"This collection of recordings is especially meaningful for me because it charts my growth as an orchestral composer from my years as a student – when the Marimba Concerto was composed – to more mature work such as Moonlight. It also reflects the wonderful relationship I have enjoyed over the years with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop. The Marimba Concerto, which reflects my love of Mozart’s piano concertos, also represents my most direct and unguarded voice as a composer. The City was originally intended as a portrait of the city of Baltimore and more generally of the American city, but the death of Freddy Gray while in police custody and the subsequent unrest in Baltimore sent me in an unexpected direction with the piece." -- Kevin Puts

REVIEW:

Marin Alsop, as well as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, have contributed significantly to this composer’s prominence, as they do here. Their playing reveals the diverse aspects of the works. Thus they do not overload the Marimba Concerto with unnecessary context, and in The City they show the demanding bustle of American cities with concisely figured playing. They offer the soloists colorful panoramas on which to develop.

Ji Su Jung was very interested in the marimba concerto and thus offered it for recording. Personally, the instrument is not particularly close to me, but Ji Su Jung elicits wide spectrums from the work with superior technical execution that proves the stylistic possibilities of use despite a unified sound.

With this fresh addition to the solo repertoire, oboist Katherine Needleman has found a rich field of activity for her instrument that she fills with virtuosity and creative inspiration.

-- Pizzicato

Justin Holland was an important African American figure in the national US anti-slavery movement as well as being a significant figure in guitar composition and methodology. As a composer he synthesized European models and embraced popular, church and parlor songs generating a rich variety of works. A master of virtuosic variations, his arrangements are witty, elegant, and colorful, culminating in Carnival of Venice, which shows the full range of his gifts, sweeping in breadth and dazzling in effect.

REVIEW:

Collectors of a certain age may remember this attractive pairing of Mozart’s 17th and 27th piano concertos through its original LP release on Vox’s subsidiary label Candide. It also turned up on CD as part of Vox’s long gone budget Prima series. Newly remastered for Vox’s new Audiophile Series, this 1978 Elite Recordings production supervised by Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz retains its vivid impact and vibrant detail.

Notice the orchestral ritornellos’ ebb and flow under Stanisław Skrowaczewski’s leadership, and how the forward woodwinds and singing strings conversationally interact. Even in loud tuttis one can take dictation from each orchestral strand. Pianist Walter Klien’s Mozart playing is a model of clarity, projection, poise, and proportion, and he never puts an unbalanced or uneven phrase forward. He’s also one of the few pianists on disc who doesn’t approach Mozart’s final concerto with kid gloves, meaning that his slow movement is full-bodied and fluent rather than ethereal and wispy, and that he doesn’t underplay the finale’s scampering thrust. Sometimes Klien’s phrasing falls into square and tinkly assembly line patterns.

You won’t find the witty inflections and dabs of color that you hear from Peter Serkin or Maria-João Pires in K. 453’s wonderful theme and variations finale. Nor does Klien’s clean yet regimented articulation in K. 595’s first-movement development section match Richard Goode’s harmonic subtlety and feeling for chamber-like repartée. Still, these interpretations won’t steer you wrong. And while I have the floor, we need a truly complete boxed set edition of Skrowaczewski’s Vox recordings!

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

The viability of the horn trio was definitively established by Brahms in 1865. He had learned the natural horn as a child and infused his Trio with a range of moods, including a deeply felt slow movement in honor of his mother who had died earlier in the year and a carefree finale which explores the horn’s hunting legacy. Inspired by this precedent, Lennox Berkeley’s Trio is lively and characterful with a sequence of ingenious and playful variations. GRAMMY-nominated Jonathan Leshnoff is one of America’s leading contemporary composers and his 2016 Trio moves from darkness to light, and is full of pointed syncopations, before arriving at a joyous conclusion.

The rediscovery of Florence Price’s music has revealed one of the most significant bodies of work by an African American composer in the 20th century. The variety of genres represented on this release place Price’s immense artistic imagination on full display. The two Concert Overtures explore her engagement with spirituals, both episodically and coloristically, in music that embraces the somber, the poignant and the ebullient. Songs of the Oak is a tour de force of Hollywood-influenced storytelling while The Oak offers amore anxious, ultimately tragic portrait. Price’s best-known work is the Suite of Dances–originally for piano it is heard here in the composer’s full, sumptuous orchestration.

REVIEW:

The rediscovery of Florence Price’s music has revealed one of the most significant bodies of work by an African American composer in the 20th century. The variety of genres represented on this release place Price’s immense artistic imagination on full display. The two Concert Overtures explore her engagement with spirituals, both episodically and coloristically, in music that embraces the somber, the poignant, and the ebullient. Songs of the Oak is a tour de force of Hollywood-influenced storytelling while The Oak offers a more anxious, ultimately tragic portrait. Price’s best-known work is the Suite of Dances — originally for piano, it is heard here in the composer’s full, sumptuous orchestration.

-- WFMT 98.7FM Chicago, IL (Lisa Flynn)

The unique instrumentation of the three works in this album was pioneered by the innovative Lou Harrison, whose 1959 concerto encapsulates his culturally wide-ranging aesthetic. More conventional instruments work alongside calibrated extras such as wash tubs and flowerpots in a work of color, languorous elegance and kinetic energy. The companion works were composed in its honor: Robert Xavier Rodríguez’s Xochiquetzal evokes the ancient Mayan world in imaginary folk music to form a synthesis of time periods and cultures, while the economical serenity of Kati Agócs’s concerto also includes bitonal effects and zesty syncopation.

Richard Danielpour is one of the most decorated, frequently performed and recorded composers of his generation. His commissions include works for some of the most celebrated artists of our day. Each of the Twelve Études is dedicated to a particular pianist with its own substantial technical demands, but all are conceived as concert pieces with a self-contained narrative. The variations in the Piano Fantasy are based on the final chorale of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. All of these world premiere recordings were made in close collaboration between the composer and acclaimed pianist Stefano Greco.

REVIEW:

In the 40-minute cycle, Twelve Etudes for Piano, the composer roams through a wide variety of moods, but also presents challenges to the pianist such as playing with the left hand on the keys and plucking strings inside the piano with the right hand. Stefano Greco masters all of this with aplomb.

In addition to two miniatures, the Piano Fantasy subtitled ‘Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden’ from 2008 is also heard. It is based in continuing variations on the final chorale from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, although the theme does not appear until the end of the work. This piece also shows Greco as an excellent performer.

-- Pizzicato

This album presents eight of the most recent works by Peter Boyer, one of the leading American orchestral composers of his generation. Balance of Power was commissioned for the 95th birthday of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, while Fanfare for Tomorrow was composed for the inauguration of President Joe Biden in 2021. Each of these pieces displays Boyer’s vivid soundscapes and tuneful American sensibilities, from the cinematic sweep of Rolling River to Radiance, composed especially for this album. Boyer’s GRAMMY-nominated Ellis Island: The Dream of America (8.559246) has received over 250 performances and was televised by PBS.

REVIEW:

Boyer's description of [the London Symphony Orchestra] as “one of the world's greatest orchestras” isn't hyperbolic but rather accurate. It shouldn't be overlooked either that as conductor he was directly responsible for coaxing from the ensemble the inspired performances the recording features.

The fourth album by Boyer (b. 1970) and his third in the Naxos American Classics Series presents eight works, six of them world premiere recordings. The tone is often celebratory, even triumphant, as exemplified by the stately Fanfare for Tomorrow, commissioned for President Biden's January 2021 inauguration; but melancholy is also present in affecting settings such as Rolling River (Sketches on “Shenandoah”) and, naturally, Elegy. As performed by the LSO, the material packs a visceral punch that ensures no listener's attention will drift as the music plays. The orchestral sweep one hears in John Williams' music finds its place in Boyer's too.

All of the material on Balance of Power is of recent vintage, the earliest work dating back to 2014 but most from the last two to three years. It opens rousingly with the aptly titled Curtain Raiser, as ear-catching and exuberant an overture as one could ask for. Boyer's gift for orchestration is immediately apparent, as is the effervescence of the LSO's execution. Strings, percussion, and horns combine for a dynamic, five-minute exercise in uplift, the result a thrilling start to the album.

The evidence at hand suggests Boyer's name might be mentioned in the same breath as those of Barber, Bernstein, Ives, Adams, and especially Copland. Like them, he writes works that have popular appeal and engage with immediacy. They're also, however, impeccably crafted and in no way lacking in integrity. Boyer isn't calculating: while he's one of the most frequently performed American orchestral composers of our time (his Grammy-nominated Ellis Island: The Dream of America is now one of the most-performed American orchestral pieces), his writing is sincere, honest, and authentic[.]

--Textura

All World Premiere Recordings!

Featured in the New York Times' "5 Classical Albums You Can Listen to Right Now"

William Grant Still, the “Dean of Afro-American Composers,” was part of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote nearly 200 works including nine operas and five symphonies. Still’s many awards included three Guggenheim Fellowships and eight honorary doctorates. His work combines Classical forms with jazz and blues idioms and was inspired by the rich tradition of African American spirituals. Still hoped that his music would serve a larger purpose of interracial understanding, and this joyous, moving and hauntingly beautiful program –featuring all world premiere recordings – is infused with Still’s love of God, country, heritage, and even his mischievous dog Shep.

REVIEW:

William Grant Still's music evokes the melting pot that makes up the American experience, incorporating sounds and textures from many genres, including blues, African-American spirituals, French impressionism, and more.

The three movements of the Violin Suite of 1943 fall in the traditional fast-slow-fast format, but the styles of each vary dramatically, with the second movement, "Mother and Child," a beautiful, passionate lullaby bordered by two dance movements. The final work, Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius, was commissioned for a celebration concert marking the composer's 100th birthday. This work displays Still's adaptability, infusing aspects of the Romantic symphonic sound with mid-20th century modern American.

--Allmusic.com (Keith Finke)

All the items on this program are world premiere recordings, so I think it would not be amiss if some information were to be forwarded for the benefit of all those interested in this very special music.

Can’t You Line ‘Em (1940) captures the rhythm and spirit of the construction gangs, particularly those lining up railroad tracks. A CBS commission, this piece was premiered on 17 February 1940 with the CBS Radio Orchestra on their network program American School of the Air.

Originally composed as the second movement of three Visions for solo piano, Summerland (1936) is Still’s delicate description of the serenity and purity of Heaven.

Another work originally written for solo piano, Quit Dat Foolnish (1935) conjures up a jazzy romp with the composer’s mischievous dog, Shep. Still also wrote a version for solo saxophone and orchestra, transposed for this recording by Dana Paul Perna.

Pastorela (1946) is a tone picture of a Californian landscape, peaceful but exciting, arousing feelings of languor in some of its aspects, and of animation in others, presenting an overall effect of unity in its variety.

American Suite (circa 1918) is the composer’s first symphonic work. Still sent the parts of the American Suite to Chicago Symphony conductor Frederick Stock. In 1998, Still’s daughter Judith Anne shared the orchestral parts with Dana Paul Perna, who created the present score.

Fanfare for the 99th Fighter Squadron (1945), which resonates with pride, courage, and patriotic resolve, was composed in honor of the Tuskegee airmen who during WWII gave everything for the cause of peace and justice. This work was premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on 22 July 1945 in commemoration of the end of war and the valiant service of those Airmen.

Serenade (1957) was originally intended as material for a cello concerto proposed by Still’s friend, the famous cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Instead, it became a commission by the Great Falls, Montana High School Orchestra, with its lush cello writing hinting at its conception.

The Violin Suite (1943) is a musical impression of three works of art. African Dancer is a stunning bronze statue by Richmond Barthe (1901-1989). Mother and Child is a poignant colored lithograph by Sargent Johnson (1888-1967). Gamin is a sassy bronze bust by Auguste Savage (1892-1962). These works were featured in The Negro in Art, a book published in 1940 by Still’s friend and champion Alain Locke (1885-1954). The book so impressed Edith Halpert (1900-1970), a Russian-Jewish refugee, visionary and art promoter, that she contacted Locke to promote an exhibition in her Downtown Gallery in New York. The exhibition opened on 8 December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but despite the deep sadness that engulfed American society, this first major commercial showing of African American art in New York was a great success. Still rose to the occasion and translated the artists’ imagination into music full of verve, tenderness and very often charm.

The beautiful Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius (1965) was commissioned for a concert in memory of Finland’s national hero, composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Still’s tribute is a noble and haunting farewell, channeling the spirit and mystique of Sibelius the man and the composer.

This is a marvelously exciting hour of music by a composer of substance whose recorded catalog is still only average. Hopefully, Naxos’s advocacy for Still’s oeuvre will induce more labels and listeners to turn to this uplifting repertoire which is as moving as it is entertaining. Do not remain still to Still’s sound world. You will be missing an experience and you might come to regret that. A peach of an issue, superbly performed, recorded and annotated.

--Classical Music Daily (Gerald Fenech)

“The Souls of Black Folk and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music”
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film three in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

If George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – the highest creative achievement in American classical music – embodies a glorious (and controversial) fulfillment of Dvořák’s prophecy, there also exists a buried lineage of exceptional compositions by Black composers following in Dvořák’s wake. Coming first was his assistant Harry Burleigh, whose seminal settings of “Deep River” are – as our film illustrates – as much compositions as transcriptions. Burleigh’s initiative was sealed by singers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. But William Levi Dawson’s oracular Negro Folk Symphony, though triumphantly premiered by Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, gathered dust – and Dawson was never to create the symphonic catalogue he seemed destined to undertake. Commentators include George Shirley, the most legendary name in present-day Black classical music, also Kevin Deas, music historians Gwynne Kuhner Brown and Michael Cooper, and conductor Michael Morgan. This film includes performances by pianist Benjamin Pasternack, The Fort Smith Symphony conducted by John Jeter, The Vienna Radio Symphony conducted by Arthur Fagen and Kevin Deas recorded in live performance.

“The disconnection between the rich history of Black American music and the classical music we typically hear has proved impoverishing. Because of our current conversation about race we now observe a seemingly desperate effort to make up for lost time, to present Black faces in the concert hall. I think that's only fair. But if it's going to become a permanent new way of thinking, there has to be new understanding. Dvořák's Prophecy is on time, it's a bull's-eye. We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. Joe Horowitz's book explains how we got there. . . . Dvořák's Prophecy proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.” –from George Shirley's Foreword to Dvořák's Prophecy

Naxos continues its exploration of Florence Price’s unjustly neglected orchestral works with this latest album, which includes Symphony No. 3. The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Price advocate, John Jeter, who received widespread praise for his album of Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4 (8.559827), released in January 2019.

REVIEW:

Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 (1940) may be her finest. Written in four well-proportioned movements, it begins with music of high seriousness—a slow introduction that sounds like the Adagio of Bruckner’s Seventh meets the Blues—and never looks back. The ensuring Andante is extremely beautiful, and in place of the usual scherzo Price gives us her customary “Juba,” a dance-like fantasy full of captivating sonorities, sultry melodies, and gently offbeat rhythms. As in the Fourth Symphony, Price calls the finale the actual Scherzo, offering her own imaginative slant on traditional symphonic form. It’s worth pointing out that as a graguate (with honors) from the New England Conservatory, Price was about as well trained as any American composer of her day, and entirely apart from the music’s characteristically personal expressive elements, her technical sophistication as a writer for the orchestra really shows. This is good stuff.

The Mississippi River, sometimes called a “suite,” is actually a tone poem containing nearly half an hour of continuous music. Price quotes American folk tunes and Negro spirituals (Get Along Little Doggies, Deep River, etc) as the river wends its way from north to south, but what impresses most is how well sustained the musical argument is, and how effectively this lengthy and colorful piece cheats the clock. Really, there’s no excuse for this music not being programmed regularly in American orchestra concerts. Finally, Ethiopia’s Shadow in America is a brief triptych tracing the arrival of the Black man to American as a slave, his resignation and faith, and finally, hopefully, his ultimate assimilation into American society in a fusion of African and “acquired impulses.” The work offers a useful commentary on the role of the individual in society in these racially polarized times.

John Jeter has already turned in very good performances of Price’s First and Fourth Symphonies with his own orchestra in Arkansas, but these recordings with the full-time ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra are both better played and better recorded. Price was an important and worthy voice in American classical music, quite apart from the challenges she faced as an African-American woman. Getting to know her is a genuine treat.

-- ClassicsToday.com (David Hurwitz)

“Charles Ives' America”
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film two in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Steeped in nostalgia, in his Danbury childhood and the New England Transcendentalists with whom he profoundly identified, in the American experience of race which he absorbed from his Abolitionist grandparents, Ives used the past with consummate empathy and brave artistry. A musical Whitman or Melville, he embodies the American trope of the “self-made genius,” heeding Emerson’s call to cut the cultural umbilical cord with Europe, forging an original path. The music at hand here includes his Second Symphony (a milestone in culling the vernacular to set beside Huckleberry Finn), The Housatonic at Stockbridge (possibly the most sublime nature reverie in the American orchestral repertoire), and The St. Gaudens in Boston Common (a singular ghost dirge in tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Black Civil War regiment). We also hear portions of Ives’s Concord Sonata performed by Steven Mayer (an interpretation seasoned by a lifetime of advocacy) and half a dozen Ives songs peerlessly sung (in live performance with Paul Sanchez) by William Sharp. The commentators include the Ives scholar Peter Burkholder, James Sinclair, William Sharp and Judith Tick.

‘Charles Ives’ America may be the most important film ever produced about American music. Horowitz moves Ives from the fringes squarely to his position as the seminal composer of our country’ – JoAnn Falletta, Music Director, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

“Lou Harrison and Cultural Fusion”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film six in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Joe Horowitz writes of this film: "No non-Western musical idiom has so impacted on the Western concert tradition as Indonesian gamelan, beginning with the Javanese Pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition: an epiphany. Sampling gamelan-inspired works by Debussy, Poulenc, Messiaen, and McPhee, we arrive at a paragon exemplar of cultural fusion – Lou Harrison – and a pair of concertos, for violin and piano, unsurpassed by those of any other American. The composer/scholar Bill Alves demonstrates the layered complexity of Javanese gamelan, and how it translates into keyboard textures composed by Harrison for Keith Jarrett. For Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion, we tour the “junk percussion” – including flowerpots and washtubs – that Harrison made sing and dance."

He goes on to write "We now inhabit a “postclassical” musical aesthetic that, rather than piling on modernist complexity, draws inspiration from a variety of sources, Eastern and Western, “high” and popular. The prophetic figure, it seems to me is Lou Harrison, who practiced world music before there was a name for it. Harrison was certainly a composer who discovered a usable past – including music from Indonesia, China, and Japan. In the New World, a usable starting point was and remains the sorrow songs of African Americans, so eloquently celebrated around the turn of the twentieth century by W. E. B. Du Bois and Antonin Dvořák. Dvořák’s 1893 prophecy that “negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble” school of American music has never seemed more pertinent.”

"These six beautiful films reveal a compelling, inclusive musical tradition, deeply interwoven with American culture." – J. Peter Burkholder, author of 'A History of Western Music' and 'Listening to Charles Ives'.

Kevin Puts is one of America’s most exciting and important composers. His first opera, Silent Night, with a libretto by Mark Campbell, was commissioned by Minnesota Opera. It premiered in 2011 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. A work profound and sweeping emotional power, it has since entered the modern operatic repertoire with remarkable speed, enjoying world-wide performances. The opera is based on Christian Carion’s screen-play for the 2005 French war film Joyeux Noël, and its fictionalized subject is the series of Christmas truces on the Western Front in 1914.

REVIEWS:

American composer Kevin Puts’ first opera, Silent Night, with a libretto by Mark Campbell, was commissioned by Minnesota Opera, the house where this live recording was made. The opera's subject is the Christmas truce on the Western Front in 1914.

Various languages are used in the opera, German, French, English, Italian, and even Latin.

Puts and Campbell have packed the serious theme into a complex score, very colorful and modern in style, with painfully dissonant and wonderfully lyrical moments. Overall, the opera is good for an impressive musical experience, though the question is whether the visuals of the theatrical experience are missing from the audio recording. On the other hand, with just the audio there is more focus on the music, and it is, after all, quite expressive and convincingly performed in this live recording.

-- Pizzicato

As we have already heard in his orchestral works, Puts is a highly compelling and innovative orchestrator, and here he is equally compelling in the field of opera where he works within the conventions of solos, duets and choruses. They are then brought together by the British-born conductor, Courtney Lewis. It is not the type of story you can enjoy, but the opera, which takes two hours, must rank amongst the most outstanding staged in recent times. Add to this the ideally balanced recording, and it becomes self-recommending. The twin disc comes with English. This, and the slim two disc jewel case with notes on the artists, is then presented in a cardboard box.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

“Beyond Psycho - The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film five in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Hollywood’s supreme film composer was a casualty of the standard narrative - as he himself was bitterly aware. Not only were his movie scores high creative accomplishments; Bernard Herrmann was a formidable- and formidably unfashionable- concert composer whose Clarinet Quintet may be the most beautiful chamber music by an American. His Psycho Narrative, which we also sample, surpasses the Psycho Suite we normally hear. He honed his gift for dramatizing the spoken word as the pre-eminent composer for a genre no longer remembered: the radio drama. This film samples Whitman (1944) – a Norman Corwin radio play that deserves to live as a concert work. It also exemplifies how radio, an unprecedented mass medium, once consolidated the American experience, its biggest star being Franklin D. Roosevelt. Participants include the Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, the critic Alex Ross, Murray Horwitz on radio lore, and William Sharp on playing Walt Whitman to music by Bernard Herrmann.

“Dvořák's New World Symphony - A Lens on the American Experience of Race”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film one in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

The six documentary films in this series align with Joe Horowitz's new book 'Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music'. Like the book, they explore a “new paradigm” for the history of classical music in the United States. Why classical music in America “stayed white” is a central concern of Dvořák’s Prophecy." The films incorporate Naxos recordings as well as live performances, including William Sharp singing Ives, Kevin Deas singing Harry Burleigh, and Dennis Russell Davies conducting Harrison’s Piano Concerto. Participating commentators include critic Alex Ross, Black Classical Music pioneer George Shirley, music historians Bill Alves, Beth Levy, and Judith Tick, and the African-American conductors Roderick Cox and the late Michael Morgan.

 This first film in the series keys on Dvořák’s prophecy and explores its present-day pertinence. In New York City and Spillville, Iowa, Dvořák boldly chose to regard African-Americans and Native Americans as representative Americans. That decision was both acclaimed and ridiculed at the time. It remains inspirational. His New World Symphony, still the best known and best loved symphonic work conceived on American soil, is saturated with the influence of plantation song, and also with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. This act of appropriation, the film argues, was an act of empathy performed by a great humanitarian. The musical selections here are mainly taken from the Hiawatha Melodrama, which Joe Horowitz co-composed with the music historian Michael Beckerman with orchestrations by Angel Gil-Ordonez. It mates Dvorak with Longfellow. The participating commentators include the music historians Mark Clague and Lorenzo Candelaria, the literary historian Brian Yothers, the conductor JoAnn Falletta, faculty members from Howard University – and also (sagely commenting on cultural appropriation) the bass-baritone Kevin Deas, and the late Michael Morgan.

"Horowitz's six beautiful films reveal a compelling inclusive tradition in American classical music, open to influences from popular, Black, Native American, and world music, this music is deeply interwoven with American culture." – J. Peter Burkholder, author of A History of Western Music and Listening to Charles Ives.

“Aaron Copland: American Populist”
A PostClassical Ensemble “More than Music” film
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff
Film four in the six-film Naxos series:
“Dvorak’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music”

Buffeted by social and political currents, Copland can seem unmoored: a cork in a stream. He was politicized by the Depression- and by the example of Mexico, whose artists galvanized national identity and progressive thought. He wrote a prize-winning workers’ song and addressed a Communist picnic in Minnesota. Twenty years later, the Red Scare targeted him as a traitor. Can his odyssey be read as a parable illuminating the fate of the American artist?  This film features a reenactment of Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by Edward Gero). It also highlights the most consequential Copland score we don’t know: his ingenious music of Lewis Mumford’s 1939 World’s Fair film The City, itself a complex product of the Popular Front. We reconsider the valedictory Piano Fantasy, in which Copland refreshed his modernist roots- a galvanizing performance by Benjamin Pasternack, who also recalls a telling encounter with the composer. The other commentators include the American historians Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, who ponder the tangled legacy of American populism of the left and right.

"The 'Dvořák’s Prophecy' film series makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the history of music in America, and of the role that music has played, and must continue to play, in American culture as a whole. The films are both enlightening and entertaining. I can readily envision their use in classrooms, in both introductory and advanced-research contexts. Non-specialists will also enjoy them thoroughly. Because Horowitz does not shy away from political, racial, and gender issues of intense contemporary relevance, these films are especially important right now." – Larry Starr, Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Washington

This current volume of Sousa’s music for wind band presents three exceptional examples of Sousa’s musical creativity. Chris and the Wonderful Lamp is an enchanting retelling of the Aladdin legend, while Showing Off Before Company is a clever routine Sousa often used to open matinee concerts. The painstaking reconstruction of Sisterhood of the States allows us to hear the ‘ballet’ that incorporated music from each of the 48 states for a spectacular show in 1916. Keith Brion, one of the world’s most knowledgeable and most-recorded Sousa conductor leads his own New Sousa Band and is a frequent conductor of light music orchestral concerts throughout America and internationally. He is a specialist in Sousa’s period style and has published numerous performing editions of his music.

Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of today’s most important American composers. The works heard here in their world premiere recordings are part of a growing legacy that one pundit has described as “The Power of Tower.” Strike Zones is tailor-made for percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s dazzling technique and impeccable musicianship. The work’s orchestration is crafted to enhance a stage filled with percussion instruments – while in Small they are contained on a single table, the soloist working like a brilliant chef. The piano concerto Still/Rapids was inspired by the glistening beauty and powerful force of water, and Ivory and Ebony, written as a test piece for an international piano competition, is infused with Tower’s “high-energy” signature.

REVIEW:

Another American Classics release features the music of contemporary composer Joan Tower. These fabulous premiere recordings give a good representation of the range of music Tower has been producing over recent years. It is particularly good to hear performances from Evelyn Glennie as one of a cast of top rate musicians here. The earliest work, Strike Zones, dates from 2001 and the latest, Small from 2016. Both these feature percussion. Still/Rapids combines piano and orchestra with the final piece, Ivory & Ebony being a test piece for an international piano competition.

-- Lark Reviews

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Orchestral Performance!

Pulitzer and Erasmus Prize-winning composer John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Adams describes My Father Knew Charles Ives as “an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge.” Harmonielehre was a deliberate move by Adams to expand his musical language beyond Minimalism, keeping its energetic pulse but embracing the rich tonal resources of the past to create a work that has accrued an aura of timelessness. Six-time GRAMMY Award-winning conductor Giancarlo Guerrerois music director of the Nashville Symphony and the NFM Wroc?aw Philharmonic in Poland, as well as principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. He has championed contemporary American music through numerous commissions, recordings and performances with the Nashville Symphony, presenting eleven world premieres of works by Michael Daugherty, Terry Riley, and others. As part of this commitment, he helped guide the creation of Nashville Symphony’s Composer Lab & Workshop initiative.

REVIEWS:

In point of fact, John Adams’ father did not know Charles Ives, but imagined that they had a good deal in common, and that was a springboard to a work that is unlike any other among Adams’ output. It’s not at all clear why My Father Knew Charles Ives has been so neglected. The work gets a detailed, sympathetic treatment here from Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Guerrero and the Nashvillians have done a major service by reviving My Father Knew Charles Ives.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

Given the difference in ambiance and style between the two works, these brilliantly played and recorded performances might just make an ideal point of entry for those new to the composer.

– MusicWeb International

Steve Reich is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost exponents of minimalism, arguably the most significant stylistic trend in late 20th-century music. This chronological survey shows how Reich’s innate curiosity has taken his work far beyond such musical boundaries. One of the first fruits of Reich’s creative quest is ‘Music for Two of More Pianos,’ in which the influence of Morton Feldman and jazz pianist Bill Evans can be heard. The rhythmic and flamboyant ‘Eight Lines’ comes from the true heyday of minimalism, while ‘Vermont’ and ‘New York Counterpoint’ both explore webs of phased patterns created by multi-tracked instruments. ‘City Life’ is a dramatic set of impressions of New York, vividly weaving sampled speech and street sounds into a work with symphonic depth of range and expression.

REVIEW:

This generously filled new release includes compositions from a wide swath of Reich’s career, from Music for Two or More Pianos from 1964 to City Life from 1995. All of the selections are clearly minimalist in that they employ simple chord structures, rhythmic patterns that revolve around a discernible driving pulse, and an abundance of energy. The earliest piece, for pianos, is the most abstract-sounding, but after something of a slow start, it picks up energy as it as it moves along. Reich’s compositions and these spirited performers project an undeniable feeling of life-affirming joy, a sense of sheer exuberance, and an expression of gratitude for the ability to create, perform, and enjoy the sounds of music and integrate them with the with the rhythms of life. This is a disc well worth an audition even if you have listened to a Philip Glass recording or two in the past and concluded that minimalism was not for you…

-- Classical Candor (Karl W. Nehring)

Bernard Herrmann was famous for his film scores, but he was also a leading figure in music for radio, to which he brought his inimitable palette of mood and sonority. Whitman, whose subject is Walt Whitman’s collection of poems Leaves of Grass, was a 1944 radio drama, a genre now much neglected but revived in this newly restored version. Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra is not a suite or excerpts from the film but a concert work, re-ordered and re-composed, while Souvenirs de voyage is one of the most polished and seductive of all American chamber works.

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REVIEWS:

Gil-Ordóñez and the PostClassical Ensemble have plenty of experience with Herrmann and perform the music with the proper heated quality. The result is an album that will be essential for Herrmann fans but also of great interest to general listeners.

– AllMusic Guide

With a narrator as Whitman, and a chamber sized orchestra to add impact and color, these many years after the end of the WWII (around the time of its original broadcast), it still carries a profound message. Souvenirs de voyage came towards the end of Herrmann’s life, and was proof of his range of genres that today are overlooked in favor of his film scores. It is a beautiful score, blessed with attractive melodic material and couched in subtle colors. Herrmann was to re-compose music from Psycho years later to form a concert work. It was rediscovered by conductor John Mauceri in 1999.

It would be difficult to imagine finer performances from a number of performers, Whitman, being a World Premiere Recording with the conductor, Angel Gil-Ordonez and the Washington-based PostClassical Ensemble, William Sharp the ideal narrator. Top quality sound, and It comes with an excellent booklet.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Tobias Picker, hailed as “a genuine creator” by The New Yorker, has written extensively for the stage and for symphonic forces, and these two approaches are represented in this album. The Encantadas (an older name for the Galapagos Islands) derives from a novella by Herman Melville. Picker has set it as a melodrama, exploring the enchanted isles in all their quietly menacing and spectacular beauty. In a radical new form, Picker’s Opera Without Words is set to a libretto by Irene Dische that has now been removed, allowing the music alone to bear the expressive richness and intensity of this “secret opera.” Tobias Picker has been commissioned to write numerous works in other genres, including operas, three symphonies, concertos for violin, viola, cello and oboe, four piano concertos and chamber music. His many honors include the 2020 GRAMMY Award for Best Opera Recording (Fantastic Mr. Fox). Picker is a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is artistic director of the Tulsa Opera, a post he has held since 2016.

REVIEW:

The title for The Encantadas (1983) comes from the early name for the Galapagos Islands. In six sections it relates the journey made there by Herman Melville. The work was conceived for narrator and a standard sized orchestra, and, on this recording, the composer is the very articulate voice that relates Melville’s discoveries he made there.

The more recent score, Opera Without Words, was completed five years ago, and had a strange birth. He had hired a librettist, Irene Dische, to conceive the story, and, after many discussions, all was completed, even down to the stage actions and directions for the producer. But in the end Picker deciding to dispense with words. It receives its World Premiere Recording by one of the commissioning orchestras, the Nashville Symphony. They, and their conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, provide a very colourful score, both works instantly enjoyable in pure tonality. The booklet includes the words narrated in The Encantadas and I hope there is more Picker coming from Naxos.

-- David's Review Corner (David Denton)

This new release from Naxos brings together the two poles of Tobias Picker’s output: symphonic music and opera. He brilliantly straddles both worlds, drawing upon each to bring something new to the other.

…The music on this disc is impassioned and adventurous, providing the curious listener a great introduction to Tobias Picker’s output. The recorded sound is excellent, and the Nashville Symphony is in top form. Recommended.

-- Fanfare

The fifth Naxos recording of works by Kenneth Fuchs with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by JoAnn Falletta, won the Grammy Award in 2018 for Best Classical Compendium. This new album reveals his mastery of the band medium and features the exceptional United States Coast Guard Band, in definitive performances of seven works for symphonic winds by one of America’s leading composers. Kenneth Fuchs is one of America’s leading composers, and has written music for orchestra, band, voice, chorus, and various chamber ensembles. This release features the alto saxophone concerto Rush, in its version with wind ensemble, presented by soloist Greg Case, who is co-principal saxophonist of the United States Coast Guard Band and has been a member since 1997.