On August 5, the American Composers Orchestra in New York City will release Orchestra Underground: Tech & Techno, its fifth digital album, featuring music by Mason Bates, Edmund Campion, Anna Clyne, Justin Messina, and Neil Rolnick. The Chamber Orchestra of New York has released its third recording on the Naxos label, featuring Respighi’s The Birds, Three Botticelli Pictures, and the Suite in G major, led by Salvatore Di Vittorio. Copland House’s debut recording on its new label, Copland House Blend, is Wake Up Singin’, featuring African-American songs, hymns, and spirituals sung by baritone James Martin. Later this year the label plans to release music by former Copland House resident composers Pierre Jalbert and Robert Xaver Rodriguez, as well as a DVD of the 1986 PBS documentary Aaron Copland: A Self-Portrait, directed by Allan Miller and written by Vivian Perlis. The New York Philharmonic has released several recordings: Philip Glass: Koyaanisqatsi with Orchestra (Live), recorded in 2011 with the orchestra, the composer, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and the Collegiate Chorale; and live performances from 2013-14 including Mozart Symphony nos. 39, 40, and 41, Penderecki’s Concerto Grosso, and Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, featuring Principal Bassoon Judith LeClair. The Philharmonic has also released a three-album “Glenn Dicterow Collection,” honoring its departing longtime concertmaster. The Philadelphia-based Orchestra 2001 is featured on George Crumb: Voices from the Heartland, a new recording on the Bridge label including Crumb’s Sun and Shadow and Song of the Earth. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has released a Reference Recordings CD of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 and the symphonic suite from Janacek’s Jenufa, recorded in 2013 and led by Music Director Manfred Honeck. The PSO also offered its first live video stream, its July 6 concert at the Allegheny County Summer Concert Series, featuring music by Copland, Bernstein, and Morton Gould, led by PSO Resident Conductor Fawzi Haimor. The first recording of John Luther Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean, by the Seattle Symphony and Music Director Ludovic Morlot, will be released by Cantaloupe Music in September. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has signed a recording contract with Chandos Records; the first release, in August, will be a live 2013 performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade led by Music Director Peter Oundjian and featuring TSO Concertmaster Jonathan Crow. The L.A.-based flexible ensemble wild Up has released Feather & Stone, featuring works by wild Up director Christopher Rountree as well as by Nicholas Deyoe, Chris Kallmyer, Odeya Nini, and Andrew Tholl, on the Populist Records label.
Several soloists who also perform with orchestras have released new recordings. Cellist Maya Beiser will release Uncovered—featuring new arrangements of songs by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and others—on August 26 on the Innova Records label. Beiser was a founding member of Bang on a Can All-Stars, the new-music ensemble. Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov, winner of the 2012 Honens Prize for Piano, has released Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons and Six Morceaux, on the Hyperion label, his first studio recording. Anthony McGill, recently appointed principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, has released a recording of music by Brahms and Mozart with the Pacifica Quartet, on Cedille Records. Richard Reed Parry of the Canadian band Arcade Fire has released his debut classical album, Music for Heart and Breath, on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
Posted July 17, 2014
