In my long orchestral career, the times that I find myself playing chamber music with string instruments, especially by living composers, are the times that I feel most like myself. The works gathered here quite literally span my entire career. I have worked closely, over many years, with each composer involved in this project and I am grateful to them all. I am grateful as well to my instrumental colleagues. The process of performing and recording these works with such truly distinguished string players has been a sustaining privilege. Many different compositional styles are at play here, yet the works all have an important unifying element to me, that of feeling entirely native to the instrument. I am honored to have helped bring these chamber pieces for English horn and strings into the world, to have been a part of each composers’ gravitational pull.
- Robert Walters

Contemporary music is alive and well in innumerable forms and genres, and the flexibility and colorful sonorities of the flute have attracted composers of every style. This collection of beautiful chamber music with flute is performed by award-winning soloist Alice K. Dade and includes four premiere recordings. These take us from Aaron Jay Kernis’s Air, the composer’s ‘love letter in music,’ via the youthful memories of Michael Fine’s Skipping Stones, the Baroque and jazz elements in Noam Elkies’ E Sonata and the breathtaking mountain scenery of Jennifer Margaret Barker’s Na Tri Peathraichan, to the novel and mysterious musical mirroring of Dan Coleman’s Pavanes and Symmetries, This is a program to tease the imagination and stimulate the senses.