Snjezana Pavicevic - World Winds II - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

This album brings together players, wind instruments, and associated traditions from four continents. The compositions were written over a span of more than twenty years. They illustrate very different responses to the many compositional challenges presented by trying to create a complete sound world entirely through the use of melody. David Loeb was born in 1939 in New York into a family which took music and painting very seriously. He studied composition with Peter Pindar Stearns at the Mannes College of Music in New York, and then completed a master's degree at Yale. His catalog of compositions is unusually extensive and diverse. In addition to the expected assortment of works for orchestra, various chamber combinations, soloists, and voice, he has also written many pieces for Asian instruments (in addition to Japanese, some for Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Mongol) and for early Western instruments (in addition to viols, some for lute, harpsichord, and recorder). He has often brought these instruments together in unique combinations, such as four shakuhachi and four viols; flute, guitar, koto, and shakuhachi; and khaen, flute, guitar, cello, and percussion.

Only few testimonies provide us any details about this now little known but once esteemed composer. Born in Coburg, 1735, Anton Schweitzer died 1787 in Gotha, where he had settled following the Weimar palace fire in 1774. Regrettably, only relatively few manuscripts have survived. Some of the works recorded here (which comprise almost the entire existing church music) have been preserved in several copies, which were recently found in different archives in Thuringia. This recording shows us a colorful virtuoso music of an unjustly forgotten composer. The works on this are world premiere recordings.

Classical Winds - Wind Music [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/11/2011