Classical Music

Finnish composer Jaakko Mantyjarvi (b. 1963) has written some of the finest choral music of the past 50 years. To date, this semi-professional musician, whose output consists mostly of choral works, has had over one hundred of them published. Founded in 2009, the chamber choir Cor Cantiamo’s mission objective is to perform and promote contemporary choral music and foster new composers for the art form. Eric A. Johnson D.M.A. is Cor Cantiamo’s Founding Artistic Director.

Jacques Casterede's distinguished career was centered in Paris, but with musical roots in the early twentieth-century traditions of neo-Classicism and Les Six- the wide variety of scope and intent in his work was never meant to compete with the radical avant-garde. The balletic Flutes en vacances has become one of his most popular pieces, while Ciels ('Skies') was a competition piece for the Conservatoire. The colors in Trois moments musicaux d'apres Corot depict paintings in sound while the Sonatine de Mai is more neo-Classical in mood.

In the late-classical era, an Edinburgh publisher commissioned the most famous composers in continental Europe to orchestrate traditional Scottish folk songs in their original English. A lush sampling of this music is performed here by Makaris, a new early-music super-group headed by soprano Fiona Gillespie. (Olde Focus)

Maynard Ferguson - With His Own Bands: Early Years 1954-57 / Canadian jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson was something of a prodigy as a youngster, playing solos with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra broadcasts when he was 13 years old, and was always destined for a career in music, training at the Conservatoire in Montreal until 1948. He moved to the USA and played with the bands of Boyd Raeburn, Jimmy Dorsey and Charlie Barnet before joining Stan Kenton for an extended stint in the early '50s. The recordings featured here represent his first forays into recording leading his own bands. This 43-track 2-CD collection comprises all the titles (excluding one which could not be included for reasons of space) from his albums on the Emarcy label "The Maynard Ferguson Octet", "Dimensions", "Around the Horn with Maynard Ferguson" and "Boy with Lots of Brass", with line-ups ranging from an octet to a 13-piece big band. It features many original compositions, with a number by tenor saxophonist and arranger Bill Holman, along with arrangements of classic Songbook standards, with the musicians involved including Bud Shank, Shelly Manne, Milt Bernhart, Herb Geller, Georgie Auld, Red Callender, Nino Tempo, Ray Linn, Bill Holman, Ray Brown, Alvin Stoller, Bobby Timmons, Larry Bunker and many more. It's an intriguing and entertaining insight into his work as he leads his own bands on record for the first time

1967