Recording features the Nashville Symphony and its new Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero

This month the Nashville Symphony releases its latest recording on Naxos American Classics, featuring two works by American composer Michael Daugherty. Scheduled for release on September 29, the recording is the Symphony’s first with new Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero.

According to the League of American Orchestras, Daugherty is one of this country’s 10 most performed living composers. His Metropolis Symphony pays tribute to the American comic book hero Superman, with movements devoted to characters such as Lex Luthor and Lois Lane. The London Times has called the work a “Symphonie Fantastique for our times.” Featured performers include Nashville Symphony musicians Mary Kathryn Van Osdale (violin), Erik Gratton (flute) and Ann Richards (flute/piccolo).

The recording also includes the piano concerto Deus ex Machina, which was co-commissioned by the Nashville Symphony and four other American orchestras. Inspired by trains of the past and the future, the piece features award-winning soloist Terrence Wilson.

“I’m a big fan of Michael Daugherty’s music,” Guerrero said. “It’s amazingly rich with color, rhythm and vivid orchestral effects, and I think this recording will appeal to a wide range of listeners.”

“In these pieces, I seek to express the energies, ambiguities, paradoxes and wit of American popular culture,” Daugherty added. “The Nashville Symphony has done a truly remarkable job of bringing this music to life.”

Over the past decade, the Nashville Symphony has become one of the most active recording orchestras in the country. Recorded at Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, this latest release is the orchestra’s 17th for Naxos. Past releases include Joan Tower’s Made in America, which received 3 GRAMMY® Awards in 2008.

Recorded in Nashville’s beautiful Laura Turner Concert Hall, Naxos presents the latest recording from the Grammy®-winning Nashville Symphony. Joined by the Chicago and Nashville Symphony Choruses, the Chattanooga Boys Choir and conductor Alastair Willis, the Nashville Symphony performs Ravel’s 1925 opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, and his beloved cycle for soprano and orchestra, Shéhérazade. Soloists include Julie Boulianne, Genevi ève Després Kirsten Gunlogson Philippe Castagner Ian Greenlaw, Kevin Short Agathe Martel Cassandre Prévost and Julie Cox.

Being released just in time for the 84^th anniversary of its first performance, Ravel received the script for L’enfant et les sortilèges from French novelist Colette in 1917 but did not complete the work until 1924. The opera tells the story of an ill-behaved child who meets a rude awakening when the inanimate objects in his nursery and garden come to life and turn on him. The libretto offers many opportunities for the soloists to provide witty depictions of the various objects that seek their revenge on the young child, such as the damaged grandfather clock, the belligerent teapot, the Ragtime singing teacups, the personification of arithmetic (a crazed professor), and the duet by the amusing cats.

Ravel told his friend Hélène Jourdan-Morhange that L’enfant contained many musical styles: Massenet, Puccini, Monteverdi and American musical comedy. In creatively weaving these many moods, Ravel surely found a lighthearted way to convey that message that actions have consequences and that a civilized society would not exist without care for the world around us.

Shéhérazade is actually the title of two works by Ravel. The first is Shéhérazade, ouverture de féerie, written in 1898 for orchestra. The second (Shéhérazade), which is heard on this recording, was written in 1903 as a song cycle for orchestra after three poems by Tristan Klingsor: Asie, La flûte enchantée, and L’indifférent.

On November 18, Naxos releases Gian Carlo Menotti’s beloved 1951 Christmas classic Amahl and the Night Visitors, paired with My Christmas (1987), a short choral work with a libretto by the composer (Naxos 8669019). This recording features the Nashville Symphony, led by Alastair Willis; members of the Nashville Symphony and Chicago Symphony choruses, led by directors George Mabry and Duain Wolfe; and soloists Ike Hawkersmith (Amahl), Kirsten Gunlogson (Mother), Dean Anthony (King Kaspar), Todd Thomas (King Melchior), Kevin Short (King Balthazar), and Bart LeFan (Page to the Kings). This recording marks the third in two months featuring the Nashville Symphony; the other releases are Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Naxos 8570716) and John Corigliano’s A Dylan Thomas Trilogy (Naxos 8559394).Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera written for television, enjoys over 500 performances annually around the world and is immensely popular with amateur groups. A disabled boy, Amahl, and his mother encounter the three Kings who seek the newborn Jesus. After deciding to give his crutch to the Christ Child, Amahl is miraculously healed, and he joyfully accompanies the Magi to Bethlehem to give thanks. Sung in English, the opera is a humorous and poignant Christmas classic, beloved by audiences of all ages.

No post-war opera has enjoyed exposure comparable to Amahl and the Night Visitors, commissioned by NBC and first televised on Christmas Eve in 1951. Although it was subsequently staged at Bloomington in February 1952, conducted by Thomas Schippers, with whom Menotti enjoyed a long working relationship, the opera’s television potential has been explored in a number of subsequent presentations. Between 1951 and 1966, it was shown each year on NBC on or around Christmas Eve. In 1963, it was remade by NBC with an all-new cast, a production shown for the next three years. Then, in 1978, NBC filmed another new production, partly on location in the Holy Land. Meanwhile, the BBC commissioned two versions of its own, the first broadcast in December 1955, with the second following four years later. Menotti himself directed another filmed version as late as 1996. All of these productions attest to the appeal that Menotti’s unassuming stage work has exerted over audiences for almost six decades.