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

Valerie Coleman is regarded by many as an iconic artist who continues to pave her own unique path as a composer, GRAMMY®-nominated flutist, and entrepreneur. Highlighted as one of the “Top 35 Women Composers” by The Washington Post, she was named Performance Today’s 2020 Classical Woman of the Year, an honor bestowed to an individual who has made a significant contribution to classical music as a performer, composer, or educator.

Coleman’s work as a performer is just as impressive with an extensive discography and appearances throughout North America and Europe, in settings ranging from chamber to orchestral, as well as small group jazz.

Coleman is a founder and former flutist of Imani Winds. The acclaimed ensemble is featured in a dedicated exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Along with composer-harpist Hannah Lash, and composer-violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama, she co-founded and currently performs as flutist of the performer-composer trio Umama Womama.

Classical Music

Throughout her career, internationally heralded harpist Yolanda Kondonassis has found herself fascinated by the luscious creations of French composer Maurice Ravel. Ravel: Intimate Masterpieces is a celebration of Kondonassis' longtime love of Ravel's music, and a celebration of the great roster of Oberlin Conservatory of Music talent that came together with her to record the album on campus in January 2013. 'This disc is especially meaningful because I was able to make it with such wonderful players and to celebrate the wealth of artistry and musical opportunity that lives at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music,' says Kondonassis.

Oberlin Music is proud to announce the release of Dr. Seuss' the Sneetches, a symphonic poem for narrator and symphony orchestra. Theodor Geisel's timeless children's tale about the perils of bigotry comes to vivid life through an inspired performance of Lorenzo Palomo's original score by the Oberlin Orchestra and spirited narration from actor John de Lancie (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Breaking Bad). Through the generosity of Dr. Seuss Enterprises and Lorenzo Palomo, all proceeds from the sale of this recording will support scholarships at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

A showcase for contemporary bassoon repertoire, the bassoonist George Sakakeeny is accompanied by three ensembles from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music to present four premiere recordings of modern works for bassoon.

An accomplished performer on the viola, piano, and clarinet, Paul Hindemith used to brag that he could play any instrument in the orchestra with a little practice. Over the course of his prolific career, the German composer proved that he could write for any instrument as well, and that very notion became something of a mission for him- to ensure that each instrument had its share of solo repertoire. Convergent Winds, a new recording from Oberlin Music, showcases five sonatas Hindemith wrote for woodwinds. It features performances by a host of esteemed Oberlin Conservatory faculty: clarinetist Richard Hawkins, pianist James Howsmon, flutist Alexa Still, oboist and English hornist Robert Walters, and retired bassoonist George Skakeeny. The works were written between 1936- a time when Hindemith’s music was banned from performance in Nazi Germany- to 1942, by which time he has resettled in America. For Howsmon, a longtime professor of instrumental accompanying at Oberlin, the recording pays tribute to an exacting neoclassicist whose music has unfairly fallen out of fashion. “Rather than being a huge innovator, Hindemith took his inspiration from past eras, and yet he had a really wonderful approach to it,” Howsmon says. “He took old models and made them look new, and no matter how wild he gets, you can always find where his starting point was, and it was always 150 years before. He’s like a master furniture builder- a total craftsman. There have been others who have done that, of course, but to me he is the best of them.

The National Brass Ensemble with James Sommerville and Gail Williams, French Horn.

The National Brass Ensemble is comprised of twenty-six of the finest brass players in major orchestras across the US. “Gabrieli”, featuring the NBE, includes 15 pieces from the Italian composer’s highly influential Sacrae Symphoniae (1597), arranged for this ensemble by San Francisco Symphony trombonist Tim Higgins, and the debut of Music for Brass, a new work by celebrated film composer John Williams. The inspiration for this recording comes from a historic, Grammy Award-winning recording, The Antiphonal Music of Gabrieli, featuring the legendary brass ensembles of the Chicago Symphony and the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras. It has been long admired as the definitive modern performance of Giovanni Gabrieli’s works.

Alexa Still credits fellow flutist Jeanne Baxtresser for introducing her to the music of Venezuelan-born composer and conductor Efrai´n Amaya. On Syzygy, Still’s second release on the Oberlin Music label, she joins fellow Oberlin Conservatory faculty members and students on six pieces written by Amaya between 1997 and 2014. Former principal flute of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Still joined the Oberlin faculty in 2011. She remains an avid performer in recitals throughout the world, including the Australian and US premieres of Matthew Hindson’s ‘House Music’- a piece she also premiered on a 2015 Oberlin Music recording. Syzygy, which takes its name from a movement in the recording’s opening piece, means “working together toward a common goal.” On pieces for flute and piano, flute and cello, and two flutes, Still works effortlessly with her Oberlin collaborators. Joining her are longtime piano professor Robert Shannon, cello professor Darrett Adkins, and two former standout students in Still’s flute studio: Aram Mun and Tasiaeafe Hiner.

Bernard Rands boasts a catalog of more than 100 published compositions, among them his vocal and instrumental work Canti del Sole, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1984. The centerpiece of Rands at Oberlin, a new recording on the Oberlin Music label, is a work commissioned by Oberlin Conservatory in honor of its 150th anniversary and intended for English horn player Robert Walters, a professor at Oberlin and longtime member of The Cleveland Orchestra. Rands’ Concerto for English Horn received its world-premiere performance by Walters and The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall in November 2015. It makes its recorded premiere on this release, which features Walters performing alongside the Oberlin Orchestra, under the direction of Raphael Jiménez. Rands at Oberlin also features Canti del Sole, which describes a day’s progression from dawn to dusk. It is performed here by Norwegian tenor Magnus Staveland with Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, under the direction of Timothy Weiss.

Darrett Adkins has commissioend and been the dedicatee of many important new works for cello, among them pieces by Birtwhistle, Donatoni, Messiaen, and Berio. On Myth & Tradition, he teams up with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble - under the direction of Timothy Weiss - for the world-premiere recording of another Adkins commission, Su Lian Tan's Legends of Kintamani. Inspired by the composer's travels to Southeast Asia, the five-movement story depicts a return to a more innocent time and place, where mythology and reality combine in fairy tales. Also commissioned for Adkins is Philip Cashian's Concerto for Cello and Strings, a showcase for adkins' virtuosity made up of a series of interconnecting and juxtaposing sections underpinned and echoed by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble. Completing the collection is Richard Wernick's Concerto for Cello and Ten Players, which was commissioned by the Twentieth Century Consort in 1979 and premiered two years later at teh Hirsshorn Museum in Washinton, D.C. An avid chamber musician, Adkins performs and records in the U.S. and Europe with the Lions Gate Trio. He serves on the faculty of Oberlin Conservatory, where he earned his undergraduate degree.

Throughout his musical career, Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera artfully incorporated the folk music and dance forms of his native land into increasingly modernist creations. From the populist to the avant-garde, his work was created using an architectural approach that effectively set his music apart. Ginastera: One Hundred is released in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Ginastera’s birth. The work serves as a musical ‘thank you’ from world-renowned harpist Yolanda Kondonassis, whose career has been heavily influenced by Ginastera. She has performed his Harp Concerto nearly 200 times. Alongside the Harp Concerto is Danzas Argentinas, with its themes that evoke Argentinean history and culture juxtaposed with modernist structures. This is the work which catapulted Ginastera into fame in his home country. Finally, Pampeana No. 1 shows influences from Aaron Copland, with whom Ginastera studied, and Sonata for Guitar, which is the composer’s only work for Argentina’s national instrument.

The concept that led to The Oberlin Concertos was initially hatched in a conversation between pianist and educator Xak Bjerken and a former student, Oberlin Conservatory composition professor Jesse Jones. It was Jones who suggested writing a chamber concerto to be premiered by his friend and mentor, and it was Bjerken—a former longtime member of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet and a veteran soloist with the L.A. Philharmonic and other ensembles—who was immediately hooked. Their plan gave rise to another commission—for the chair of Oberlin’s Composition Department, Grammy Award-winner Stephen Hartke—and then another, for fellow composition faculty member Elizabeth Ogonek. The resulting works were recorded in three sessions over a two-year span, with Bjerken joining forces with Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble and conductor Timothy Weiss in the conservatory’s Clonick Hall studio, in addition to presenting the world- premiere performance of each piece on campus.

Soprano Kendra Colton has sung the music of John Harbison for some 25 years, including an untold number of performances of the composer’s church and chamber music, as well as Colton’s turn as Daisy Buchanan on the workshop recording of The Great Gatsby, which Harbison composed for the Metropolitan Opera. On Late Air, Colton and Harbison are united once again on music representing three decades of Harbison’s creative output. One of America’s most distinguished artistic figures, JOHN HARBISON (b. 1938) is the recipient of numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. He has written music for most of America’s premier musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His music is widely recorded on leading prestige labels. Harbison’s catalog is anchored by three operas, seven symphonies, 12 concerti, a ballet, six string quartets, numerous song cycles and chamber works, and a large body of sacred music that includes cantatas, motets, and orchestral-choral works. He has served as composer in residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Academy in Rome, and numerous festivals.