Old and New Worlds is the result of an international collaboration between Ars Veritas (Gothenburg, Sweden) and Schola Cantorum (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio). It features great choral works of the past and the present. Ensemble Ars Veritas started in 2010 at the University of Stage and Music in Gothenburg. Jakob Patriksson led the work on creating an ensemble focusing on early church music and the sacred music it later inspired. One of the hallmarks of Ars Veritas is the concerts that gradually illustrate the evolution of Western European church music: from the sacred unanimous Gregorian music to the first completely independent polyphonic works.

This album features a program of great works for viola from the 21st Century. Violist Christopher Lowry is also a wonderful composer, and two of his works are featured here, along with works by Peter Dayton and Christopher Hallum. This is miles removed from the often hard-to-listen-to new music that is all-too prevalent. This music is immediately captivating. Hailing from Nashville, TN, Christopher Lowry is emerging as one of the leading violists and most performed composers of his generation. He is a two-time prize winner in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, winning the "Jury Panel Prize" in 2016 and Yuri Bashmet's "President of the Jury Prize" in 2013. He has also won prizes in the Lewisville Lake Symphony International String Competition (2015), LSU Concerto Competition (2014, 2012), Marquette Symphony Concerto Competition (2014), Nashville Philharmonic Orchestra Concerto Competition (2012), Vanderbilt Concerto Competition (2008), ASTA National Solo Competition (2007), and the Eastern Music Festival Concerto Competition (2006), among many others.

Centaur is pleased to release another album by prolific composer David Loeb. The works are Setsune, Five Reveries, Kiri, Fantasia sobre “Como la rosa en el guerto,” Three Friends of Winter, Suite No. 4, Cycle for the Lunar New Year, and Canon. Composer David Loeb was born in 1939 to a family which took music and the arts very seriously. He studied first with Peter Pindar Stearns at the Mannes College of Music, and then received his master’s degree from Yale. His catalog of compositions is quite remarkably extensive and diverse. In addition to the typical assortment of works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice, he has also composed extensively for Asian instruments and for early music instruments.

Memos is loosely related to a series of five essays by Italo Calvino, titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Composer Erik Lund found this work to be a fascinating read, and he felt that meaningful analogies could be made to sound and music. Erik Lund composes music as analogies and commentaries. As such, his works are usually born of ideas and sources that are not inherently musical, where he takes as his task the process of transforming these ideas into the sound domain. The result has been music which has been described as “dramatic and gripping” (Martin Adams, Irish Times). Erik Lund is professor of music composition at the University of Illinois, a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, and an active performer of both composed and improvised music. His compositions have won the League of Composers, International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and ASCAP composition competitions, and he has received grants for his work from the Musik Biennale-Berlin Festival, Meet the Composer, ASCAP, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois.

In the early 19th-century, a rivalry existed between two of Italy's greatest guitarists/composers, Francesco Molini and Ferdinando Carulli. This album features not only the complete Molino works for flute and guitar, but also the Carulli Concerto for Flute and Guitar. Both composers are wonderful, as are these performances. Diversity of styles is a hallmark of Roberto Alvarez’s concerts and recitals. As a matter of fact he feels just as comfortable performing classical, baroque or avant-garde music as well as Celtic, jazz or rock. He has received various international prizes, such as the Diploma of Honor in the Torneo Internazionale di Musica, Concurso Internacional de Música “Paper de Musica” de Capellades, the Ángel Muñíz Toca Award and the Ciutat de Manresa Prize. Born and raised in Singapore, Kevin Loh is a recipient of the Fellowship of the Royal Schools of Music, the 2018 Goh Soon Tioe Centenary Award and the 2010 HSBC Youth Excellence Award for Musical Excellence. He was talent-scouted by The Yehudi Menuhin School via his YouTube channel when he was only 12 years old and was awarded a grant by The Rolling Stones to study at the prestigious music school as their first Asian guitarist.

This is an album featuring some of the greatest music written for Saxophone Quartet in the past thirty years, with a strong stream of minimalism. The Orion Saxophone Quartet came into being in 1989, established by Jeff Benedict and Charles Richard, both of whom were recent products of Harvey Pittel's saxophone studio at the University of Texas. Staunch devotees of Pittel's rich, expansive tone, they wanted to form a group based in Los Angeles that would play in the same bold and unapologetic manner they had studied so assiduously under his tutelage. Ken Foerch, a former member of the U.S. Marine Band, and Adrian Williams, a product of Richard's own studio, proved to be the perfect match in tone quality and musical concept. It is the aspiration of the Orion Quartet to perform a diverse array of music in a manner true to the composer's intent and the style of the era while also exploiting the full tonal and expressive range of Adolphe Sax's grand invention. With a repertoire spanning five centuries, the Orion Saxophone Quartet demonstrates a perpetually robust sonority and superb command of the melodic line.

This is a great album of works by the master of music of the Argentine tango, Astor Piazzolla, and works by Juanjo Mosalini, who is deeply steeped in the music of this tradition. If this album doesn't get you up on your feet, dancing, nothing will! Juanjo Mosalini was born into a musical family- his father and grandfather both played bandoneon, and they raised him to be deeply rooted in Argentina’s musical traditions. He began playing bandoneon at eight years old. In 1999 he founded the first bandoneon course in Europe at the Conservatory of Music in Gennevilliers.

Gabriel Dupont (1878 - 1914) wrote a wonderful works for voice and piano. They are beautifully performed here by soprano Rachel Joselson and pianist Bo Ties. While still a university student in voice performance, Rachel Joselson performed with the Indianapolis Symphony and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Robert Shaw. After completing her masters’ degree at Indiana University, she moved to Europe and pursued private voice study with Mario and Rina del Monaco in Lancenigo, Italy. Her first full-time operatic contract was in Darmstadt, singing roles Rosina, Dorabella, Cherubino, Adalgisa and Idamante, before transitioning to soprano repertoire during her years at Hamburg. She has been on the faculty at the University of Iowa since 1997. Bo Ties (pronounced teece) is originally from Southeastern Minnesota. He took piano lessons from an early age until 8th grade though he never really delved too deeply into classical music. After a four year hiatus from lessons, playing for his own enjoyment, he decided he needed to be a pianist. He began his formal training in classical music as a college freshman and never looked back. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Piano Performance (2009) at Winona State University studying with Dr. Deanne Mohr. He then moved south to complete an M.A. in Piano Performance (2011) and a D.M.A. in Piano Performance and Pedagogy (2018) at the University of Iowa under the tutelage of Dr. Uriel Tsachor. In August 2018, Dr. Ties joined the faculty at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. He remains an active performer, teacher, and presenter.

This album brings together players, wind instruments, and associated traditions from four continents. The compositions were written over a span of more than twenty years. They illustrate very different responses to the many compositional challenges presented by trying to create a complete sound world entirely through the use of melody. David Loeb was born in 1939 in New York into a family which took music and painting very seriously. He studied composition with Peter Pindar Stearns at the Mannes College of Music in New York, and then completed a master's degree at Yale. His catalog of compositions is unusually extensive and diverse. In addition to the expected assortment of works for orchestra, various chamber combinations, soloists, and voice, he has also written many pieces for Asian instruments (in addition to Japanese, some for Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Mongol) and for early Western instruments (in addition to viols, some for lute, harpsichord, and recorder). He has often brought these instruments together in unique combinations, such as four shakuhachi and four viols; flute, guitar, koto, and shakuhachi; and khaen, flute, guitar, cello, and percussion.

French composer Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957) made a life's work of collecting, transcribing, and arranging folksongs. His Chants d'Auvergne has long been very popular. Much of the rest of his songs, though, have been unjustly neglected. Among these, L'arada emerges as a particularly intriguing work.

Krassimira Jordan is Professor Piano and Artist-in-Residence at Baylor University, and has established for herself an international reputation as both a concert pianist and a recording artist. He has an impressive list of international prizes to her name, including the International Piano Competitions “Alfredo Casella” and “Alessandro Casagrande,” as well as the Mozart “Clara Haskil” Prize. She currently records and performs frequently as one half of the Vienna Piano Duo alongside fellow pianist Thomas Kreuzberger. She has chosen some of her favorite and most-performed works for this recording, including works by Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

On January 5, 2017, Robert Owens passed away in Munich. He left behind a vital legacy of music that is just now being fully discovered. Soprano Jamie Reimer has studied the life and work of Owens extensively, and gave the world premiere of his 4 Sonnets to Eleonora Druse, which are on this album. Soprano Jamie Reimer has performed in opera, oratorio and recital venues around the United States, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and Australia. Her concert appearances include performances of Mozart Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Choral Fantasy, as well as Liszt’s Christus for the American Liszt Society’s international festival. She has performed with Opera Omaha, Omaha Symphony Chamber Orchestra, Lincoln Symphony, Hastings Symphony, and the Northern Iowa Symphony Orchestra. She has also appeared in several musical theater roles, including Tessa (The Gondoliers), Rapunzel (Into the Woods), and Martha Jefferson (1776).

This album features four major works for guitar from the age of Napoleon. Pascal Valois performs these works with exceptional presence and sensitivity. Pascal Valois is dedicated to reviving enthusiasm for the guitar scene during the Romantic era. He performs music from the nineteenth-century repertoire by using various period instruments, ornamentation, stylistic practices of the period, as well as improvisation, which was customary in that era. After graduating with honours at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal under Jean Vallières, and receiving the award Pierre J. Jeanniot during his studies at Université du Québec à Montréal with Alvaro Pierri, Valois studied romantic guitar with Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and with David Starobin in New York. He has also received a doctorate in Performance Practice from Université Laval. Recently, he has played in Basel, Paris, Riga, San Francisco, New York, Ottawa, and Toronto. He has been a soloist with many ensembles, among them Rigas’s Ensemble Samsara and Montreal’s Les Idées Heureuses. He has also given master-classes in many institutions, including the Manhattan School of music, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.

Here, contemporary American composer Mark Lackey presents a program of his works for chamber ensemble and for solo piano. As a composer of vocal, electronic, chamber, orchestral, and wind ensemble music, Mark Lackey has garnered premieres from many gifted artists including Rhymes With Opera, Fireworks Ensemble, Eastman Wind Orchestra, Definiens Ensemble, Druid City Ensemble, cellist Craig Hultgren, violist Victor de Almeida, and violinist Courtney Orlando. His music is available on the Potenza Music label, through Dorn Publications, and on his own Julian Date Music imprint, and he is currently working on a new album of original music to be titled Fairy Tale. Honors include a public reading by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, an Encore Grant from the American Composers Forum, and selection as finalist in the American Composer Competition of the Columbia (MD) Orchestra. Mark Lackey is also an energetic educator. As Assistant Professor at Samford University's School of the Arts, he teaches composition and music theory.

Antonio Juanas wrote some of the great choral music of the late 1700s, but far too little of this work is known. This release presents premiere recordings of these great works, performed by the Collegium Mundi Novi, conducted by R. Ryan Endris. R. Ryan Endris has received critical acclaim for his “ability to imbue his vocal and instrumental forces with his view of the music” and for his ensembles’ “clarity, exquisite phrasing, and vibrancy” (Bloomington Herald-Times). Dr. Endris currently serves as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Choral & Vocal Activities at Colgate University where he conducts the University Chorus and Chamber Singers. Highly sought after as a conductor and clinician, he has recently appeared as a guest conductor for the Syracuse Vocal Ensemble and Monroe County School Music Association’s Women’s Honor Choir and as a guest clinician at Creighton University (Omaha, Nebraska), University of the Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and University of Cartagena (Cartagena, Colombia).