The formidable roster of Boulanger students featured on this album bear witness to this: Philip Glass, Elliott Carter, Quincy Jones, and Marion Bauer, whose Woodwind Quintet has been revived and recorded here for the first time. On Nadia, Windsync hopes to humanize Mademoiselle, as she was known by her pupils, by telling her story through a century's worth of music written by teacher and students - a legacy of dizzyingly varied American music that reverberates to this day.

"The Bridge disc features the expert New York chamber group Speculum Musicae, and has an attractive rarity as opener, the Three Poems of Robert Frost, composed in 1942 when Carter was still an obedient, highly effective adherent of the 'open-air' Coplandesque style, but orchestrated with exuberant resourcefulness as recently as 1980...The account of Syringa (1978), the most complex and hermetic of the vocal works, with its superimposition of the soprano's Robert Ashbery poem on a collection of ancient Greek texts sung by the bass, may strike listeners (and especially attentive score-readers) as more careful than inspired. But as it proceeds it conveys the spirit of the work's intricate yet impassioned enquiry into the sources and spaces of creativity very well. Momentum is maintained, and the instrumental detail is clear and precise.

A Mirror on which to Dwell (1976) is less ambitious, though these settings of six poems by Elizabeth Bishop are marvellously refined in sonority the vocal line ranging from lingering lyricism to subtly-patterned declamation. Christine Schadeberg characterizes the texts alertly, especially the tricky syntax of ''O Breath''...

It is indeed gratifying to find record companies so prompt in acknowledging the importance of the Carter phenomenon, and with performances that, if not always ideal in every respect, are for the most part worthy of this extraordinary music."

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone [2/1990]

Elliott Carter’s two major string/piano duos – the Cello Sonata of 1948 and the 1974 Duo for violin and piano – here balance six of the short works for one, two or three players, tributes and playful arabesques, which have so unexpectedly thronged his latest decade of creativity. The result is an invaluable, kaleidoscopic introduction to one of the liveliest instrumental minds of our time. Fred Sherry and Charles Wuorinen fluently dispatch the four-movement Cello Sonata, the earliest and apparently most ‘traditional’ work in the collection. Yet this is where Carter first refined his ideas of metrical modulation, conflict and cross-purpose between players: mainstream Americana turning Cubist and many-dimensional. It’s also eloquent, even gabby, and volatile in the sense of forever aspiring to flight. In the single-movement, mosaic-like Duo the torrential discourse continues without any reference to traditional tonality or structure, but Rolf Schulte and Martin Goldray here turn in a far more amiable and beguiling version of this ragged, mercurial work than did Robert Mann and Christopher Oldfather two years ago on Sony. The short pieces, from the guitar study Changes (1983) to last year’s Gra for clarinet in homage to Lutoslawski, aren’t exactly miniatures, but relaxed fantasies of tone colour and technique: ‘tennis matches for the imagination’ is the striking image in David Schiff’s liner notes. Amiably and insistently they test the virtuosity of the individual instrumentalists, and the members of the Group for Contemporary Music rise joyfully to their challenges in nicely realistic, not over-bright sound.

-- Calum MacDonald, BBC Music Magazine

Ursula Oppens has been a steadfast and masterful champion of Elliott Carter's music for more than three decades, and her recital encompassing the prolific 100-year-old composer's complete piano music clearly is a labor of love. What is more, her interpretations have evolved. For example, Oppens' 1998 Night Fantasies recording (Music & Arts) abounds with dead-on accuracy and drive. However, it sounds relatively earnest and literal next to this far more flexible, overtly contrasted, and color-conscious remake. Oppens also has rethought and internalized "90 +" to the point where her detached and legato articulations now are more sharply profiled and truer to Carter's written dynamics.

In her vivid, incisive performance of the early Piano Sonata Oppens particularly relishes the grand sonorities and overtones resulting from the composer's imaginative use of the sostenuto pedal, although her softest playing ultimately lacks Charles Rosen's magical tonal allure. Two recent works appear in their first recordings: Oppens imparts a strong sense of line via her precise yet unhurried handling of Caténares' rapid repeated notes (shades of Ravel's Scarbo); conversely, she forges a welcome, multi-dimensional tonal landscape from Matribute's continuous single-line texture. Superb production values (thanks to producer Judith Sherman and the Academy of Arts and Letters' marvelous acoustics) and informative booklet notes add further value to a significant release for Carter's centennial year, or any other year for that matter.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Prophets of the New is a series from Sony focusing on classic recordings of the 20th century's most revolutionary works. Elliott Carter's Variations for Orchestra was described by the Boston Globe as "an astounding imaginative feat of virtuoso orchestral writing," and his Double Concerto was hailed by Stravinsky as "a masterpiece."