Born in Barcelona on 22 September 1933, the composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu of that city and the Juilliard School in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is University Professor of Composition.
Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s (Guernica, María Sabina, Steel Symphony). He is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with later avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style starting with Sinfonía en Negro – Homage to Martin Luther King (1968), and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

Born in Barcelona on 22 September 1933, the composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu of that city and the Juilliard School in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is University Professor of Composition.
Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s (Guernica, María Sabina, Steel Symphony). He is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with later avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style starting with Sinfonía en Negro – Homage to Martin Luther King (1968), and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

Born in Barcelona on 22 September 1933, the composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu of that city and the Juilliard School in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is University Professor of Composition.
Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s (Guernica, María Sabina, Steel Symphony). He is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with later avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style starting with Sinfonía en Negro – Homage to Martin Luther King (1968), and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

Born in Barcelona on 22 September 1933, the composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu of that city and the Juilliard School in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is University Professor of Composition.
Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s (Guernica, María Sabina, Steel Symphony). He is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with later avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style starting with Sinfonía en Negro – Homage to Martin Luther King (1968), and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

Born in Barcelona on 22 September 1933, the composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu of that city and the Juilliard School in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is University Professor of Composition.
Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s (Guernica, María Sabina, Steel Symphony). He is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with later avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style starting with Sinfonía en Negro – Homage to Martin Luther King (1968), and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

Born in Barcelona on 22 September 1933, the composer Leonardo Balada graduated from the Conservatorio del Liceu of that city and the Juilliard School in 1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti, Aaron Copland and conducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is University Professor of Composition.
Some of his best known works were written in a dramatic avant-garde style in the 1960s (Guernica, María Sabina, Steel Symphony). He is credited with pioneering a blending of ethnic music with later avant-garde techniques, creating a very personal style starting with Sinfonía en Negro – Homage to Martin Luther King (1968), and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975).

Dutch cellist Quirine Viersen, born in 1972, belongs international to the leading musical personalities of the younger generation. With her powerful, intense and virtuoso playing, she has convinced the public, as well as the press and colleague musicians of her special musicality. With her performance in concerto and recital and with her participation at festivals, she has shown a broad insight in classical music literature.
This is her debut-CD with works by Kodály and Bartók

The music of distinguished American composer Charles Wuorinen is notable for its compositional wit, dynamic virtuosity and intellectual rigor. This CD features vocal chamber works from the late 1990s to 2007, a new piano work, and Wuorinen’s ‘remakings’ of music by Josquin des Prés. Ashberyana, a major new work commissioned by Da Camera of Houston, sets the dazzling poetry of John Ashbery for a tour-deforce ensemble led by the composer. Fenton Songs I and Fenton Songs II offer contrasting poems by James Fenton, ranging from lyrical confessions of love to the horrors of Tiananmen Square. Two personal solo piano pieces – one dedicated to conductor James Levine – and Josquiniana, composed for the Brentano Quartet, complete this compelling portrait of one of today’s most important musical voices.

In his long composing life, Charles Wuorinen has drawn on an extremely wide range of intellectual and musical inspirations, including many from science and literature. The Dante Trilogy is among his most ambitious compositions, its source one of the great works of the Western intellectual canon. The three ballets each correspond to one of the books of Dante’s Divina Commedia: The Mission of Virgil to Inferno, The Great Procession to Purgatorio, and The River of Light to Paradiso; although rather than attempting to mirror the whole of Dante’s narrative, Wuorinen’s music relates to the detail and atmosphere of the books.

Charles Wuorinen writes virtuosic music for virtuoso performers. He has a profound desire to engage with the listener and with sympathetic performers, and essential to this engagement is a spirit of adventure and fun. Wuorinen’s music, from his earliest pieces through the more recent masterworks, is a body of work as significant as one is likely to encounter. Both Tashi and Fortune were written for the ensemble Tashi, and although the rate at which events unfold in Fortune is more gradual than the relentlessly intense Tashi, the two works share certain concerns and complement each other. Wuorinen seems especially in his element when writing for percussion instruments, as demonstrated here by the rhythmically exciting Percussion Quartet.

For all Charles Wuorinen’s longstanding reputation as a modernist, his musical career has more in common with those of Brahms and Beethoven than with any contemporary model. His music, from his earliest pieces through the more recent masterworks, is a body of work as significant as one is likely to encounter. Wuorinen has long had a well-earned reputation for mastery of unconventional instrumental groupings, but the four chamber works on this disc are all scored for conventional forces – two string quartets, a string sextet and a piano quintet.

For all Charles Wuorinen’s longstanding reputation as a modernist, his musical career has more in common with those of Brahms and Beethoven than with any contemporary model. His music, from his earliest pieces through the more recent masterworks, is a body of work as significant as one is likely to encounter. The works on this disc are all trios of diverse combinations, written in the early 1980s, and performed here by the Group for Contemporary Music, the ensemble that Wuorinen co-founded in 1962. The music ranges from the powerfully driven Horn Trio to the unusual and resonant texture of the Trombone Trio.

Though his reputation as a composer has remained rather isolated in the decades since his death, Charles Koechlin enjoyed a prominent place in the French music scene in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1918, Satie welcomed him into Les nouveaux jeunes, a short-lived collective of young French composers (including Roussel and Milhaud) that ultimately metamorphosed into Les Six. In his lifetime, Koechlin was more widely known for his work as a theorist and teacher than for his own music. Harmony and instrumental color are generally at the fore in Koechlin's music, which is perhaps most effective in the way it creates exquisitely shaded atmospheres.

Though his reputation as a composer has remained rather isolated in the decades since his death, Charles Koechlin enjoyed a prominent place in the French music scene in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1918, Satie welcomed him into Les nouveaux jeunes, a short-lived collective of young French composers (including Roussel and Milhaud) that ultimately metamorphosed into Les Six. In his lifetime, Koechlin was more widely known for his work as a theorist and teacher than for his own music. Harmony and instrumental color are generally at the fore in Koechlin's music, which is perhaps most effective in the way it creates exquisitely shaded atmospheres.

Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895 - 1968), the father of modern Ukrainian music, wrote a variety of works, including five symphonies, symphonic poems, and several shorter orchestral and vocal works, two operas, chamber music, and a number of works for solo piano. His earliest compositions were greatly influenced by the expressionism of Scriabin and Rachmaninov (Symphony No.1). His music later moved toward surrealism (Schoenberg, Shostakovich). This caused significant problems with Soviet censors. Lyatoshynsky was accused (together with Prokofiev and Shostakovich) of formalism and creation of degenerative art. Many of his works were rarely or never performed during his lifetime.