This iconic CD was originally released in 2000 by CBC Records. Having been out of stock for years, Centerdiscs is thrilled to partner with CBC Music to finally re-press this much sought after album. "One of the most important composers of our time" (Kingston Whig-Standard). Marjan Mozetich's compellingly beautiful music has found favour with outstanding artists, critics and audiences around the world. "His music generates the kind of joyousness you feel when you hear the young Mozart." (Toronto Star). His aim is to write music that expresses beauty, sensuousness and emotion - things that give him and his audiences pleasure. When CBC Radio broadcasted the concert performance of Mozetich's 1997 violin concerto, Affairs of the Heart, the Corporation's switchboards lit up from coast to coast. There were numerous reports of what those who work in radio sometimes call "the driveway experience": where listeners are so captivated by what they're hearing, they remain in their cars, listening to the end, even though they've long since arrived home. The music of the concerto gives voice to emotions that are impossible to articulate in any other language: the inexplicable affairs of the heart. The Passion of Angels (1995) is one of a rare breed of orchestral works featuring two solo harps, and it is the first such work by a Canadian composer. The work explores three related but distinct degrees of passion: longing, desire, and ecstasy. The opening horn solo with accompanying harps announces the essential thematic material upon which the entire piece is based. Throughout the work the harps act as a catalyst for the orchestra to embark on a voyage of feeling. Postcards from the Sky is the collective title of an ongoing series of short pieces for string orchestra. As the title suggests, these works are relatively short, evocative thoughts on the heavens at large, either literal or metaphorical. The first three 'Postcards', were commissioned with the assistance of the Canada Council, and premiered by the Thirteen Strings of Ottawa conducted by Paul Andreas Mahr in April of 1996.

Current, B.: This Isn't Silence

Southam, A.: Canadian Composers Portraits

Cherney, B.: Like Ghosts From an Enchanter Fleeing / String

Chatman: Earth Songs

The newest release from Kronos Quartet features “Tundra Songs,” “Cercle du Nord III” and a selection of Inuit Throat Song Games for String Quartet written by JUNO Award-winning composer Derek Charke. All three works were commissioned and premiered by the Kronos Quartet to critical acclaim in North America and Europe. Tundra Songs was designed to complement the voice of its lead performer, Intuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq.

Music of the City and the Stars features two new compositions by Andrew Paul MacDonald where he is the featured soloist with the Quatuor Saguenay. The opening work, Lyra, is a musical examination of the constellation Lyra set in seven movements played segue. The piece opens with Hermes' invention of the lyre as his gift to Apollo and follows it through the magical hands of Orpheus as he encounters the Argonauts, Eurydice, Hades, and finally the Bacchants. The work closes with Zeus placing the lyre in the heavens in memory of the great musical wizard. Exotic string writing and electronic effects applied to the guitar create an eerie and timeless atmosphere. The album's companion work, Restless City, features both concerto-like exchanges and intimate expressive passages. Set in three substantial movements, this jazz-inspired composition pays homage to bebop legends Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron, and Thelonious Monk. Acclaimed Canadian composer Andrew Paul MacDonald was recently appointed to the Order of Canada for his contributions to Canadian music. His compositions have won many prestigious prizes, including the 1995 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year for his Violin Concerto. Renowned as a composer of works for symphony orchestra, opera, chamber ensembles, and soloists, MacDonald has been commissioned by artists across Canada and performed around the globe. A protégé of Alexandre Lagoya, MacDonald is also a concert guitarist who has premiered a number of works especially written for him. Formerly known as the Alcan Quartet, the Quatuor Saguenay consists of violinists Marie Bégin and Nathalie Camus, violist Luc Beauchemin, and cellist David Ellis. Based in Saguenay, Quebec, the quartet has developed a reputation for excellence throughout Canada and internationally since its formation in 1989.

Take the Dog Sled (2008) was commissioned by Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. This new work for seven musicians and two Inuit throat singers was premiered during the MSO’s first tour of Nunavik in Quebec’s far North. This work honours both Inuit and Western musical traditions, integrating them seamlessly without one subsuming the other. The piece captures the joy, tenderness, and energy of life in the North, as well as the mystical quality of the land. Since its premiere, the work has been performed numerous times by orchestras in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Acclaimed Canadian composer Alexina Louie has collaborated with leading soloists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world. Her orchestral works have been performed by the San Francisco, Montreal, BBC, St. Louis, Toronto, and Vancouver symphony orchestras, as well as China’s NCPA Orchestra, Beijing among others. Her compositions have been conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, Kent Nagano, Leonard Slatkin, Pinchas Zukerman, and Ingo Metzmacher. An Officer of the Order of Canada, Alexina Louie has received numerous awards for her lifetime of music creation. Esprit Orchestra was founded in 1983 by Music Director and Conductor Alex Pauk, and is Canada’s only full-sized, professional orchestra devoted to performing and promoting new orchestral music. Inuit throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik are multi-disciplinary artists and teachers originally from Nunavik.

When Nicholas Papador moved to Canada in 2005 he started participating in the Windsor Canadian Music Festival presented annually by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and University of Windsor. Over the course of several years, and after exposure to a fantastic body of work by a range of composers, he became enthralled with the rich repertoire of contemporary Canadian solo percussion music. The title of this recording is the English translation of Fran�ois Rose's Points d'emergence, and the idea of borders-as simultaneously rigid and porous-links the composers and the cultural and aesthetic influences emerging in their music. Fran�ois Rose is a French Canadian living in the U.S; Linda Catlin Smith, producer Ray Dillard, and myself are American born, but now living in Canada. Nicolas Gilbert's work crosses genre and applies extra musical narrative touches to his solo vibraphone piece; Catlin Smith's work, coincidentally enough, also is inspired by literature. Christien Ledroit engages punk rock and nuances of world music; Fran�ois Rose draws from the drumming of South India; and Isabelle Panneton evokes European and French Canadian expression even as angular gestures and sharp dynamics echo the formidable sonic aggression of a 1960s Japanese marimba repertoire. This recording contains primarily premi�re recordings; Papador is, in most cases, the second performer to play these pieces and the first to commercially record them. This reflects his commitment to explore, cultivate, and increase the visibility of significant existing repertoire rather than seek the notion of propriety that fuels commissions and premieres.

Dean Burry: Baby Kintyre

LOUIE Piano Concerto 1. ARCHER Piano Concerto No. 1 2. KUZMENKO Piano Concerto 3 • 1-3 Christina Petrowska Quilico (pn); 1 Alex Pauk, cond; National Arts Centre O; 2 John Eliot Gardiner, cond; CBC Vancouver O; 3 Jukka-Pekka Saraste, cond; Toronto SO • CENTREDISCS CMCCD 15610 (71:29)


These three piano concertos by Canadian women composers seem to be a summing-up of historical, conservative trends of the last century. They are all fast-slow-fast three-movement constructions, featuring the traditional dramatic structure of solo versus orchestra. The ghosts of Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Bartók hover over all of these works, although they are not imitative. The 1984 concerto of Alexina Louie opens mysteriously, really rather portentously, with percussive sonorities and blaring brass, but the overall feel of the work is Impressionistic, as rendered by the delicate and colorful timbre blending in the orchestra writing as well as the deftly textured solo piano part. Some sections have an Expressionistic cast, and there is writing for strings in the slow movement that seems to mimic a theremin. The last movement has a delightfully jazzy playfulness.


Violet Archer, a major figure in Canadian music who died in 2000, gives us a piano concerto in the Russian mode, with a brawny, post-Romantic work that sounds like it could have been produced by the great Soviet music-making machine of the mid 20th century. In fact, it was premiered in 1956, by far the oldest of the trio of concertos here. Prokofiev seems to be a major influence. It is a solid, very well-written work of concentrated emotional heft that could easily satisfy a wider audience, given the chance.


With its energy and spiky rhythms, the 1995 concerto of Larysa Kuzmenko bears the profile of an early Bartók work. The final movement is especially impressive, a propulsive tour de force for both soloist and orchestra, very well presented by this team of musicians.


Christina Petrowska Quilico plays all of this music with vivid brio, always finding a lucid textural balance with the orchestra. Her rock-steady rhythmic pulse and palpable enthusiasm seem to beg the listener to pay attention to the music, as if to say that none of this deserves obscurity. She is well supported by these Canadian bands, with only the National Arts Centre Orchestra betraying some rough edges.


FANFARE: Peter Burwasser
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Essential for the magnificent Louie work.

A big hurrah for this disk for it brings to us a major work by Alexina Louie, one of the brightest, and most exciting, composing talents to come out of Canada in recent years. Her music is full of the sounds of her Chinese heritage. She was born of second generation Canadians of Chinese descent, and she uses a full, rich and colourful palette in her works. Her language is modern, but one which speaks readily to an audience. This Concerto is a big virtuoso work, the piano taking the lead and the orchestra supplying a varied tapestry of sound to highlight the piano’s thoughts. There’s a lot going on in this work and it’s one of those pieces which really repay repeated hearings. The lyricism of the work might not be immediately apparent but it is full of tunes, and Louie works them out with a skill and grace which are typical of her music. Louie is a major composer who we should hear much more of, and I hope that this fabulous Concerto will win her many friends. The performance, conducted by Alex Pauk, Louie’s husband and a particularly sympathetic interpreter of her work, is very good indeed, and has the mark of authenticity.

Violet Archer’s Concerto comes as a shock after the hothouse of Louie’s work for here is very much a divertissement of a piece, the outer movements being sparkling and vivacious surrounding a rather more severe and serious slow movement. The ending is pure farce with big gestures, à la virtuoso vehicle being mocked and over-done. This is a pleasing enough piece, more than a bit of fluff, certainly, but despite Kenneth Winters’ assertion that “… it is a masterpiece …” it isn’t and doesn’t have the real quality sufficient to be a major contribution to the Piano Concerto literature.

Kuzumenko’s Piano Concerto begins in a very uncompromising manner with dissonance and a bravura cadenza for the soloist. That done, it turns into a neo-classical romp which, oddly, reminds me of Arthur Bliss’s Piano Concerto. The central movement changes style into a frozen northern landscape such as one which we have heard from Vagn Holmboe. The finale is a fast race and reminds one of Alan Rawsthorne. The problem, and I think you will have realised what I am about to write, is that this work, which is very competently written and everything happens just as it should do is lacking a really original voice. I don’t, for one minute, think that Kuzumenko is copying the composers whose names I have mentioned, rather she has happened onto the same sounds for which the others are known. Ironically, this work receives the best recorded sound – and it should be good considering that one of the engineers is the fabulous Stretch Quinney.

The sound for Louie and Archer is rather distant but an increase in volume can help this. Balance between soloist and orchestra is generally good and the notes, in English and French, will be of help to those unfamiliar with these composers. This issue is essential listening for anyone interested in new music and is particularly important for giving us the magnificent Alexina Louie work.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

Athparia, Colleen: Danse sauvage

Five works by Lee and Eagle explore reveals connections between the sound worlds of the chamber and electro acoustic music of our time and the intimate approach to listening as was the musical practice of ancient China. Secret of the Seven Stars, the title piece on the CD, was premiered by Toronto's New Music Concerts. The solo works on the disc feature the expressive virtuosity of German accordionist Hussong and Canadian flutist Aitken.

Commissioned by the Vancouver Chamber Choir for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, Magnificat, for soprano solo, SATB chorus and string orchestra is a 24 minute piece in eight movements. Through it's marriage of multilingual texts and contrasting musical idioms, the work expresses not only strongly held religious convictions but also hope for universal peace and harmony within our global community. To complement the spiritual nature of Magnificat, the subsequent tracks of this collection are 'songs of reflection' for either accompanied or unaccompanied SATB chorus.

From Sea to Sea' is an a cappella song cycle made up of thirteen musical settings of celebrated Canadian poems. In composing this work, I have selected one poem per province/territory of Canada - each poem written by a writer native to the region - and have set this text to music. Featured poets include such highly regarded and award-winning poets as Gwendolyn MacEwen, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robert Service, and Shane Koyczan. I have received permission and endorsement from all poets and/or their legal estates. These pieces explore the range and versatility of the human voice and cover a wide range of musical genres ranging from contemporary classical choral, to lively folk melodies - from driving bebop vocalese, to minimalistic soundscapes.