This episode looks at eight Lincoln-inspired works by eight different American composers.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559373-74

Subscribe to Podcast: Enhanced* | Regular | iTunes Store
Download this Episode: AAC* | MP3

* enhanced version of the podcast contains chapter markers and cover art.

He as a master of the memorable melody and the catchy rhythm. Over the years, he composed or arranged many pieces for the holiday season, including Sleigh Ride and A Christmas Festival.

This podcast looks at a new recording of his holiday music, featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559621

Subscribe to Podcast: Enhanced* | Regular | iTunes Store
Download this Episode: AAC* | MP3

* enhanced version of the podcast contains chapter markers and cover art.

On October 28, Naxos releases the world-premiere recording of John Corigliano’s A Dylan Thomas Trilogy (Naxos 8559394), performed by the Nashville Symphony and its Music Advisor Leonard Slatkin. Also featured are the Nashville Symphony Chorus (George Mabry, Chorus Director), renowned British baritone Sir Thomas Allen, Canadian tenor John Tessier, and boy soprano Ty Jackson.

The genesis of this work began in 1959, when the composer, then a senior at Columbia University, first encountered Thomas’ poetry. He called it a “revelation” and composed the first of several settings in the following year using the text of Fern Hill. (The original version was for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra, but as the work morphed to reflect “the three stages of man,” Corigliano recast the mezzo-soprano solo for boy soprano.) In 1969, Charles Wadsworth of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center asked Corigliano to write a work for the Society’s opening season. He returned to Dylan Thomas, this time setting the bittersweet Poem in October, inspired by the poet’s 30th birthday. This time, the narrator’s voice was that of a tenor, accompanied by flute, oboe, clarinet, string quartet, and harpsichord.

In 1975, Corigliano again revisited Thomas’ poems while dealing with complex professional and personal issues. His discovery of Poem on his Birthday, in which the poet’s 35th year “is not celebrated but ‘spurned,” was an eerie reflection of his own struggles. Unlike the bel canto vocalism of Fern Hill and Poem in October, Poem on his Birthday needed to reflect the character’s midlife crisis. Scored for a baritone and full orchestra and chorus, Corigliano incorporates a broad spectrum of musical styles, “dreaming up an array of sounds (sea winds, bird calls, ghost cries) deciding on their precise shape first, their notation later.” In 1976, the newly-complete Dylan Thomas Trilogy received its premiere in Washington National Cathedral.

Twenty years later, and more at peace with his life, Corigliano asked Maestro Leonard Slatkin if he could finish the trilogy, which no longer felt complete. For the composer the oratorio was about a man “interpreting … his future through his past”; Fern Hill and Poem in October, therefore, needed to be recast to appear as memories rather than actual events. Additionally, Corigliano needed another work to frame the quasi-operatic oratorio, and eventually settled on Author’s Prologue, Thomas’s introduction to Collected Poems. The newly recast oratorio begins with baritone, chorus, and orchestra, presenting the first 51 lines of text from Author’s Prologue (Part I). Fern Hill, scored for chamber choir, orchestra, and boy soprano, follows. The baritone soloist then reappears with the chorus in Part II of Author’s Prologue, preparing the audience for the pastoral Poem in October (also rescored for chamber orchestra). The work concludes with Poem on his Birthday.

John Corigliano, among the most honored composers in the United States, was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Symphony No. 2. In March 2000, his third film score, for The Red Violin, won the Academy Award (”Oscar.”) Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, an impassioned response to the AIDS crisis, won the 1991 Grawemeyer Award for Best New Orchestral Composition; the Chicago Symphony’s recording of it won Grammy® Awards for Best New Composition and Best Orchestral Performance, and it has been played by over 150 different orchestras. A Distinguished Professor of Music at the City University of New York, Corigliano was named in 1991 to the faculty of The Juilliard School and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an organization of American’s most prominent artists, sculptors, architects, writers, and composers. Commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera, where it premiered in December 1991, Corigliano’s “grand opera buffa,” The Ghosts of Versailles, sold out two Met engagements in 1991 and 1994, as well as its 1995 production at the Chicago Lyric Opera. It is due for another Met revival in the ‘09-’10 season. Corigliano’s recent works include 2004’s Circus Maximus: Symphony No. 3, for multiple wind ensembles, and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (‘The Red Violin’), released by Sony in December 2007, with Marin Alsop leading soloist Joshua Bell and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Corigliano’s catalogue includes three symphonies, seven concerti (for violin, flute, clarinet, oboe, guitar, percussion, and piano), numerous shorter works for orchestra, and an extensive catalogue of chamber works, recorded on major labels. His music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Leonard Slatkin was appointed Music Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2008, after completing his 12th and final season as Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra. The distinguished American conductor continues as Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Music Advisor to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, and Conductor Laureate of the Saint Louis Symphony, of which he was Music Director for 17 seasons. He has served as Festival Director of the Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Festival (1990-1999), Principal Guest Conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra (1997-2000), Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (2000-2004), and Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl (2004-2007). Mr. Slatkin’s many recordings have won seven Grammy® awards. He is the recipient of honors that include the 2003 National Medal of Arts, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Gold Baton for service to American music, ASCAP awards with both the National and Saint Louis symphonies, honorary doctorates from Juilliard, Indiana University, and the University of Missouri, and the Declaration of Honour in Silver from the Austrian ambassador to the U.S. for outstanding contributions to cultural relations.

Sir Thomas Allen is an established star of the great opera houses of the world. At the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden-where, in 2006, he celebrated the 35th anniversary of his début with the company-he has sung over 40 roles. In 2006, he also celebrated the 25th anniversary of his début at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. A regular guest at the world’s great opera houses, he is particularly acclaimed for his Billy Budd, Pelléas, Eugene Onegin, Ulisse, and Beckmesser, as well as the great Mozart roles of Count Almaviva, Don Alfonso, Papageno, Guglielmo, and Don Giovanni. Equally renowned on the concert stage, Sir Allen has appeared with many of the world’s great orchestras and conductors. He has recorded with distinguished names rhat include Solti, Levine, Marriner, Haitink, Rattle, Sawallisch and Muti. In the New Year’s Honours of 1989, he was created a Commander of the British Empire, and in the 1999 Queen’s Birthday Honours, he was made a Knight Bachelor.

On the international stages of opera, concert, and recital, Canadian tenor John Tessier has gained attention and praise for the beauty and honesty of his voice and his refined style and artistic versatility in the lyric tenor repertoire. He has performed with the major orchestras of Canada and the U.S., as well as in opera house throughout Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

12-year-old Ty Jackson has performed with the Nashville Symphony on numerous occasions, including a recent recording of George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess. He is a member of the Nashville Boy Choir at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Led by Music Advisor Leonard Slatkin, incoming Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero, and President and CEO Alan D. Valentine, the Grammy® Award-winning Nashville Symphony has a growing international reputation for its recordings and innovative programming. With 140 performances annually, the 84-member ensemble is an arts leader in Nashville and beyond, offering a broad range of pops and jazz concerts, special events, children’s concerts, and community outreach programs.

For over 40 years, the Nashville Symphony Chorus has regularly presented significant works from the classical choral repertoire, from Baroque music to contemporary. During George Mabry’s 10-year tenure as Chorus Director, the Chorus has also been featured in three CDs: Celebration in Song, a collection of sacred music recorded in 2000; Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, recorded on the Naxos label (8.557060) in 2003; and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, released on Decca in 2006. A further Nashville Symphony recording with the Chorus is in progress with Naxos: Gian Carlo Menotti’s My Christmas, a cantata with male chorus to be coupled with Menotti’s popular opera Amahl and the Night Visitors.

Some of the arrangers, like Vladimir Askhenazy and Leopold Stokowski are well known, others are not.

But all have been moved by Mussorgsky’s music, and all have created brilliant arrangements.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.570716

Subscribe to Podcast: Enhanced* | Regular | iTunes
Download this Episode: AAC* | MP3

* enhanced version of the podcast with chapter markers and cover art.

This podcast looks at his life, and at this new recording featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin.

Album details…
Catalogue No.: Naxos 8.559357

The Naxos label is marking his centennial by bringing out his complete orchestral music, conducted by no less than Leonard Slatkin…

… It’s time to pay tribute to this popular American composer, who was born 100 years ago on June 29 in Cambridge, Mass…

… Now those little gems, along with several that were never before recorded, are part of his complete collection of orchestral works, just in time for his centennial celebration.

Read more.

Anderson, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday on June 29, occupied a unique niche in American music: he was a classically-trained composer whose records topped the pop charts, as well as a meticulous, inventive, and precise arranger. Although he labored over every measure he composed, Anderson’s works sounded remarkably effortless. For this first complete cycle of his orchestral music, his family has made several previously unreleased pieces available, with some first recordings scattered among familiar and not-so-familiar titles.

In addition to four world-premiere recordings, Volume 3 includes the notorious musical gem The Typewriter, in which the machine is transformed into a relentlessly busy percussion instrument; the tasteful and heartwarming Suite of Carols for Brass Choir; and Anderson’s biggest hit, Sleigh Ride.

Other works featured on Volume 3 include Harvard Sketches (Lowell House Bells - Freshman in Harvard Square - Widener Reading Room - Class Day Confetti Battle) (1939)*; Melody on Two Notes (1966)*; Mother’s Whistler (1940)* ; The Penny Whistle Song (1951); The Phantom Regiment (1951); Promenade (1951); Sandpaper Ballet (1954); Saraband (1948); Serenata (1947); Old MacDonald Had a Farm (1947); Seventy-Six Trombones (Willson/arr. Anderson) (1958); Wintergreen for President (Gershwin/arr. Anderson) (1932)*; and A Trumpeter’s Lullaby (1949). (Works marked with asterisks are world-premiere recordings.)