He went on to head major orchestras in Dallas and Atlanta and to guest conduct leading ensembles all over the world. But before that, Louis Lane honed his craft while working in the shadow of one of the great masters: in 1947, legendary maestro George Szell chose the young, inexperienced Texan to assist him in Cleveland - "I think you will do" was the gruff maestro's verdict, exceptional praise indeed from that notorious perfectionist.

Between 1959 and 1972 - with the full Cleveland Orchestra, the somewhat smaller Cleveland Pops and the chamber-sized Cleveland Sinfonietta - Louis Lane made a series of critically acclaimed recordings for Columbia. They display the "exceptional breadth and impeccable taste" for which this gifted but perennially undervalued conductor was lauded in a tribute by the orchestra's executive director. Sony Classical is pleased to present them now - many for the first time on CD - in a new 14-disc set.

Reviewers were effusive in their praise when these albums were originally released on LP. Here is a sampling: Pop Concert U.S.A. (1959) - music by Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein and other American composers: "If only all the pops (or, for that matter, all the classics) were as good as this!. The orchestra plays splendidly" (Gramophone). On the Town with the Cleveland Pops (1960) - selections from On the Town, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma, The King and I and other Broadway musicals: "Scintillating. Under Lane's enthusiastic direction, the Clevelanders play these familiar musical comedy excerpts with such precision and virtuosity that they emerge with glistening freshness" (High Fidelity). Music from the Films (1961) - Henry V, Louisiana Story, Bridge on the River Kwai, Gigi, Exodus and other motion pictures: "This concert of music from the movies is so superior to most issues of it's kind that it calls for special commendation. Lane has coaxed some beautiful playing from the Cleveland orchestra, and the engineers have provided him with rich and glorious sound" (High Fidelity).

Daniel Rieppel, a native of Minnesota of Austro-Hungarian descent, performs Mozart’s Fantasy and Sonata in C minor, the Piano Variations of Aaron Copland and Symphonic Etudes by Robert Schumann. Dr. Rieppel performs widely in North and South America and Europe (most recently in Iceland) and has been Professor of Music at Southwest Minnesota State University for over a quarter century. He has international recognition for his research into Schubert’s incomplete sonatas, finishing several that will be the subject of his next recording.

JoAnn Falletta conducts the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic in works by four extraordinary mid-20th-century American composers who helped shape the country’s musical destiny: Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Paul Creston and Ulysses Kay. Includes two world premiere recordings – Paul Creston's Saxophone Concerto and Ulysses Kay’s poignant and elegiac Pietà.

Navona Records is proud to present MUSIC FOR STRING QUARTET; the world premiere recording of renowned composer Leonard Bernstein’s long-lost work. Composed by an 18-year-old Bernstein during his studies at Harvard; the piece has been steadfastly shepherded from its re-discovery to this historic release by former Boston Symphony Orchestra Librarian John Perkel; and is performed here by Lucia Lin; Natalie Rose Kress; Danny Kim; and Ronald Feldman. “Movement I” and the newly-discovered “Movement II,” which was found within the U.S Library of Congress; are accompanied here by the seldom-recorded duo piece Elegies for Violin and Viola by composer Aaron Copland; a musical mentor; collaborator; and dear friend of Bernstein’s.

After World War I, composers would cast off the moorings of the traditional European styles to create something inexorably new. This was the beginning of the American Century. The four composers featured are the pinnacle of that achievement. Schuman, Persichetti, Ives, and Copland blazed a trail into a new era of distinctly American classical music on this incredible album from the United States Navy Band Washington D.C.

“Gazebo Dances” is a collection of Classical pieces by The United States Navy Band featuring some of the greatest composers including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Jean-Baptiste Arban, John Corigliano, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, and Michael Giacchino.

A fantastic collection of American choral classics ranging from Thompson’s sublime Alleluia to the terrific choral arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime from Porgy & Bess. Conductor Robin White’s excellent arrangement of the traditional Shenandoah balances the programme nicely along with Copeland’s "I bought me a cat". This is a surprising and entertaining collection. Alban Voices is a chamber-choir formed over 20 years ago by Robin White and his late wife, Freda, originally as a relief choir for services in St. Albans Abbey. It has always been an ad-hoc grouping, drawn together as and when required: many of the current members sing regularly in London’s top symphonic choirs. Among other appearances, it featured most notably in a pivotal episode of the BBC TV soap opera EastEnders in December 2003. More recently, the group’s recording of Robin’s original Christmas song, Light of the World, accompanied by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, has been well received, and was played on Scala Radio and Classic FM in the run-up to Christmas 2022.

Robin White trained at Imperial College, London and the Royal College of Music, studying conducting with Vernon Handley and orchestration with Bryan Kelly. He has conducted open-air, pop-classics concerts at National Trust and other venues across the south-west of England and the midlands. He has also worked with leading soloists such as John Lill, Christopher Warren-Green, Alexander Baillie and Emma Johnson in concerts in Bristol and the Channel Islands. His 1992 recording of Edwardian light music for Chandos Records was played extensively on Classic FM.

Pianist John Wilson, like his mentor Michael Tilson Thomas, is a servant of the music rather than its dictator and he knows both when and how to step back and let it speak.

The dynamic young American pianist John Wilson first encountered Michael Tilson Thomas (affectionately known as "MTT") in 2015 when he was a fellow with the New World Symphony. John’s protégé status quickly evolved to that of close confidant and collaborator, leading to this solo debut album featuring the world-premiere recording of the title track, MTT’s three-movement suite for piano, Upon Further Reflection. MTT explains innumerable influences that are embedded throughout the work, including the piano music of Debussy and Schumann, bossa nova, gamelan, ragas, Monteverdi, Berg, and Peggy Lee’s rendition of the song "Alley Cat," all of which “flowed together in a way that seemed completely natural... to me anyway.” In 2019, John premiered a portion of Upon Further Reflection that was broadcast live on MediciTV to an audience of over 50,000. John embellishes the album’s Americana theme with two titans of the solo piano repertoire – Aaron Copland’s early Piano Sonata – a work lesser-heard than the composer’s other works for solo piano – and Earl Wild’s virtuoso arrangements of seven of George Gershwin’s most iconic tunes.

REVIEW:

Given the scope and versatility of his long conducting career, it’s no surprise that Michael Tilson Thomas’s work as a composer has, until now, largely passed under the radar. In recent years, though, it’s begun to emerge. MTT’s latest champion is the pianist John Wilson, a former fellow with the conductor’s New World Symphony and a brilliantly gifted pianist.

His new album, Upon Further Reflection takes its cue from Tilson Thomas: the title track is a three-movement meditation on the artist’s early life, while subsequent selections by Earl Wild and Aaron Copland draw out different strands of MTT’s personality and long career. Taken together, the program paints an affecting portrait.

Upon Further Reflection is an ingratiating piece. Its freshness derives partly from its eclecticism – echoes of jazz, bossa nova, and Broadway collide with more abstracted, nostalgic expressivity – and partly from its wild virtuosity. Indeed, no small part of the thrill of Wilson’s performance is hearing the terrific dexterity with which the pianist dispatches its busiest textures (particularly the concluding “You Come Here Often?,” its material adapted from an aborted 1977 musical).

While Wilson’s just as comfortable with the music’s more ruminative moments – the reflective and somewhat brooding outer thirds in “Sunset Soliloquy (Whitsett Avenue 1963)” are tenderly shaped – much of this piece, like MTT, is smartly extroverted. The profile of the refrains in “Bygone Beguine (1973)” grow in intensity and definition as the movement proceeds, but they never lose their soulful vibe.

Filling out the disc are Wild’s 7 Virtuoso Etudes after Gershwin and Copland’s Piano Sonata.

The Wild set, with their knowing adaptations of familiar tunes, fit smartly alongside Reflection. And Wilson, whose playing is magnificently secure and flawlessly balanced, gives a reading that rivals Wild’s own for character; it exceeds it for recorded quality.

Wilson’s account of Copland’s Piano Sonata is shaped with similar thoughtfulness. This 1942 score is years removed from the populist composer of that day – its harmonic acerbity recalls the Piano Variations of 1930 much more than Rodeo or Appalachian Spring. Regardless, it’s a powerfully-structured work whose three movements chart a course from turbulence to nervous peace.

The pianist has got real sympathy for this music: how it’s structured, how the melodic line develops, its drama is paced, the shifting tone colors, and so on. His control of dynamic contrasts and balances in the first movement are masterful, as is his transition in to the driving Allegro. In the central Vivace, the music shimmers, while the stentorian, oracular gestures at the start of the finale simply melt into the movement’s concluding diatonic counterpoint.

True, that transition provides one of the most powerful contrasts on this disc – and it’s more a compositional accomplishment than an interpretive one. But Wilson, like his mentor MTT, is a servant of the music rather than its dictator and he knows both when and how to step back and let it speak. The result is a performance of raw power and touching beauty.

-- The Arts Fuse (Jonathan Blumhofer)

Elena Urioste is a musician, yogi, writer, and entrepreneur, while Tom Poster is a musician whose skills and passions extend well beyond the conventional role of the concert pianist; they are musical and (now married) life partners. From Brighton to Brooklyn is an exploration and celebration of their British and American backgrounds and mutual fascination with music from each-other’s home country. They comment: ‘All the pieces by English and American composers on this recording deserve to be heard far more often than they are: none would be considered core repertoire, yet every one of them captivates through its composer’s distinctive voice. Some of the pieces have been known to one or both of us for many years; others we discovered only when we were dreaming up this recording. With the exception of Coleridge-Taylor’s soaring, impassioned Ballade, this is a collection of miniatures and character pieces. Some, such as the works by Beach and Bridge, transport us to a world of elegant salons; others, such as the pieces by Britten and Schoenfeld, are colorfully virtuosic and certainly gave us a shot of adrenaline in the recording studio! Bridge’s Heart’s Ease, with which the album closes, perfectly encapsulates a more general tendency among our chosen pieces to convey the listener to another world, using relatively few notes, and it has become a particular favorite of ours. We hope that you, too, will discover some new treasures here.’

REVIEW:

Urioste and Poster link lighter, salon-type pieces by the Americans Amy Beach and Florence Price and the Britons Frank Bridge and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to music that draws on vernacular sources. Primary among these are Copland's early and heavily jazz-flavored Two Pieces of 1926, which are not often heard and fit in beautifully here. The players draw in a later work imbued with Gershwin's spirit, the Four Souvenirs of Paul Schoenfield. Britten's Suite adds a just slightly harder edge, and the program concludes with Bridge's beautifully lyrical Heart's Ease. Urioste and Poster never try to make more of this music than is actually there, and what is actually there is considerable charm and a fresh concept that no one should disvalue.

-- AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

“Aaron Copland: American Populist”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film four in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Buffeted by social and political currents, Copland can seem unmoored: a cork in a stream. He was politicized by the Depression- and by the example of Mexico, whose artists galvanized national identity and progressive thought. He wrote a prize-winning workers’ song and addressed a Communist picnic in Minnesota. Twenty years later, the Red Scare targeted him as a traitor. Can his odyssey be read as a parable illuminating the fate of the American artist?  This film features a reenactment of Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by Edward Gero). It also highlights the most consequential Copland score we don’t know: his ingenious music of Lewis Mumford’s 1939 World’s Fair film The City, itself a complex product of the Popular Front. We reconsider the valedictory Piano Fantasy, in which Copland refreshed his modernist roots- a galvanizing performance by Benjamin Pasternack, who also recalls a telling encounter with the composer. The other commentators include the American historians Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, who ponder the tangled legacy of American populism of the left and right.

"The 'Dvořák’s Prophecy' film series makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the history of music in America, and of the role that music has played, and must continue to play, in American culture as a whole. The films are both enlightening and entertaining. I can readily envision their use in classrooms, in both introductory and advanced-research contexts. Non-specialists will also enjoy them thoroughly. Because Horowitz does not shy away from political, racial, and gender issues of intense contemporary relevance, these films are especially important right now." – Larry Starr, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Washington

Following up its widely acclaimed reissues of the Juilliard Quartet’s complete Epic and RCA Victor albums – originally issued between 1956 and 1960 – Sony Classical is excited to present a new box set collecting the earliest albums of this august American ensemble. Made between 1949 and 1956 in Columbia’s studio on Manhattan’s 30th St., these landmark recordings are mostly new to CD.

From its first appearances in New York, the Juilliard Quartet was identified as a champion of modern music. Its first recordings for American Columbia, all included here, were dedicated to the works of Alban Berg and Béla Bartók (then only recently deceased), as well as to Arnold Schoenberg (still very much alive), and to active American composers including William Schuman. But the heart of this release comprising 16 newly mastered CDs and also featuring works by Mozart, Ravel, Webern, Milhaud, Copland, Peter Mennin, Alexei Haieff and Andrew Imbrie, are three discs containing the premiere of Béla Bartók’s six quartets on records, which were set down in 1949. They appeared on LP and 78s the following year, bringing the Juilliard Quartet its first real celebrity. Recorded on 78-rpm shellacs rather than on tape, this path-breaking set thus consists of live, unedited performances. When reissued some years ago on CD – the only portion of the new Sony Classical box set ever to have appeared before on silver discs – it was rapturously praised in Fanfare magazine for “its joy of discovery, which remains completely fresh and vivid” even though numerous other traversals of the Bartók cycle had appeared in the meantime.

Another Juilliard milestone was the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s four quartets on records, set down in 1951–52. At last, all these historic Juilliard String Quartet recordings are available to today’s music lovers.

REVIEWS:

[An] engrossing 16-disc box set of [the Juilliard Quartet's] earliest recordings for the Columbia label, many appearing on disc for the first time.

What other quartet of that era would have made its recorded debut not with standard repertoire but with a cantata by Darius Milhaud, written just a few years before? There are works here by composers both renowned (Berg, Webern, Copland) and virtually forgotten (Peter Mennin, Alexei Haieff), all rendered in the Juilliard’s trademark sound: X-ray clear and devoid of schmaltz.

Two complete cycles anchor the set: Bartok (the first recording of his six quartets) and Schoenberg. Given how unfamiliar these works were at the time, the Juilliard’s confidence and authority is stunning. Subsequent recordings may have disclosed other aspects of this repertory, but that does not dampen the freshness and sense of discovery audible here.

-- The New York Times

If patience is a virtue, then fans of the Juilliard String Quartet’s earliest records must be saints. For only now have these much-cherished monaural recordings returned to circulation, some 70 years after their debuts, in a new 16-CD set from Sony Classical titled “Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings, 1949-56.” The quartet, currently observing its 75th anniversary, is still going strong, though the present ensemble naturally comprises personnel entirely different from those selected for the group at its founding in 1946 by the composer William Schuman, then president of the famed Juilliard School in New York.

Sony has been good to the Juilliard, having previously released important sets of recordings from a bit later in the group’s life, specifically the 1950s and ’60s, when the quartet made what quickly became fabled discs for Epic and RCA Victor. The addition of this box means the quartet’s early prime is now thoroughly documented. (That said, good luck acquiring those Epic and RCA reissues, which were quicky snatched up—something worth keeping in mind while pondering this latest one.)

String quartets, with their changing personnel and specialized repertory, have rarely achieved lasting fame, at least among the larger population. They have never in modern times commanded the attention that celebrated instrumental soloists garner, and they haven’t the institutional resources that orchestras command. So releases like this one serve a special purpose. They make us aware of great musicians who might otherwise be, at best, dimly recalled. And, certainly in this case, they return to public attention extraordinary performances that should never have been out of the limelight.

-- The Wall Street Journal

The award winning Aeolus Quartet offers the second installment in their Many-Sided Music Project, Ariel and Other Poems. This ongoing project collects distinctive voices of American composers, combining the classic with the modern. Ariel and Other Poems takes its name from the original title of Sylvia Plath's last manuscript. The poems contained therein include the work that inspired Christopher Theofanidis' Ariel Ascending, and joined by the rich expansive tones of the Copland, the buzzing electricity of the Mazzoli, and the deep catharsis of the Barber, the album Ariel and Other Poems seeks to offer a small sampling of the multi-faceted collection of American chamber music.

Teach me! The students of Nadia Boulanger is the Boulanger Trio's first album on the Berlin Classics label, an album dedicated to the trio's eponymous heroine. The three musicians present music by Bernstein, Piazzolla and Françaix alongside Quincy Jones, Aaron Copland and Philip Glass. The works are very varied in style, yet a common bond unites their composers: they were all students of Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger's special personality as a teacher and her charismatic engagement as a source of inspiration for composers from all over the world lie at the heart of this album. Would Piazzolla have ever discovered Tango nuevo without Nadia Boulanger? What form would Philip Glass's repetitive structures have taken, and would West Side Story have turned out as we know it today? Generations of music-makers were influenced by Nadia Boulanger, who supported them in their quest to evolve their own personal style. She composed no works of note, nor did she write a guide to composition or harmony. Her work focused on her relationship with her students, on exchange of ideas with them and conversations with them. The repertoire of this album is wide-ranging and imaginative. The Trio pour violon, violoncelle et piano (1986) by Jean Françaix rubs shoulders with the well-known Cuatros Estaciones Porteñas by Astor Piazzolla. The melodious love song Maria from Leonard Bernstein's celebrated musical West Side Story is side by side with Philip Glass's repetitive Head On. Other musical excursions whirl listeners away to the avant-garde with Aaron Copland's Vitebsk - Study on a Jewish Theme (1929) before landing them in film music with the main title theme to the film The Color Purple by Quincy Jones.

For her fifth release on BIS Clare Hammond has constructed an adventurous programme of twentieth and twenty-first-century variations for piano. From the imposing Chaconne by Sofia Gubaidulina, to the tender grief of Paul Hindemith’s variations or Aaron Copland’s bold and uncompromising proclamation, the disc presents a fresh perspective on the genre. Hammond opens with Karol Szymanowski’s Variations on a Polish Theme from 1904, a virtuosic and intensely Romantic outpouring that contrasts strikingly with the wit and irreverence of Helmut Lachenmann’s set on a theme by Schubert. The most recent works in the programme are Harrison Birtwistle’s mercurial elegy and its polar opposite I Still Play, a lyrical waltz composed in 2017 by John Adams. Described as ‘a star interpreter of contemporary music’ (The Observer), Clare Hammond has developed a reputation for imaginative concert programming. As she herself admits in her liner notes, variation form may on the surface appear to be both limiting and limited, but the works she presents here transcend the form in myriad creative, and at times daring, ways.

East West explores musical landscapes from the European and American parts of the globe, resulting in a kind of travel journal that begins in Eastern Europe and then travels westward Duo Aliada is known for their creative approach to adapting classical repertoire for their own instruments. Polish saxophonist Michal Knot and Serbian accordionist Bogdan Laketic formed the duo in 2013 in Vienna, a city whose rich musical tradition reflects its history as a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe. The following years brought Michal and Bogdan to performances around the world, and into contact with various cultures and musical traditions. This wide range of experiences, beginning all the way back with their childhoods in Eastern Europe, is a major source of inspiration for their music making and for this album.

The four works on this release, all composed in the 1940s, embrace the lingering end of one musical tradition and the vigorous upsurge of another. Mellifluous, retrospective and playful, the Duet Concertino and Prelude to Capriccio were works from Richard Strauss’s final phase – an old man’s refuge from the barbarism of war and its aftermath. What the public thought of them was incidental, even irrelevant. In the same decade, Aaron Copland and other younger American composers were reaching out, via radio, recordings and film, to a new mass audience. The European influence of Appalachian Spring and the Clarinet Concerto, though inescapable, was minimized in a populist, vernacular idiom that absorbed folk music and jazz.

Richard Stamp unites some of the finest instrumentalists from the UK and Europe in these performances – featuring celebrated orchestras the Academy of London and the Royal Northern Sinfonia with renowned Austrian soloists Ernst Ottensamer and Stepan Turnovsky. Stepan Turnovsky joined the Vienna State Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1978 and has kept the position of Solo Bassoonist there since 1985, performing with conductors such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Carlos Kleiber amongst many others. The late Ernst Ottensamer was a former principal clarinettist at the Vienna Philharmonic and an avid performer of chamber music – founding numerous ensembles and collaborating with musicians such as Sir Simon Rattle, André Previn, Daniel Barenboim and Rudolf Buchbinder amongst others. In 2005 he found a clarinet trio with his sons Daniel and Andreas Ottensamer – themselves the Principal Clarinettists of the Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras. This present performance represents his last concerto recording.

REVIEW:

It is for the two Strauss performances that I can offer an enthusiastic thumbs up. Ernest Ottensamer died suddenly in 2017 at the age of 61, and the Copland was his last concerto recording. That, too, adds to the value of this release. Signum deserves gratitude for saving all four performances from being lost and forgotten.

– Fanfare

'From the New World' is the subtitle of Dvorak's famous Symphony No. 9, implying a departure into a new musical world and representing a bridge between the European and American music traditions and their influences. Dvorak's music shares the programme with works by Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland. These new organ transcriptions are performed by Hansjörg Albrecht on the Organ system (large organ, concert organ, echo organ) of the main church St. Michaelis in Hamburg. Hansjörg Albrecht is – besides Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, Martin Haselböck and Wayne Marshall – one of the few artists who are regularly present internationally both as conductor and concert organist. He is considered a musical innovator and lateral thinker without fear of contact. As a conductor, he consistently follows his own paths – between archive and new creation and with an extensive repertoire from Bach to Messiaen – and with his organ transcriptions he has established himself as a specialist among the virtuosos of his instrument.

REVIEW:

Pride of place here are the two arguably greatest works written by a European on American soil and an American on European soil. However, these are preceded by two remarkable transcriptions. First comes a boisterous version of Dvorák’s Carnival overture, made by another European emigrant to America, Edwin Lemare, which shows off Albrecht’s virtuosity. Then comes John Fesperman’s transcription of Copland’s Passacaglia, which gives us a fabulous Cook’s tour of many of the organ’s weirder and more wonderful sounds.

Barber’s Adagio for Strings works very well in this transcription by William Strickland; and while the bulk of the sound is, naturally enough, created by the string tone, Albrecht’s judicious employment of flutes gives it a comfortable, idiomatic feel. My only reservation is the bulky pedal stop which anchors it rather too solidly.

The transcription of Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony is by Zsigmond Szathmáry, and makes considerable demands on both the organ and the player. The generous acoustic of St Michael’s Church, Hamburg, possibly covers a multitude of sins, and perhaps some intricate detail gets lost in this highly atmospheric recording, but Albrecht has a powerful vision for the work and is superb in recreating what are distinctly orchestral textures. He is particularly impressive in conveying the dancelike vigour of the final movement. Above all, he moves across the mindboggling specification of this organ (by my reckoning, there are some 150 stops to play with) with the fluidity of the River Elbe.

-- Gramophone