Charles Chen - Charles, Play! / Charles, Play! Showcases the joy of creation and the fun of play with a stellar band composed of Ralph Moore, Peter Washington and Kenny Washington. - Charles, Play! #is pianist Chen's debut album. The album represents how Charles approaches play: both very serious and very fun. Listeners will hear catchy compositions, danceable arrangements, & dynamic solos. Charles, Play! Showcases the joy of creation and the fun of play. The stellar band is composed of Ralph Moore on tenor saxophone, Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums.

Charles Lloyd's new studio album features a newly assembled quartet of four distinctive voices with the legendary saxophonist joined by pianist Jason Moran, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Brian Blade. Recorded around Lloyd's 85th birthday concert, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow is a majestic body of work that presents Lloyd originals new and reimagined. The double-album finds one of the most significant musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries still at the peak of his powers. 2 LP: 180G, Gatefold Jacket

At the heart of this new album from renowned British pianist Charles Owen stand two towering masterpieces: Liszt's Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen and Franck's Pr�lude, Choral et Fugue - works that chart spiritual journeys through grief, doubt and despair toward radiant, redemptive hope. Each embodies the essence of de Profundis - a rising from the depths, a cry of the soul yearning for transcendence. Liszt and Franck, so different in temperament yet united by deep mutual admiration and shared faith, drew profound inspiration from their Catholic spirituality. Where Liszt's unbridled Romanticism blazes with drama and color, Franck's introspection glows with quiet devotion; both speak to the indomitable human spirit. Balancing such intensity are Liszt's visions of nature in the Deux L�gendes and Les jeux d'eaux � la Villa d'Este: birdsong, flowing water, and the shimmer of divine light. His piano writing moves from the lightest suspension of sound to thunderous resonance, creating musical landscapes of awe and serenity. Charles Owen brings this immensely personal recording to life with luminous clarity and poetic insight, revealing music of both earthly struggle and eternal hope.

The "[Everything Jazz - Vol.5 ECM Edition]" collection stands as an essential, high-fidelity offering for any serious jazz enthusiast, compiling fifty carefully curated, generation-spanning masterpieces from the renowned ECM label that have earned acclaim both internationally and in Japan. What truly elevates this set is the commitment to superb technical brilliance; presented on the Ultimate High Quality CD (UHQCD) format-often for the first time-and enhanced with the Green Color Label Coat specification, these reissues promise pristine audio fidelity, faithfully reproducing the original master recordings with astonishing clarity. Beyond the cutting-edge sound, the collection adds substantial value with detailed booklets featuring brand-new liner notes and artist comments for each work, making this an indispensable, comprehensive package that blends timeless classics with definitive sound quality, ready for you to discover your next destined masterpiece.

Charles Tolliver was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1942 and moved with his family to New York City when he was 10. During his childhood, his grandmother gave him his first horn, a cornet he had coveted. Tolliver was attending Howard University in the early 1960s as a pharmacy major, when he decided to pursue music as a career and return home to New York City. He came to prominence in 1964, playing and recording on Jackie McLean's Blue Note albums. In 1971, Tolliver and Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East Records, and Tolliver released many albums and collaborations on Strata-East.

Live at Captain's Cabin is a newly discovered gem from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada that finds Music Inc in absolutely fine form at a club called the Captain's Cabin. Playing mostly original music from Tolliver the band let's loose in the live setting. In his words The players I had, John Hicks, Clint Houston, and Cliff Barbaro. I just let them go do their thing and I didn't rein them in so we could have some pretty wild renditions of things, which if I were to do it now with a different rhythm section, it would sound different. It would be different. But I think that 50 something years ago that we were just expressing the exuberance of playing together and being on the road and the songs that I composed at that time, a few of them I still play, are completely different. This recording is an incredible document from an amazing band that was continually pushing boundaries.

Double CD. Previously unissued live recording from 1973 Remastered audio transferred from the original tape reels Includes extensive booklet with rare photo, and essay by renowned writer Angelika Beener, an interview with Tolliver by Jeremy Pelt and more!

MENDELSSOHN: SCOTTISH & ITALIA

DEBUSSY: LE MARTYR DE SAINT-SE

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH ROY HARG

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

BEETHOVEN: SYMPHONIES NO 7 & 8

Miss Verrett...comes into her own in the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov songs. Her essentially lovely voice warms to these and I found them all most enjoyable... I hope Miss Verrett...will some day give us a recital of Russian songs, including some by Borodin and Mussorgsky, for she responds so sympathetically to those included on this disc...

-- Gramophone [6/1968]
reviewing the original LP release

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...I enjoyed hearing the immense sincerity she already brought to An die Musik and to Die Allmacht, a song calling for the dramatic power of an opera singer. The Russian items, sung in the original, are also deeply felt and here the unaffected style is very welcome. Needless to say the spirituals are superbly done, particularly Oh, Glory!, which I used, not long ago, for a radio profile of this artist. Witness shows off her excellent rhythmic sense and diction in English. Alleluia is technically secure, but the piece calls for a brighter voice. The accompanist is no great asset and as recorded sounds clangy. I do hope RCA will soon give us a new recital from this rich-voiced mezzo; she deserves as much.

-- Gramophone [6/1973]
reviewing an LP reissue of this recording

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“I believe in working and in being good.” - Shirley Verrett

"On stage Miss Verrett presents both a stunning physical appearance and a stunning voice. Vocally her range is large, and her voice is exceptionally expressive and memorable. She works on dramatics – conveying the meaning of the words – and strives equally hard, and equally successfully, to sustain a flowing musical line. She has mastered the subtlety of Schubert songs and the coloratura of Mozart’s “Alleluia.” The hymns and spirituals which she has been singing since childhood, and which she still loves to do, she obviously sings from the heart."

- Mary Campbell
quoted from the program notes for this album. 1965

Among musicians closely associated with Charles Ives and his music, John Kirkpatrick possessed an innate affinity for the composer’s rough and tumble sound world that bordered on clairvoyance. A brilliant and adventurous pianist, Kirkpatrick (1905-1991) gave the complete public premiere of Ives’ “Concord” Sonata in 1938, followed six years later by its first recording. Kirkpatrick remade the work in stereo for Columbia Masterworks in 1968, and its first CD release here sounds better than ever.

The lean, slightly astringent sonority I remember from my well-worn LP copy gains color and tonal heft via digital remastering, with no compromise in regard to the composer’s considerable dynamic range. Kirkpatrick shapes the first two movements’ gnarly, restless keyboard writing with bracing energy and a near-infallible sense of the music’s quirky ebb and flow. The dissonant outbursts, lyrical asides, and wacky popular song quotations emerge with such idiomatic rightness and effortless transitions that it almost seems as if Kirkpatrick is making up the sonata on the spot. He is not, of course, but astute listeners will notice small textual variants based on source material that appeared only after the composer’s death, and the absence of the optional viola and flute parts.

A selection of Ives’ own private piano recordings fills out the disc, and features the composer improvising variants and new material based on the Emerson and Hawthorne movements, along with a straighter yet no less fervent reading of the complete Alcotts movement. While it’s instructive to sample Ives’ “Concord”-based piano recordings as an adjunct to Kirkpatrick’s performance, you also can find them in CRI/New World’s collection of the complete recordings of Ives at the piano. Had I produced this reissue, I would have gone so far as to add Kirkpatrick’s earlier and even more incisive 1945 “Concord”, together with the never-before-reissued “In the Inn” from the First Sonata that filled out Side 10 of the original five-disc 78 rpm album. Still, Sony/BMG and Arkivmusic.com deserve thanks for restoring Kirkpatrick’s stereo “Concord”, a performance that fully deserves its iconic reputation.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Neidich plays on a modern reconstruction of an 1810 clarinet, Levin on an 1825 piano, and the gains are naturally most evident in the work which gives the closest ear to sonorities, Weber's Grand duo concertani. He wrote it for himself and his much-admired friend Heinrich Baermann, and it is not a clarinet sonata but exactly what it says, music for two virtuosos. The lighter piano textures are of great benefit in those passages where there is a danger of a modern piano overwhelming the clarinet. This is striking in the slow movement (where a long solo passage for the piano is also built into the music), but also in some of the dizzy figuration in the finale where the piano's right-hand speeds along in thirds beside the clarinet, especially with the piano taking the upper third. The virtuosity seems to hold no terrors for these skilled players, and they bring a suitably Weberian note of sinister darkness to the Andante and a witty flash to the final Rondo. The phrases are often very long: close recording means that Neidich's snatched breaths are very audible, and so are puffs in the middle of phrases suggesting that, unusually for a clarinettist, he is using the technique of 'circular breathing' (refilling the lungs through the nose while continuing to play with the reservoir of air in the mouth).

Danzi's Sonata is an amiable piece that shares with Weber's Duo an interest in giving the two partners equality by occasionally silencing the clarinet. It is charmingly invented, though not as forward-looking in manner as some of his music. Mendelssohn's Sonata is a good deal less evenly inspired than much of the music written in his dazzling teens, with some empty passagework that seems to be on automatic pilot in the outer movements contrasting with striking developmental sections where the composer takes the controls again. Much the most remarkable movement is the Andante, a curiously haunting little song first played on unaccompanied clarinet and charmingly deployed throughout the movement.

-- JW, Gramophone [9/1995] Review of Sony 64302

After Robert Holl’s outstanding recent disc of Brahms Lieder, Marjana Lipovsek, a singer of no less searching musical sense and sensibility, adds her own selection to the catalogue. Her strong and spirited Eastern European mezzo-soprano brings an appropriate inwardness and intensity to four of the five Op. 105 songs. Purposeful phrasing runs gently through the senses in ‘Wie Melodien zieht es’, like the song’s eponymous melody, and penetrates the very heart of the soul’s winter in ‘Immer leiser’. All, though, is not angst. Lipovsek and her accompanist Charles Spencer are sensitive to the rapidly shifting moods within a group of songs, so that the numb darkness of Heine’s cool night of death is recreated as evocatively as the light-filled morning of his ‘Es schauen die Blumen’. Later, a steely vocal strength for ‘Von ewiger Liebe’ can dissolve to the lunar evanescence of ‘Die Mainacht’. Lipovsek’s thrilling grasp of the regional idiom of the final three folksongs is in glaring contrast to the infelicitous English (American) translations in the accompanying text: I doubt that Brahms’s poets would own up to an ‘incalibrate glow’, a ‘cute little child’ or, still worse, ‘a together time’.

-- Hilary Finch, BBC Music Magazine

Intense and enthusiastic musicality inform every performance in this engaging program of mostly unfamiliar music.

This is a wholly delightful record. The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society sometimes invites distinguished singers to join the instrumentalists in an evening at Alice Tully Hall, and this disc is the result of one such concert with two of America's brightest singing talents. Intense and enthusiastic musicality inform everything they do here, and they show their catholicity of taste in a wide-ranging programme of mostly unfamiliar music. Indeed even the one really well-known piece, "Non so pia", is presented in the unusual guise of an arrangement by Mozart himself for piano and violin accompaniment. It serves as a welcome memento of Miss von Stade's youthful, palpitating Cherubino, seen and heard at both Glyndebourne and Salzburg in recent years. Throughout, her tone and approach remind me of the young Christa Ludwig, except that one would have been unlikely to hear the Austrian mezzo in the French item, Chausson's sensual Chanson perpetuelle, which von Stade sings with dark, smouldering tone so right for its fin de slick eroticism. Judith Blegen is no less engaging in her solo items. She darkens her usually bright soprano for "Ja, wir schwären", an aria with clarinet obbligato from Die Verschworenen, written in 1823, with a typically Schubertian sense of longing. The Saint-Saens item comes from one of his early operas. The vocal line is in an attractively sinuous vein with a violin solo, another example of the French composer's art prompting thoughts that he may be in for a much-needed revaluation.

The Schumann and Brahms duets in varying moods demonstrate the almost perfect blend of the two voices and also the thought that must have gone into their preparation so unanimous is the phrasing. Both ladies sing German, as they do French and Italian, with great fluency. The accompaniments, under the direction of the ubiquitous Charles Wadsworth, are all worthy of the singing, Gervase de Peyer's clarinet and Gerard Schwarz's trumpet being worthy of special mention. Joel de Maria is an anagram of Jaime Laredo, who is undoubtedly the violinist concerned here! The proof-reading and ordering of the texts is poor; otherwise I have nothing but praise for the accomplishments displayed in a more than adequate recording.

-- Gramophone [2/1976]

This is a distinctively sung, vigorously, often sensitively conducted and played, faithfully recorded reading of the old favourite that should please anyone looking for a well-integrated modern version. My enthusiasm goes rather further in the case of Millo's reading of the title role. In the interview on page 1968, the diva tells us that she has listened to most of the notable interpreters from the past, distant and not so distant, and the study shows not in any imitative way but in an authentically spinto kind of singing that has been hard to discern in other recent renderings. The firm yet vibrant, dark-hued, voluptuous tone is leavened by an appealing brightness at the top and an ability to float that is wholly natural, never contrived. Listen to "Pieta ti prenda" in the scene with Amneris or "Numi pieta" at its end and you'll hear how Millo is able to shade her timbre and her phrasing in a way that ideally matches the music.

The conflicting emotions of "Ritorna vincitor" are faithfully delineated, the reflective, elegiac mood of "0 patria mia" perfectly caught, with the final awkward passage managed par excellence. Still better is the instinctively right shading in "La, tra, foreste vergine" in the Act 3 duet with Radames and the poised singing of "0 terra addio" in the finale (although she here fails one dolcissimo test). In these examples the voice is all of a piece and the legato seamless. All this confirms the excellent impression Mil lo made on me when the opera was televized from the Metropolitan a couple of years back, a performance that delighted not a few seasoned buffs. After hearing the whole interpretation, I took down from the shelves some famous prima donne on disc: Millo was shown to be more youthful than Milanov on the Perlea/RCA (but it's that great diva at her best that Millo most potently recalls), more vocally appealing than Tebaldi for Karajan (Decca), more reliable in voice than Callas for Serafin/EMI (though not so unique in accents), more involved and as technically skilled than Price (in her first version on Decca under Solti), fuller in tone than Caballe (Muti/EMI). I wouldn't claim that in every respect Millo is superior to these formidable sopranos or to Giannini on the old HMV set now on Rodolphe/Harmonia Mundi and Pearl, simply that she is at least their peer on this evidence.

Millo is the most urgent reason for acquiring this set, but she is worthily supported by Domingo, offering his fourth and, I would judge, best Radames to date. Try "Celeste Aida", or even better the start of the final scene, to learn how much more refined the great tenor's reading has become. In the latter passage, he sings in a mezza voce he has never attempted in the past; indeed, throughout, the approach is more thoughtful. In forte the voice may be very marginally more stretched than, say, in Muti's 1974 set, still a very strong contender, but the difference is slight. When he is finally gone from the scene, we shall treasure his sterling performances, even if we shall still think in this instance that Pertile (Sabajno), Corelli (Mehta/EMI) and Vickers (Sol ti) are the ones with true Radames voices. By the way, at the end of his aria Levine and Domingo opt for the Toscanini solution—forte high B flat followed by a piano B flat an octave lower.

So much more at home in Verdi than he is in Mozart and Wagner, James Levine conducts a performance that captures the cut and thrust of the public scenes in the first part of the opera and the private anxieties and confrontations of the second. Learning a great deal from Toscanini's reading (RCA), he reveals details of orchestration often overlooked by other conductors though certainly not by Muti. His matching of tempos and general pacing (though some speeds, like that for the final scene, are on the slow side) seem to me well conceived and attentive to the histrionic needs of the well-tried piece. He is supported by the Met orchestra, once more in splendid form. The chorus is, for better and worse, not Italianate, that is to say it is more precise, less wobbly than the choruses on some other versions, but also wanting a shade in pungency.

I shall not be dispensing with my Callas/Serafin set or my Caballe/Muti or the readings headed by Giannini (Sabajno) and Milanov (Perlea), all of which are well-tried, treasurable experiences. But the new contender, which has many similarities with the grandly sung Solti (down to the feeling that one is sitting rather near the brass), deserves to be heard in their company, most of all for its very special Aida.

-- Gramophone [5/1991]

Tracks:
1. OISTRAKH/MUNCH/BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA - (1-3) SYMPHONIE EN SI BEMOL MAJEUR/ B FLAT MAJOR / B-DUR, OP.20
2. OISTRAKH/MUNCH/BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA - (4) POEME
3. OISTRAKH/MUNCH/BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA - (5-7) INTRODUCTION ET RONDO CAPRICCIOSO

Bach: Goldberg Variations

A marvellously convincing performance that in its uninhibited way blows any cobwebs off one's impressions of this romantic masterpiece. Under Bernstein there is never boredom: only freshness and much excitement.

Slick, you may say from our side of the Atlantic, in a tone of old-world smugness, but what a lot there is to be said in a highpowered and quirky romantic symphony for the Bernstein touch and unlimited rehearsal time. After all Bernstein has something of the musical Byron about him, and Liszt himself was hardly a paragon of refinement.

Bernstein's is a marvellously convincing performance that in its uninhibited way blows any cobwebs off one's impressions of this romantic masterpiece. Under Bernstein there is never boredom: only freshness and much excitement. But that said one does have to tackle the inevitable question: how does Bernstein compare with Beecham ? Most of my detailed comparisons reveal exactly the contrast one would expect. In the grand enunciations of Faust's martial theme in the first movement Beecham has more swagger and panache : by comparison Bernstein seems to be driving too hard. In the delicate little passage near the beginning of the second movement where Gretchen counts the petals ("He loves me, he loves me not"), Bernstein sounds perfect until you hear Beecham. Beecham with his daring but controlled rubato conveys so much more the tentativeness, the expectancy of joy, and it is the same through much of that slow movement. The second subject, marked dolce amoroso, is so very tender in Beecham's hands, that Bernstein's idea of amoroso sounds comparatively extrovert afterwards. The latter's account of the Mephistophelian finale opens with more diabolical drive, but Beecham conveys more clearly that the first bars are a mere introduction (he comes closer to observing the instruction ironico) and when the gallumphing scherzando distortions of the Faust themes appear the Beecham panache again triumphs.

All of which suggests a clear preference in Beecham's favour, and there is no doubt that anyone who has grown to love the Beecham performance should remain with him. But Bernstein's freshness and directness have a cumulative effect whatever the detailed comparisons, and the choral ending is more expansive than with Beecham. Particularly if one does not trouble too much about what Bernstein did at a particular bar, it is a hair-raising experience he provides, and the recording, very reverberant but brilliant as well, is recognizably more modern than the Beecham. The coupling too may have an influence on choice, though for my money I find Orpheus more interesting than Les Preludes every time. Although listed I have left the DGG issue out of the comparisons: neither playing nor recording come anywhere near the other two.

One final comparison between Beecham and Bernstein: at the very opening when violas and 'cellos enunciate Faust's mystic theme (ranging over all twelve notes of the scale as Stuckenschmidt has pointed out) Beecham conveys a sense of reverie. This is Faust the philosopher, where Bernstein's reading conveys less of mysticism and magic than a confident magician after the manner of Dukas. But to go to the same theme when it returns after the development: there curiously the contrast is quite different. After the frenzy of the development Beecham somehow fails to relax completely, where Bernstein's extra tautness in the preceding argument allows a deeper sense of calm in the return to the home idea. But then when in the finale that same theme is hinted at, pizzicato over mysterious muted horns, it is Beecham who again shows a clear supremacy. It is a marvellous work whichever version you choose.

-- Edward Greenfield, Gramophone [reviewing the original LP release]

Like Volumes 1 and 2, Volume 3 of Charles Wuorinen: Music of Two Decades consists in large part of recordings that appeared first as LPs. One doesn't drape terms like invaluable as bunting. For exotic example, the Concerto for Amplified Violin and Orchestra (Volume 2) appeared first on University of Iowa Press vinyl. Not exactly your household name. (I refer to the label. Were Wuorinen's to become such, I'm sure he'd begin wondering where he went wrong. Another performance by violinist Paul Zukovsky, Inbal conducting the Orchestra of the Hessian Radio, may some day be released.) As an instance of nlh degree rarity, Easley Blackwood's own recording of his live performance of Wuorinen's Piano Variations dwelt prior to Volume l's appearance as a 7'/2-i.p.s. tape on Charles Wuorinen's library shelves. Volume 2's Grand Bamboula, Chamber Concerto, and Ringing Changes got good distribution as Nonesuch LPs which, as a format the label has long since abandoned, have been long out of print. As further reason to applaud these Music & Arts Wuorinen discs, a succession of solid performances rates soundwise from adequate to excellent. In other words, the bad news simply isn't. So, to put conclusions first, as gratifyingly large as a “difficult“ living composer's CDiscography already is, the collector with an interest in the music of his time and place cannot afford to ignore these good resurrections. (Of all the one-man operations I admire—I offer the term as an alternative to “little“ label, which in terms of long catalogs many are not—Fred Maroth's Music & Arts Programs of America, Inc., remains among the more endearingly hydra-headed.)

It's a lot easier to tell you what the electronic piece, Time's Encomium, isn't: it isn't imitative of nature or acoustic musical instruments. If the point seems inappropriate or trivial, I remind the reader that a great deal of synthesized sound appears to exist for these kitsch aspirations. So then, while Times's Encomium in this narrow regard falls on the ear as abstraction pure but far from simple, I urge the reader not to conflate abstract with offputting. The piece abounds with playful energies. When disparate sounds interact as friskily as they do here, play of one kind or another, whether or not one knows the game's name, is obviously the thing, Wuorinen is the kind of cerebral practitioner who requires one's attention in a state of openness. We do not hear Time's Encomium transpiring toward a direction. The logic is rather that of extraordinary fireflies of various heft, hue, and gravitas. As anyone who's spent a country night outdoors, a lightshow's enjoyment need not connect with those forces that stage it. The listener is content (if he's wise) to perceive the co.nposer as firefly or, better yet, the firefly's First Mover. Wuorinen composed the work between 1968-69 at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center In New York.“ . . . The RCA synthesizer . . . is prejudiced by design toward 12-tone equal temperament . . . [I]f one accepts the limitation as a boundary condition . . . it ceases to be a problem. . . . Afterwards, I made the large-scale structure by processing the synthesized materials in one of the [center's] analog studios. Thus the work consists of a core of synthesized music, most of which appears in Part I, surrounded and interlarded with analog-studio transformations of that music. The synthesized [can be] identified by its clarity of pitch. . . . The processed almost always contains reverberation. Thus metaphorically, the listener stands in the midst of the synthesized music, which presents itself . . . with maximal clarity; and stretching away from him, becoming more and more blurred in detail, the various transformations . . .“ I assume that Wuorinen speaks in “standing] in the midst“ of the four-channel original, which one hears to his regret as a two-channel mixdown. We are back on my Fanfare hobby horse.

In no way strange to say, Wuorinen's Piano Sonata (No. 1, 1969) appears on its surface to share in those compositional impulses and schemata that yielded Time's Encomium. This seems to me especially true of the music's fast-paced, angular energies. Of particular interest is the sonata's performer, the late Robert Black. As others have for David Tudor, Wuorinen composed an obviously difficult work in large measure as a tribute to Black's strengths and sympathies. (Because music absorbs its background, we tend to overlook an executant's sometime part in a work's conception, no less its successful performance—which Black's certainly sounds to be.)

Wuorinen's comments about his here handsomely performed First String Quartet have the ring of a manifesto. “The [quartet of 1971] reflects fundamental concerns . . . with questions of large-scale form, in particular the issue of an appropriate developmental—or 'directed'—structure suited to a non tonal environment. I had already become . . . impatient with [much of new music's directionlessness] and wanted to establish formal procedures that would allow local flexibility while solidly undergirding a musical progress analogous to the very powerfully directed structure of tonality [my italics].“ Wuorinen then gives a summary of his solution, which need not detain us here. Enough to know what was then on the mind that remains aloof from a world, in too large part, of half-baked juvenalia. The String Quartet (No. 1) plays vis-à-vis the electronic and solo-piano work a tad richer in lyrical interest, in acknowledgement perhaps of a four-string ensemble's native soulfulness. The insert mentions an earlier Music & Arts CD of this Wuorinen quartet, with one of Milton Babbitt's, as an inferior transfer. While I haven't that disc to compare, the present digitization of an analog master sounds very good indeed. Again, the three volumes of this Wuorinen edition—there are no immediate plans for a fourth—address a need. All three volumes heartily recommended.

-- Mike Silverton, FANFARE [3/1997]

HARMONIEMUSIK - CASTIL-BLAZE,

Includes song(s) by Stephen Foster (Composer). Ensemble: National Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Charles Gerhardt. Soloist: Robert White (tenor).

BRAHMS: SYMPHONY NO 1, ETC MU

[André Watts] meets [the Liszt Sonata's] super-human demands heroically, and keeps faith with the introspective and contemplative facets of the work. The second version of Liszt’s Paganini Études finds Watts in audacious mood, and his bravura playing is masterful. Reminiscences de Don Juan, Liszt’s Mozartian fantasy, and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10 are effectively played by Charles Rosen, and remastered sound is pleasing.

-- Michael Jameson, BBC Music Magazine

Produced by George Korngold

Recording Engineer: K.E. Wilkinson

Recorded in February 1973

"In his notes for this CD, Gerhardt states, "it is my conviction that so powerful an artist as Miss Davis, through the strength of her portrayals, inspired a variety of composers to produce some of their best work....her composers created a 'Bette Davis sound'." Here is a varied program of music written for some of her greatest roles, high points being the excerpts from Dark Victory and Now, Voyager." - Robert Benson, Classical CD Review