For over fifty years Arthur Berger's output consisted of sturdily crafted pieces that reflected the mixed lineage of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Copland. Born in 1912 and raised in the Bronx, he first studied at City College and New York University, later at the Longy School of Music and at Harvard. ...

John Adams becomes more popular by the year with his compositions for large orchestra (Naive and Sentimental Music, On the Transmigration of Souls) and operas (Doctor Atomic and in a way El Nino) gaining justly increased performances, but Adams has another side―chamber works. ...

Nominated for 2007 Grammy Nominee as the Best Contemporary Composition, this highly anticipated recording presents first recordings of four major Elliott Carter compositions conducted by the distinguished British conductor, Oliver Knussen.

Grand Pianola Music (1982) is scored for a small orchestra of winds, percussion, sopranos, and two pianos, and has a light-hearted, humorous, and, at times, sharply parodistic edge. The work is something akin to a musical ex¬orcism: In it John Adams has brought together a variety of elements from his musical past, including the marches and band music he played in his youth, a touch of Gospel, some Beethovenian piano writing-and even a patently diatonic theme that is reworked until it becomes an archetypal minimalist figure. Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint, dedicated to Betty Freeman, is scored for three alto flutes, three flutes, and three piccolos, plus two solo lines in each of which the soloist plays, one at a time, all three instruments. For this recording, Ransom Wilson taped all nine ensemble parts plus one solo line, and then added the "live" solo line as the final touch.

Composer's Notes
I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky was a quote from a survivor of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, a catastrophe that devastated a large part of the northern Los Angeles area. The librettist June Jordan found this phrase in the Los Angeles Times and offered it to me as the title for what I wanted to be a Broadway-style show. After composing two grand operas, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” I’d realized that the only truly indigenous form of American musical thater was what we call, for lack of a more precise term, the “musical.” My first appearance onstage as a child was in a small-town production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific”, with my mother acting the role of Bloody Mary. In my youth I knew all the famous American shows more or less by heart, and my later discovery of “West Side Story” convinced me that this particular theatrical form could actually attain the level of genuine art. Another American icon, Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”, also stood as a model although as a theaterical entity it had serious formal problems.

Combining the vocabulary of classical dance with a suggestion of traditional Chinese lyric gestures and pageantry, The Chairman Dances builds on the repetitiveness of its minimalist score and boldly colorful staging. It features a lead dancer and a corps of 16 women attired in brilliantly colored Chinese-style costumes, with decor by Rouben Ter-Arutunian. The ballet was inspired by a scene originally written for, but not included in, the production of Adams' opera, Nixon in China, that of Chairman Mao dancing with his future bride, the movie star Chiang Ch'ing.

A child of America's east coast, who now makes his home on its west, the prolific John Adams reflects that journey in these two autobiographical works. My Father Knew Charles Ives looks back to the New England of Adams's youth. His father did not, of course, know Ives, but that composer's influence is evident in Adams's evocation of his New England youth. Written for the opening of Frank Gehry's Disney Hall in LA, The Dharma at Big Sur thrillingly fuses sitar and jazz with Appalachian fiddle riffs, brilliantly played by Tracy Silverman, with the BBC Symphony conducted by the composer. Nevertheless, the ambience of each piece is so different that it made sense for Nonesuch to package this as a two-disc set―even though the program would fit comfortably on one―for any more direct collision between East Coast and West would have been truly disorienting.

Death, be not proud! Apparently John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer has something to offend everyone. When it was new back in 1991, this quintessential opera, based on the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, created a mild stir among those who perceived it as insufficiently hard on terrorism and more than a bit unfriendly to Jews. Since 9/11, the smoldering resentment has fairly exploded. The Boston Symphony hastily canceled a performance of concert excerpts. Musicologist Richard Taruskin, in an article in the New York Times, accused Adams of romanticizing terrorists and being un-American. The editor of England’s Opera magazine was appalled by Alice Goodman’s libretto, which he dismissed as “desperately naïve,” and even went so far as to say that the opera is “best left unperformed.” After seeing a production in Helsinki, one critic in the same journal hated the work so much that he declared it “an operatic corpse.”

The five works by Luciano Berio on this Sony disc, performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez, show the composer simultaneously exploiting every possibility inherent in one particular instrument and delighting in large and elegant orchestration. "Chemins II" for viola and nine instruments (1967) is based on "Sequenza VI" for viola written earlier in the same year. The solo work was essentially a study in repetition, where the violist plays tremolo multistops elaborating on the same basic harmonic fields. "Chemins IV" for oboe and ensemble (1975) is based on "Sequenza VII" for oboe written in 1969. Like "Sequenza VI" and its subsequent Chemins, the oboe starts from a single note, B, and explores a limited number of intervals, though with all manner of timbres throughout. But the range of pitches slowly expands until finally two-thirds of the way through G is heard, where upon the furious osscilating ends and we get a musing exploration of a small range. The latest piece on the disc is "Corale" for violins, two horns, and strings (1981), based on "Sequenza VIII" for solo violin, where the solo piece has the violinist playing a chaconne on two notes, A and B.

Berio has been writing the Sequenzae, a series of works for solo instruments, since 1958. Each Sequenza can be compared to a brief character sketch; each is unique and highly poetic. Berio avoids the tedium inherent in many contemporary studies for solo instruments through a preoccupation with the theatrical aspect implicit in the performance situation itself―another of his long-standing concerns. This disc couples three of these solo works―for flute, soprano, and trombone--with a classic setting of E.E. Cummings for soprano and percussion entitled Circles, a remarkable piece sung by the superlative Cathy Berberian.

Composed on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante, Laborintus 2 illuminates the fabulous theatrical scene animated by the music of Luciano Berio, one of the great figures in contemporary music of the generation of Boulez and Stockhausen.

Cathy Berberian, singer and wife of Luciano Berio, was one of music's true originals. Equally adept at Monteverdi and the wildest effusions of the avant-garde, her performances brought her husband's music to new and appreciative audiences, while permitting Berio to create some of his most gripping work at the same time. Folk Songs is exactly what the title says―a collection of folk songs from around the world which gives Berberian the opportunity to demonstrate her ability to sing in different languages and styles. Recital 1 is something else again―a monologue for soprano that reveals the slow disintegration of her personality. It's a nervous breakdown in music. Berberian performs everything on this disc brilliantly.

H'un: In Memoriam 1966-1976 is emphatically an angry and grieving cry of historical experience. This essay was composed in 1987, the year Sheng became an American citizen. The word H'un, pronounced like the tribe of Attila, is translated by the composer as “lacerations.” The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. In 1978, Sheng became one of the first to be admitted to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he earned his composition degree. Moving to New York City in 1982, he continued his composition studies at Queens College of the City University of New York with George Perle and Hugo Weisgall, at Columbia University with Chou Wen-chung, Jack Beeson, and Mario Davidovsky, and with his mentor Leonard Bernstein.

The Brodsky's new recording, "Lament" (Silva Classics SILKD 6001; CD and cassette), steers a middle course between what the quartet does normally and what it did with Elvis Costello, who returns for a cameo after his earlier collaboration with the quartet on "The Juliet Letters" for Warner Brothers. Of the nine works here, two are by Michael Thomas, the first violinist, and two are arrangements by Paul Cassidy, the violist. Both performers are clearly comfortable writing for the quartet medium; whether they can establish distinctive compositional voices is another issue. However, these players use their instruments uninhibitedly to create sound effects, some aggressive, some delicate, and exhibit a sense of humor, virtuosity and an ear for musical dialogue that are strikingly imaginative.