Avalon String Quartet – Price & Sowerby: Music for String Quartet (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:20 minutes | 1,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Naxos
Florence Price and Leo Sowerby were both prominent members of the Chicago music community in the 1930s and 1940s, and they are known to have respected each other’s work. Most of Florence Price’s compositions remained unpublished at her death, and her String Quartet in A minor was not performed in her lifetime. Its African American vernacular idioms and colorful harmonic language are characteristics shared in the famous melodies woven into the later Five Folksongs in Counterpoint. From its brooding opening through propulsive rhythms, expressive lyrical melodies and fugal finale, this premiere recording of Sowerby’s String Quartet in G minor reveals a work undeserving of its decades of obscurity. This recording is very much part of an encouraging rediscovery of Florence Price, the first African American female to have a symphonic work performed in Chicago back in 1933, coupled with Leo Sowerby’s unpublished String Quartet in G minor. This is the kind of release that adds significantly to our knowledge of American classical music in the 1930s, topped off with the attraction of Price’s better-known Five Folksongs in Counterpoint from 1951.
Read moreAvalon String Quartet – Debussy, Britten, Garrop, Golijov: Illuminations (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:26 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Cedille Records
The Avalon String Quartet, “a remarkably fine ensemble” (The Strad), makes its Cedille Records debut with an irresistible and richly varied program of captivating works by Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten, Osvaldo Golijov, and rising American composer Stacy Garrop.
Read moreAndy Baker Orchestra, Avalon String Quartet & Andy Baker – Leo Sowerby: The Paul Whiteman Commissions & Other Early Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:05 minutes | 1,43 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Cedille
Evoking the Roaring Twenties, Chicago composer Leo Sowerby’s engaging and ingenious Synconata (1924) and Symphony for Jazz Orchestra (“Monotony”) (1925), critically praised for their distinctive harmony, counterpoint, and humor, receive world-premiere recordings by Chicago bandleader-trombonist Andrew Baker and his Andy Baker Orchestra, making their Cedille Records debuts.
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