Updates from the world's leading classical music label
A recent new album of American organ concertos featuring multi-award-winning artists brought together the artistry of organist Paul Jacobs and the contemporary music pedigree of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Giancarlo Guerrero. The high expectations generated by such a rare programme were met with distinction and this podcast conversation between Raymond Bisha and Paul Read More …
Raymond Bisha introduces a programme of orchestral music by the Pulitzer and Erasmus Prize-winning American composer John Adams. The two works on this new album from the Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero demonstrate why Adams is one of today’s most widely performed and recorded composers. Adams describes My Father Knew Charles Ives as “an homage Read More …
Raymond Bisha introduces a new release of orchestral music by American composer Christopher Rouse, who died in September 2019. It’s a fitting tribute to one who led the revitalisation of contemporary orchestral music with works that ranged from intensely active to wonderfully lyrical. As both a Pullitzer Prize and GRAMMY Award winner, his personal mission Read More …
Principal players from the Nashville Symphony Orchestra step up to the solo spotlight in world premiere recordings of 3 wind concertos. Frank Ticheli’s Clarinet Concerto pays homage to a different American composer in each of its three movements; Brad Warnaar’s Horn Concerto attests to the composer’s own professional mastery of the instrument; while Behzad Ranjbaran’s Read More …
Terry Riley’s breakthrough work, In C, was written in 1964, but it wasn’t until 1991 that he produced his first orchestral piece. Over the years, Riley has come under the influence of a wide range of musicians, including John Cage, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Pandit Pran Nath, the master Indian classical singer. Raymond Bisha Read More …
Three orchestral works by the contemporary American composer Richard Danielpour immerse the listener in both a world of conflict and the richly colourful palette with which the composer depicts his narrative. Songs of Solitude and War Songs respectively present a response to 9/11 and commemorate the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil Read More …
Michael Daugherty is considered among the Top 10 most performed American composers of concert music today. This podcast details three of his orchestral works that cement this status. Each was inspired by a larger-than-life American cultural figure—the author Ernest Hemingway, the artist Grant Wood and Randolph Hearst, who headed an extensive journalistic empire in the Read More …
Contemporary American composer Richard Danielpour calls them ‘siblings’: two discrete yet connected works that ponder the current endless cycle of brutalization and despair in the Middle East. Raymond Bisha introduces ‘Darkness in the Ancient Valley’ and ‘Toward a Season of Peace’, perfectly channeled subject areas for a composer who describes himself as “a 21st-century American Read More …
Based in the United States, Joan Tower is one of today’s most successful composers. A 2007 Naxos release of her orchestral music (8.559328) won 3 GRAMMY awards. Rick Phillips introduces the latest disc to feature three more of her fascinating and varied compositions for orchestra: Stroke, the Violin Concerto and Chamber Dance. Tower’s flexible style Read More …