Charles Wuorinen has always been comfortable in a range of genres, embracing the traditional forms of opera, symphony, or string quartet as readily as he accepts the challenge of composing for the unusual combinations which have become a second norm since Pierrot Lunaire. Nor has any particular focus dominated any period of Wuorinen's nearly sixty-year career: his eight symphonies span more than fifty years, his piano concertos forty. He has written everything from piano bagatelles to ballets, a Mass setting, eight symphonies, and three operas. This new album features the latest and most traditionally structured of Wuorinen’s four piano sonatas, performed by virtuoso pianist, Anne-Marie McDermott, as well as two vocal works setting poetry by two of America's greatest modern poets, John Ashbery and James Tate.
Reviews:
“Listen to the ‘Fourth Piano Sonata,’ a fiendishly difficult yet elation-bringing 20 minutes of otherworldly density and drive! Anne-Marie McDermott acts in a Promethean-heroic way to realize the complex music with ultimate comprehensibility and rangy excitement. And the opener is not as all-encompassing for length yet very much Wuorinen at his best. Vocalist and chamber players achieve a simultaneous horizontal flow that truly soars.” - Gapplegate
“This disc embodies two sides of Charles Wuorinen’s creative persona: the musical misanthrope and the mellifluous master.” - Gramophone
“Much of Wuorinen’s music makes great technical demands on musicians, including tonal leaps, extreme dynamic contrasts, and rapid exchange of pitches, all requiring extreme precision and virtuosity. This is all on ample display in the three works on Charles Wuorinen, Vol. 3” - theWholeNote
Order from iTunes
Order from Amazon
Order from ArkivMusic
Charles Wuorinen:
Alphabetical Ashbery (2013),
loadbang: Carlos Cordeiro, bass clarinet/clarinet, Jeffrey Gavett, baritone, Andy Kozar, trumpet, William Lang, trombone
Fourth Piano Sonata (2007)
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano
It Happens Like This (2010) (Cantata for Four Singers and Twelve Players on Poems of James Tate)
Sharon Harms, soprano, Laura Mercado-Wright, alto, Steven Brennfleck, tenor, Douglas Williams, bass, The Group for Contemporary Music, Charles Wuorinen, conductor
BRIDGE 9490
Related discs: