This album seeks to honor composers that have been relegated to marginalized communities and are under-represented within the classical musical cadre. To be able to perform these stellar works is a mere starting point for offering the honor, attention, and exposure that is deserved and has been so long overdue.

I have chosen the title Kairos for my debut album of compositions, as this richly meaningful Greek word conveys a sense of a significant moment or season of time. While the word Chronos refers to quantitative, measurable time, Kairos refers to a deeper, qualitative view of time. This music is the fruit of a season in which I turned over a new page as a composer, digging deeper into the forms and vocabulary of the historic classical music tradition, and delving into some of the most vital themes of human existence - time, birth, life, death, and love. - Kyle Werner

Piano works by two great French composers; Contemporary composer Philippe Manoury, and Claude Debussy.

It has been a good while since I heard electronics quite this intriguing. So naturalistic, so alive like in the branches of a tree, much might be said here about the excellence of the technology employed. In each piece on this album, it constitutes a remarkable asset, while at the same time being wholly integrated with expression. The viola part, for it's share, is seamless, it's presence so closely interwoven with the electronics that the boundary fades away. It contributes gesture, impulse, and energy. Likewise, the entire catalogue of viola techniques serves the purpose of expression. - Krzysztof Komendarek-Tymendorf

Music is a river fed by many streams. Try as one might to capture it and attach tidy labels - classical in this bottle, jazz in that, minimalism in the other - the river flows on, enriched by each tributary as it goes.

The idea of a late artistic style evokes something special, an autumnal wisdom or serenity born of hard-won emotional experience. In describing the genesis of his choices of three late masterworks for this album, Kwan Yi wrote that 'these pieces are dear to my heart and [ones] I studied extensively with my former teachers, Leon Fleisher and Bob McDonald. With the passing of Mr. Fleisher, I wanted to pay homage to my masters and took the time to record these selected works.'

Ignatius Sancho: Music of an Eighteenth-Century Black Englishman The Black British writer and musician Ignatius Sancho (ca. 1729-1780) may have been born into slavery. By 1749, he had become part of the household of the Duke of Montagu, where he worked as a valet, later becoming a shopkeeper in the neighborhood of Westminster. Sancho is known today as a writer through his posthumously published Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782).

This is an album of first-rate contemporary works for clarinet and piano.

INVISIBLE LIGHT presents six compositions, each representing a different facet of the compositional work of David Evan Jones (b. 1946). Four of the six compositions are scored for traditional Korean instruments and two for Western instruments.

This album comprises nine solo and chamber compositions written over a span of more than fifty years. Although none of these pieces uses any Asian instruments, most of them contain some kind of Asian cultural references. All of them were composed for the performers who have recorded them. __ David Loeb

This is an album largely consisting of solo violin works by Paganini, but also with two Paganini works for violin and piano. Argentine violinist Tomas Cotik, who has made a number of recordings for Centaur, is the ideal performer for these works.

The piano duos presented here, all drawn from the mid-20th century, have their inspiration in dance or ballet: but thankfully, that red flag for program music - is it a hopeless prisoner of a storyline or visual narrative? - shows no sign of rising. All three works stand majestically on their own: Rachmaninoff's autumnal self-eulogy, The Symphonic Dances, Barber's Souvenirs, a whimsical collage of the Gilded Era ballroom, and Piazzolla's Tango for Two Pianos (arr. P. Ziegler). And, in the case of Piazzolla, we witness the tango, as it moves from the cafe to the concert hall, shedding the strictures of dance itself.

Jose Elizondo is a multifaceted Mexican composer. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at Harvard University. In the field of technology, Jose works full-time as an engineer in a company that specializes in speech recognition technology systems. As a composer, Jose writes chamber and orchestral music in a style that is lyrical and expressive, often drawing inspiration from Latin American folk music.

Night Surrendering to Dawn features an engaging and eclectic program of works for flute and piano by 21st century composers Valerie Coleman, Christian Ellenwood, Amanda Harberg, and Samuel Zyman. As we move through unprecedented and challenging times, we hope that the pieces on this program serve to remind us that light and hope will return after the dark.

Why Preludes & Fugues? Everyone loves a fugue! But the prelude is important too. It should set up the fugue in dramatic fashion. Although my fugues have expositions, episodes and stretto sections, they diverge from the strict forms of the Baroque period. A pure 3 or 4 voice fugue is modeled on 4-part choral writing where each voice is maintained withing it's limited range. In the classical era - Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms all wrote 'fugue-like' pieces known as 'fugati'. These pieces often started out formally but soon broke out of their strict voice leading with runs, arpeggios and block chords. Fugue writing continued into the 20th century, but losing the tonal centers and discernable key changes weakened the strength and logic of the form. Tonal fugue writing calls for independent, melodious, horizontal lines, while also expressing logical chord progressions vertically. It's tricky! Why write piano music in this style these days? Actually, they were all composed in the late 1970's during my student days at Boston University. I was having a great time, and my teacher, David del Tredici was writing fully tonal music himself. Bottom line: if you have one life to live, you should write the kind of music you like!

This album features two of the greatest Clarinet Trios, those of Beethoven and Brahms. These are beautiful performances of truly great works.

Samuel Lord Kalcheim composes in a variety of styles, old and new, and is dedicated to writing music both emotionally and intellectually satisfying, balancing tender lyricism with tight, complex formal architecture. Building on an expertise in 18th and 19th c. styles and forms, Samuel writes expressive new music for today's sensibilities.

Music, for all of us, is intimately connected to our lives and the sounds we love and grew up with, and that we discovered on our journeys through our world. We all remember the music we heard as children, and certainly we remember the songs that bound us together with our friends as teens. As we grow older, we are exposed to music from all over the world that we experience through visits, shows, and media. -Craig Madden Morris

This album comprises seven solo, chamber, and orchestral pieces composed over almost forty years. It does not include any compositions for Japanese instruments or for early instruments which are well-represented in other albums by David Loeb. All of the pieces were written specifically for the performers who have played them here.

Jeffrey Chappell performs three great pianos sonatas from the 20th Century, by Alberto Ginastera, Charles T. Griffes, and Samuel Barber

Chinese pianist Nariga Nogi, in live recordings of piano works by Haydn, Liszt, Debussy, and Chopin.

This repertoire spans almost eighty years of classical composers' excursions into blues, folk, hip-hop, jazz, musical theater, samba, tango, techno and other genres. Each piece goes beyond mere stylistic imitation, cultivating an authentic expressivity within a transcribed musical language rooted in the Americas. ___Alexander Crosett

This is a great modern jazz album, with all original compositions by Jorge Variego

Masks under the Mask is an album of some of the greatest piano works by Robert Schumann. The pianist, Ham Can, comments: In this album, I have included six sets of character pieces, ranging from his early "Papillons, Op. 2," inspired by the idea of a masked ball, to one of his later, more chromatic works, "Drei Fantasiestucke.

This is an album of great American Piano works, spanning a century. Evan Mitchell plays these works with great aplomb.