GIA Wind Works series represents GIA Publications and Eugene Migliaro Corporon's commitment to recording the very best in wind music! These audiophile quality recordings of these diverse offerings provide the very best models for these important works for bands. This collaboration creates exciting possibilities and allows their artistic output to stay focused on the continued mission: to provide first-class recordings that accentuate the comprehensiveness, depth, and value of the medium and it's repertoire.

The creation of the GIA WindWorks label represents an expanded relationship between the North Texas Wind Symphony and GIA Publications, Inc. Composers, conductors, music critics, and connoisseurs worldwide have praised the recordings conducted by Eugene Migliaro Corporon for their innovation, excellence, and professional standards.

GIA Wind Works series represents GIA Publications and Eugene Migliaro Corporon's commitment to recording the very best in wind music! These audiophile quality recordings of these diverse offerings provide the very best models for these important works for bands. This collaboration creates exciting possibilities and allows their artistic output to stay focused on the continued mission: to provide first-class recordings that accentuate the comprehensiveness, depth, and value of the medium and it's repertoire.

The GIA Composer's Collection seeks to bring together into one place the master works by some of the most respected Wind Symphony composers of all time. Stunningly performed by the North Texas Wind Symphony under the direction of Eugene Corporon, this series also includes extensive liner notes about the composers and their contributions to the Wind Band. Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) is perhaps the first American-born composer to achieve worldwide fame and recognition, but as Ned Rorem pointed out: "His books and lectures have re-shaped the way America listens, and his mastery of keyboard and podium has defined the notion of American performance." This stellar recording of Bernstein's great works features Eugene Migliaro Corporon directing the North Texas Wind Symphony, giving exceptional life to this wonderful music, including Overture to Candide and JFK Fanfare. This recording is spectacular on every level-a showcase of great music recorded by one of the great wind symphonies of our time.

GIA WindWorks represents a new relationship between the North Texas Wind Symphony and GIA Publications. Thanks to GIA’s generous support and commitment to wind music, it has been possible for the ensemble to continue to produce recordings of the highest quality. While the first 34 releases of the Cincinnati Wind Symphony and the North Texas Wind Symphony remain with the Klavier label, this expanded alliance consolidates all of the current projects under one publishing roof. These diverse offerings now include WindWorks, the Composer’s Collection, the Teaching Music through Performance in Band recordings, and Master Conductors, the DVD series. This growth in the catalog creates exciting possibilities and allows our artistic output to stay focused on the continued mission: to provide first-class recordings that accentuate the comprehensiveness, depth, and value of the medium and its repertoire.

Naxos AudioBook Grandiose and glamorous, Baroque music stands alone, written to glorify the finest courts of Europe. It's greatest composers, such as Vivaldi, Handel and Bach, head a fascinating cast of musical magicians, including Albinoni, Pachelbel and Scarlatti. Their lives are as intriguing as their music: we find virtuoso performers who earned their bread and butter in the cathedrals of Europe while keeping company with kings and queens, and setting opera houses ablaze across the continent with their fabulous new music. Discover Music of the Baroque Era is rich in musical detail.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) carries a musical legacy that extends beyond the realms of being a writer or bandleader. His music still stands as a brilliant model of American compositional creativity. Although Ellington had a profound influence in the world of jazz, his mastery extends even further into several other compositional outputs including concerti, tone poems, film scores, ballets, big band arrangements and several operas. The four works found on Duke Ellington: The Symphonic Portrait are some of these masterworks that were eventually arranged for the symphony orchestra. Each selection varies greatly in structure, however Ellington’s visionary compositional style, combined with his discomfort with musical labels such as jazz and classical, resulted in a genre that integrated these distinct styles most effectively.

This is the Morton Gould album to get, especially for the Symphony No. 4, subtitled "West Point." The piece is interesting, convincing, and accomplished. The performance is superb, and the sound quality is simply stunning.

The most popular of Morton Gould's clear-cut, distinctive compositions have become less often heard in the recent years since his passing. He composed many more pieces than most people have heard and he achieved numerous commissions, hence there are many occasional pieces marking special events as well as pieces for specific ensembles. Gould's bright orchestration combined melodic turns from American folksong, jazz, gospel and blues peppered with colorful splashes of deftly applied 20th century dissonance and snappy dance rhythms, makes his music distinctively recognizable. One can however grow weary from overexposure to his bag of tricks so unless you absolutely love the Gould sound, acquiring albums that have good performances of his most popular works points to where to start if Gould is new to you. This distinctiveness is particularly noteworthy in his writing for wind instruments found on this album. He had a good ear for combining instruments to produce new colors.

The Naxos CD offers several big pluses. Anyone who played in a high school, college or university symphonic band probably played a Gould piece at one time or another and will want this album but whether you did or not, this is the Morton Gould album to get, especially for the Symphony No. 4 subtitled "West Point". The piece really is interesting, convincing and accomplished yet without the slick, facile quality found in some of Gould's lighter, entertaining works. The performance is superb and the sound quality is simply stunning. The other pieces on the album are also of interest. All of this, plus the price, places this release by the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble under Scott Weiss above the much older but otherwise excellent, classic Eastman Wind Ensemble recording conducted by Frederick Fennell. The piece was commissioned by the United States Military Band in 1952 and is not just a ceremonial work but instead, a serious, true symphony with a sustained melodic and contrapuntal development, particularly in the second movement, that draws you in and leads you through many fascinating moments.

The other works, though not on the level of the symphony, are worth hearing. With its musical depiction the trumpeting that brings down the walls in a straight-forward and obvious way, Jericho will thrill some listeners and bore the jaded. There doesn't seem to be a deeper meaning to this piece, just a well-written musical depiction of the fall of Jericho. The trumpet calls might remind you of Jerry Goldsmith's film score for Patton.

The Saint Lawrence Suite, composed for the Saint Lawrence Power Project is also of immediate melodic appeal. Cast in four dance-like movements, it is the kind of piece that if programed on a classical radio station will hit listeners just right prompting calls requesting to know what it is. This music is greatly aided by the fine musicianship of the University of Kansas players.

There is also the suite titled Derivations, written for clarinetist Benny Goodman and the rarely heard Fanfare for Freedom which was commissioned, along with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, for wartime concerts. Even in the lesser works, the great sound quality and musicianship carry the day and it is the 4th Symphony that is the masterpiece in its best performance on record.

– Greg La Traille, ArkivMusic.com

If you are a lover of Christmas music—carols, popular songs, and all manner of medleys and clever arrangements of such—and you miss this extraordinary recording by the first-rate Dallas Wind Symphony, then your holiday listening stands to be just a bit more dull, less festive, and more ordinary than it could have been. This is a terrific program, in exemplary sound, that not only celebrates the Christmas music tradition but exemplifies the best of the wind ensemble genre, with its unique sonorities and long tradition of both originality and sense of playfulness and humor on the part of composers and arrangers.

The program opens with the obligatory fanfare—suitably titled Festival Fanfare—a nifty arrangement by John Wasson commissioned by the Dallas Wind Symphony, not surprisingly a showpiece for horns, full of familiar Christmas tunes. A decent but kinda square Sleigh Ride follows, along with a straightforward arrangement of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring that beautifully exhibits the colors and rich textures of a first-rate wind band.

Among the highlights: my favorite, a celebration of the much-maligned minor mode—DWS saxophonist David Lovrien’s Minor Alterations: Christmas Through the Looking Glass, a “recasting” of favorite Christmas songs and carols (and even snippets of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker combined with Deck the Hall!) into a wonderful medley of minor-key madness (along with some melodic and rhythmic twists) that definitely calls for repeated listening. Another standout is The Christmas Song, with its fine alto sax solo by Donald Fabian, swingingly accompanied by the ensemble.

The big “classical” work is an arrangement simply called Russian Christmas Music, which apparently draws its sources from “Russian folk and Eastern Orthodox church music”. At almost 14 minutes, it’s by far the program’s most substantial entry, and it does show a wider range of technical virtuosity and different aspect of interpretive awareness than required in most of the other works, even if Alfred Reed’s arrangement begins to seem a bit long for the material after about 10 minutes. Never mind; any drift of attention is quickly recalled front and center with the concluding Christmas And Sousa Forever—the title giving away the concept. Wait until you hear how arranger Julie Giroux juxtaposes excerpts from such Christmas favorites as Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker with The Stars and Stripes Forever (and a couple of other marches)—not to mention the way she accompanies Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with that famous piccolo solo! It’s tempting to use that well-worn line, “if you buy only one Christmas CD this season, this one should be it”—but I won’t; I’ll just say that if by chance it is the only one, you won’t be disappointed.

-- David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com