Classical Music

During the 2005-6 season, Gwyneth Walker traveled across the US working with a variety of musicians as they premiered and recorded her works. During a week spent in Walla Walla, WA, she worked with the choirs at Whitman College as they rehearsed and recorded this new program of choral music, which employs evocative texts by Langston Hughes, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Virginia Hamilton Adair, among others. Booklet notes include the full song texts. 17 World Premiere Recordings! "Gwyneth Walker is a master composer with a fertile imagination..."

David Ashley White is one of the most popular composers in the Episcopal Church today. From anthems to hymns, this recording offers a variety of music and texts. The Choir of Palmer Church has long been associated with Mr. White's music, and gives the program a plush performance in a reverberant setting. "(White's) music reveals a distinctly Anglican ring and spirit: it would hardly sound out of place in an English cathedral. Yet it's Yankee heritage shines through as well... (This choir) is one of the finest, most professional-sounding church ensembles around." - American Record Guide

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The virtuoso ensemble Philadelphia Brass join organist Joan Lippincott at the large 135-rank Mander organ of Princeton University Chapel in this grandly conceived recording, animated by the Chapel's large acoustical space. The recording presents three original works for organ and brass: Lockwood's Concerto for Organ and Brasses, Dupre's Poeme Heroique and Widor's Salvum fac populuum tuum, plus six additional works arranged for organ and brass. For most of the 1990's Organ Prof. Emerita Ms. Lippincott was Principal University Organist at Princeton University.

Classical Music

This recording contains improvisations by Gerre Hancock on Christmas melodies.
Includes work(s) by Gerre Hancock. Soloist: Gerre Hancock.

The performance of Duruflé's transcription for 2 organs of Handel's 8th Organ Concerto is a tour de force. Mere words become woefully irrelevant.

Originally recorded in 1967 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, this release projects, among other virtues, a tangible sense of occasion. The shrine's two organs had been installed and dedicated in 1965, but the Duruflés' recital of two years later was the first to utilize both instruments simultaneously, in Marcel Duruflé's transcription for two organs of the eighth of Handel's 16 concertos for organ and orchestra. That was, by the evidence on this release, a performance tour de force. The two instruments (the great and the chancel organ) are separated by a distance of some 300 feet, a virtual city block. The Duruflés overcame that vast and vastly disorienting sonic space by resorting to the sounds transmitted via telephone headsets rather than those of the acoustic surround. The result is a breathtaking synchronici-ty of attack and release, not merely of purely technical precision, but of musical affect as well.

Clarity and precision, not merely that of getting the right fingers to the right keys and pedals in a timely fashion, but of going, straightaway, to the heart of the musical discourse at hand, inform each track on this release. The little Schumann Canon in B Minor projects a playfulness that underscores its inherent irony. The Tournemire piece (a vast improvisation by that composer subsequently reconstituted by her husband) becomes, appropriately, César Franck on speed. Mme. Duruflé's clear-eyed realization of its every Easter-chant-derived iota converts it into a grippingly human drama, at once horrifying and consoling.

Of the incense-tinged Prelude and Fugue of Marcel Duruflé, I will say nothing. Mere words become woefully irrelevant.

If you've been lulled to sleep by my verbosity, wake up and get this one before it becomes, as is so much of the best that music has to offer, unavailable.

-- William Zagorski, FANFARE [1/2000]

This organ CD is always on the Gothic Records best-sellers list, year after year. With both popular and unusual works in his program, Cathedral Organist Donald Dumler strikes just the right balance of musical choices.

Both the Chancel and Grand Gallery Organs were built by Kilgen, and are controlled by two new "twin" five-manual consoles. With 177 stops and over 9,000 pipes, the organ is both a grand musical statement, and a priceless antique whose sounds evoke the ideals of organ building in the 1920's. - Gothic Records

The Riverside Years: Frederick Swann, organist

Edward Elgar at Woolsey Hall

Eben: Okna - Starer: 3 Preludes - Hamlin: Sonata ben melodic