Acknowledgments This recording is supported by the American Music Center’s CAP Recording Program, made possible by endowment funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and with funds from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of . Additional support was provided by numerous gener- ous individuals, to whom Laura Kaminsky and the performing artists are grateful: Timothy R. Allan; Thom Collins; Cynthia Elliott; Eva & Leonard Kaminsky; Karen Kaminsky & Peter J. Tichansky.

Vukovar Trio, Duo for ’cello and piano, Music for Artur, and Triftmusik produced, engineered, and edited by Bill Siegmund of Digital Island Studios, New York. Duo for ’cello and piano and Vukovar Trio recorded November 20, 2011 Assistant engineer: Joshua Meer Music for Artur and Triftmusik recorded December 17, 2011 Assistant engineer: Andrew Shire

Cadmium Yellow, Transformations, and Wave Hill produced and engineered by Judith Sherman Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis Cadmium Yellow recorded March 3, 2012; Transformations recorded March 10, 2012; Wave Hill recorded May 19, 2012 Cassatt Quartet Cover Art: “Palisades, October,” by Rebecca Allan Photo of Laura Kaminsky: Rebecca Allan Colorado Quartet All works on this CD recorded in the Recital Hall of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music, SUNY Purchase, New York Ensemble Pi

www.albanyrecords.com TROY1393/94 albany records u.s. 915 broadway, albany, ny 12207 tel: 518.436.8814 fax: 518.436.0643 albany records u.k. box 137, kendal, cumbria la8 0xd Laura tel: 01539 824008 © 2013 Albany Records made in the usa DDD warning: copyright subsists in all recordings issued under this label. Kaminsky The Composer Festival; Soundfest Summer Institute and Festival (Cape Cod); Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival (VT); Laura Kaminsky is a composer with “an ear for the new and interesting” whose works are “colorful and Seal Bay Chamber Music Festival (ME); Music from Salem (MA); Treetops Chamber Music (CT); Troika harmonically sharp-edged” (The New York Times) and whose “musical language is compounded of hymns, International and Sound Ways Festivals (); Synthesis International Festival (Macedonia); International blues, and gestures not unlike those of Shostakovich” (inTune). She has received commissions, fellow- Festival of Women Composers (); and Casalmaggiore International Music Festival (Italy); among others. ships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, New York She is Artistic Director of Symphony Space in and is on the faculty of the Conservatory of State Council on the Arts, Aaron Copland Fund, Chamber Music America, American Music Center, USArtists Music/SUNY Purchase. Kaminsky’s scores are available for distribution through subitomusic.com and recordings International, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Kenan Institute for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts are available on the Albany, Mode, CRI, and Capstone labels. Kaminsky is a BMI composer. Commission, North Carolina Council on the Arts, Virgil Thomson Foundation, King County Arts Commission, and Meet the Composer, among others. She has received five ASCAP-Chamber Music America Awards for Adventuresome Programming as well as a citation from the Office of the President of the Borough of Manhattan, and was the recipient of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2010 Chopin Award. The Music She has been a fellow at artists’ communities including the Hermitage Artist Retreat Center, Virginia Center Laura Kaminsky is an astute and voracious listener. For decades, the journeys her ears have taken have for the Creative Arts, Centrum Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. benefited audiences in her native New York City through all the concert programs she has presented at venues Her works are frequently performed across the U.S. and abroad, in Africa, , Canada, China, and like Town Hall, the 92nd Street Y, Miller Theater, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Roulette, The New School, Latin America. Her music has been presented in her native New York at Bargemusic, Merkin Concert Hall, and Symphony Space, where she currently serves as Artistic Director. But in addition to the staggering Tenri Cultural Center, Weill Recital Hall, Symphony Space, Miller Theatre, Greenwich House, Here Arts Center, amount of music of others she has made available to the public, she has also crafted a formidable oeuvre of and the 92nd Street Y, among other venues; and internationally at Wigmore Hall and King’s Place (London), original musical compositions that are deeply individual responses to the world around her. Glinka Hall and Dostoevsky Museum (Russia), Fundacion Juan March (Spain), Naregatsi Art Institute () Social and political themes have been common in Kaminsky’s work, as has an abiding respect for and and the American Embassy in Ghana, among others. She has been featured composer at Boston, Oberlin, connection to the natural world. Her music has also been deeply informed by her extensive travels—from St. Petersburg (Russia) and Shanghai Conservatories; North Carolina School of the Arts; Mannes College of Eastern Europe and West Africa, to throughout the Americas. Her 1985 song cycle Twilight Songs (recorded Music; Ithaca College School of Music; Cornish College of the Arts; CalArts; Tisch School of the Arts/NYU; Ringling by Mode Records on the debut disc of Musicians Accord, the new music collective she co-founded) is a College of Art and Design; Bard, Hunter, St. Olaf’s, and Sarah Lawrence Colleges; SUNY at Stony Brook, response to the phenomenon of twilight featuring a text derived from a traditional Indonesian fishermen’s Purchase, and Plattsburg; Universities of Puerto Rico, Utah, Minnesota, and Puget Sound; National Academies chant. Another of her works, And Trouble Came: An African AIDS Diary (1993) for narrator and trio (recorded of Music of Armenia, Ghana, and Slovakia; Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School; Vernon on CRI and now available through New World Records), is a poignant musical response to the AIDS crisis Center for International Affairs at New York University; and festivals including the Seattle Chamber Music based on her encounters with AIDS sufferers in Ghana while she lived and worked there. Kaminsky often hears music in some extremely unlikely places—a remote Alpine vista accessible only via helicopter or a opens frenetically, but its initial relentlessness eventually dissipates and it concludes in a haze of ambiguity grueling hike, an extraordinarily beautiful public garden in the Bronx, a Croatian city devastated by the wars recalling the opening movement without actually reprising it. over the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The much more expansive solo piano suite Music for Artur from 2006 was composed for the Russian- Kaminsky’s in-depth study of the music of the different cultures she has lived and worked in has also had born Armenian pianist Artur Avanesov, who is also a composer. It was written for Armenia-America: Music a profound impact on her compositional language. For example, her idiosyncratic approach to meter and pulse Now, a festival of contemporary music that Kaminsky and Avanesov co-produced in . Kaminsky’s have clear antecedents in the multi-layered rhythms that she learned while studying traditional drumming in own description of how this music came into being offers valuable insights into her compositional process: Ghana as well as the irregular metrical cycles she experienced during her years in Eastern Europe. Yet her music sounds neither African nor Eastern European; rather it is a personal and distinctive amalgam of these rich Cross-cultural collaboration is a powerful source of inspiration for me, and musical influences. immersing myself in contemporary Armenian music as I conceived the festival All seven works featured in the present recording (the first devoted exclusively to her own music), share with Artur was nothing short of exhilarating. I first became familiar with the common elements, despite their different narratives. Prevalent is the persistent use of irregular rhythms where ancient vocal Sharakans a decade earlier while living in Eastern Europe as groupings of five and seven are more common than those of four and six. Repeating patterns shift constantly artistic director of the international European Mozart Academy. I later had the as changing accents cause unexpected syncopations that throw things deliberately off-kilter. Though all good fortune of encountering this gorgeous spiritual music in live performance completely text-less, the solo and chamber works contained in this recording are filled with narratives from in the centuries-old troglodytic churches in the mountains outside of Yerevan a broad range of inspirations. during my first trip to Armenia in 2002 when I reunited with some of my Triftmusik, commissioned by the pianist Alan Feinberg, and Kaminsky’s first solo piano work, is the Armenian colleagues from the Mozart Academy, and first met Artur. Our interest shortest as well as the oldest composition featured herein. It is one of her many works written in response to in each other’s music led to an abiding friendship that stirred me to create a and as a reflection on the natural world; the other such work on this compilation is Wave Hill. Triftmusik is new work to honor him and the festival that we created together. The challenge a sonic evocation of a meadow in a mountain high above the town of Zermatt in Switzerland in which there I gave myself was to write spontaneously and quickly, and to fashion a multi- is only one solitary building, a Berghaus built at the turn of the last century. It is a place to which Kaminsky movement work where each piece would have a unique and individual character. has hiked for many years beginning in 1987. Kaminsky’s solo piano composition, which she began composing The implied vocal lines of both “Nocturne Agitato” and “Prayer; in the Mist” are in the summer of 1991 in Switzerland and completed in the late fall back in New York City, simultaneously a quiet homage to the Sharakans; the use of complex rhythms invokes the conveys the desolate beauty of the place as well as the exhilaration of arriving there. It consists of two linked irregular pulse at the root of much Eastern Europe folk music. movements. “Sanctuary,” is brief, calm, and aphoristic, yet it flows almost like a chorale, albeit one that is tonally ambiguous and predominantly in quintuple time. This is immediately followed by “Wanderweg” which Five of the six pieces which form the suite were composed over the course of only a week while Kaminsky simultaneously austere and rhapsodic, emerging initially out of a void and remaining somehow suspended was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; the final one was composed a little over a month and unresolved throughout. “Arbores Venerabiles / Anemones” zooms the sonic lens closer to explore the later in New York City and Woodstock. “Danza Ritmico,” which opens the cycle, is a jagged interplay between trees and other plant life at Wave Hill. It begins firm and powerfully with both instruments suggesting trees the left and right hands which constantly shifts its rhythmic accents. “Nocturne Agitato” is more inscrutable that have stood there for generations. Then a series of fleeting diatonic figurations traded between the violin and elusive, like dreams during troubled sleep. “Windswept Bluff” is a perpetuum mobile of persistent sex- and piano hint at breezes and the myriad smaller plants that populate the gardens. Eventually chromaticism tuplets than only lets up on the final furious chord. “Prayer; in the Mist” begins at an almost imperceptibly is re-introduced and the work ends with a bravado return to the majesty of the movement’s onset, with low volume and remains quiet throughout; a slow hymn, somewhat reminiscent of the texture of “Sanctuary” double stops on the violin and resolute block chords on the piano. from Triftmusik, is overlaid with wide-ranged arioso flourishes. Although it also opens quietly “Boulevard” is The inspiration for Kaminsky’s first string quartet Transformations (she has composed a total of six thus a return to more energetic cascades of notes. While it is in septimal time through, Kaminsky constantly far) is much more personal and autobiographical. It was composed between February 1999 and June 2000, a varies the rhythmic emphasis among the seven beats, revealing a vast range of syncopations. “Clarion,” period of extremely significant transition in her life—illnesses and deaths of several close friends and family which ends the suite, is also chock full of torrents of notes, but here they are muscular and assertive. members as well as a move to Seattle to serve as chair of the music department at the Cornish College of the Although Kaminsky also began Wave Hill (2009; commissioned by the Kenan Institute for the Arts) at Arts. The four movements of Transformations, which was commissioned by and is dedicated to the Colorado the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and continued to work on it at the Luxembourg Gardens in and Quartet, are played without pause, but are extremely different from one another both in mood and form. The in St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as in her studio in New York City. The source of its inspiration is its namesake, first, which is mostly in quintuple time throughout, opens vigorously with all four players in unison reiterating a 28-acre public garden and cultural center in the Riverdale section of the Bronx overlooking the Hudson River one of the most dissonant intervals—a diminished ninth, which being only a half step higher than an octave, and the Palisades which is only a short walk from her apartment. Luminaries who lived in the mansion at this is particularly jarring. The remainder of the movement alternates between each of the players veering off on site, which is now on the U.S. Register of Historic Places, include Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Arturo separate paths and then coming back together, but the music each plays remains mostly derived from this Toscanini. All of them were drawn to the space’s remarkable natural setting as well as its spectacular views, interval or permutations of it such as major sevenths (an inversion which is a half step less than an octave) a true oasis within New York City. Kaminsky’s three movement work for violin and piano celebrates this and minor seconds, so there is never a sense of resolution. Kaminsky has described this music as “a study special place and evokes its changing landscape during different times of the day and the year. “Palisades” in unity and single-mindedness.” sonically renders the steep New Jersey cliffs on the other side of the Hudson River directly across from Wave The second movement begins very quietly, though briskly and resolutely, with a constant flow of septup- Hill through extremely expansive music that features a wide variety of techniques and textures. Monumental lets, first on the second violin, and then traded between the players. At first, brief motives are pitted against chords, sudden pizzicatos and snaps, extensive glissandos, static almost West African-sounding interlocking these groupings, followed by a series of slides, then a forceful descending countermelody in the cello which rhythmic figurations, and ever shifting meters convey the grandeur, complexity, and mystery of these natural leads to a complete transformation—the septuplets completely disappear and material reminiscent of those wonders. “Grey Ice,” as its title suggests, is a sonic portrait of Wave Hill in the wintertime. The music is brief motivic cells from the onset suddenly appear in all four parts. The septuptlets periodically return but now merely as ornamentation within longer melodic lines. However, a steady stream eventually returns, only now manipulation of various modal melodies and rhythmic patterns. Despite her self-imposed limitations, the in groupings of five instead of seven, quintuplets rather than septuplets. Of course, since this too is an odd material she has fashioned from them has an enormous amount of variety—from virtuosic mini-cadenzas to number, it all also feels somehow unsettled. Toward the end, there is a superimposition of five and seven, a forceful tutti declarations to lyrical dance-like passages. Like an assured colorist in the visual arts, Kaminsky wonderfully disorienting texture that finally resolves into sextuplets and ultimately a shrill and startling cluster is able to take a restricted palette and formulate seemingly infinite possibilities. chord from all four instruments spanning over four octaves. Admittedly, the Duo for Cello and Piano composed in Seattle in 2003 is something of an anomaly The third movement, which is dedicated to the memory of Kaminsky’s British grandmother Hetty Sarna, among the compositions featured here since its perfunctory and somewhat enigmatic title reveals nothing begins slowly and quietly with each instrument very gradually joining in, first the cello, then the viola, then of its inspirations, yet it is arguably the most emotionally charged work of them all. Its two movements the second violin, and finally, toward the very end, the first violin. Each of the instruments intones dirge-like are crammed with unbridled passion and intensity. Kaminsky’s only comment about the piece is that it melodies which never quite lull since the movement is predominantly in a seven beat meter, only occasion- is “about love, loss, and resolution.” “Lamento” is the simplest of all of Kaminsky’s formal constructions. ally alternating with duple meter, and there is a constant shift of which beats are emphasized throughout. Almost throughout, a yearning cello melody containing many small steps and slides is accompanied merely The final movement begins even more slowly with a series of staggered entrances of the four instruments; by unobtrusive, relatively quiet dyads in the piano which act as a sort of punctuation. But at the very end each entrance explores a different string sonority. But after a brief silence, the music completely transforms the piano becomes slightly more aggressive as the cello mimics the piano’s original material, rendering the into a frenzy of spellbindingly fast figurations which bounce back and forth between all of the instruments. At dyads as a series of double-stops, suggesting a role reversal or at least a partial transformation of their roles. the very end, however, the forceful music from the very first movement returns and, despite the instability of the “Primitivo,” in complete contrast, serves up a series of insistent, almost petulant ostinatos that trade back intervals which finally resolve to an augmented triad, also a tonally unstable chord, it somehow sounds majestic. and forth between the players. But by the end the two players are in lock-step unison, perhaps suggesting a Kaminsky’s fifth string quartet composition, Cadmium Yellow (2010), was commissioned by the common goal and a resolution. Cassatt Quartet with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, and is dedicated to the Quartet. Finally, the Vukovar Trio (1999) is one of most explicitly programmatic of Kaminsky’s compositions; it It is perhaps the most abstract of the pieces featured on this recording. Here she is inspired by a specific is a visceral response to what she witnessed in 1997 when she led a group from the Polish-based European color pigment, cadmium yellow, which is extremely vibrant and intense. Cadmium yellow is a very permanent Mozart Academy to the town of Vukovar in the newly independent republic of Croatia, to perform the very color and yet paradoxically it can be very effectively hidden within a palette. Kaminsky’s life partner is the first live concert since the end of the war between the Serbs and the Croats in a bombed out Serb Cultural painter Rebecca Allan whose astonishing canvasses and works on paper feature an extremely sensitive range Center. In an essay she has written about musical responses to war that appeared on the web magazine of color. So it is inevitable that such an attentive detail to color has inspired Kaminsky. Yet the music that NewMusicBox, Kaminsky described her visit: she has fashioned for this single-movement quartet is not designed to induce synesthesia, rather she has explored ways to translate the unique properties of cadmium yellow into specific musical ideas, e.g. various motives within the piece are hidden from time to time and permanence is conveyed via the repetition and Brought into the town under United Nations protection, we were stunned into So many images from that experience stayed with me, indelibly etched into my silence as our buses passed through deserted streets of burnt-out houses and heart and mind: the worn faces of the people, whether they were mere children apartment buildings, through once bustling squares long since abandoned. or elderly workers; the huge craters and pockmarks from bombs and bullets Earlier that afternoon, a local was killed on the outskirts of town, and the scarring the walls of the city’s buildings; the homes without rooftops; the rusted citizens were agitated. It was uncertain if it was safe enough for us to perform. old cars making their way over rubble-strewn streets; the musicians trying to We received a directive from the Human Rights Watch Committee that if indeed warm their hands over the small heater and finally realizing that the only way we would be allowed to perform, that the program’s intermission be cancelled; they could play would be to cut the fingertips off of their gloves but to keep their a break in the music might prove too dangerous; rioting might come to pass. hands covered throughout; the meager platter of food and the ceaseless flow of At dusk, it was deemed safe enough to perform and so an armed UN police vodka following the concert; the gray-black river. It was this last image above officer ushered us by foot from the hotel, where we had spent the afternoon all, and the notion of a river of blood and ice, that hit me hardest, and shortly waiting in limbo, across the bridge spanning the frozen river to the Serb Cultural after the trip, I began to write music to convey this image, which soon led to the Center where we were to perform. As we walked, he pointed to the sluggishly composition of the complete trio. flowing gray water and said, “three years ago this river was frozen; it was red with blood.” The eight contrasting sections of the single movement Vukovar Trio, each with a vividly descriptive title, offer a guided tour through a horrific but ultimately life-affirming memory. In “A Sky Torn Asunder” the strings wail We entered the building, which had lost most of its glass windows and its fur- as the pianist bangs out clusters and chromatic arpeggios. At the onset of “The Shattering of Glass,” the strings nace during the bombing, and realized that we had to play in our coats, warmed initially stay frozen on the same pitches, a ninth apart from each other, as the pianist explores the upper only by a small electric heater placed at the feet of the musicians on stage. In extremities of the instrument’s range eventually expanding into pulverizing clusters as the strings slide and accordance with the directive to cancel the intermission, we played without glide. In “Lost Souls” the piano is almost completely silent except for one ominous sustained chord toward pause, and thankfully without incident, to an audience whose grim faces and the end as the violin intones a mournful melody against the cello’s drone. “Revenge/Retreat” introduces an weary bodies visibly lightened and relaxed as the evening passed. Afterwards, insistent rhythm with ever shifting meters, a dance whose steps keep changing so there is no way to get a with the aid of translators, we talked with the people in attendance, some of sure footing. “Death Chorale” offers the bleakest music thus far: strings moving solemnly in parallel motion whom cried openly after hearing live music again for the first time in three years. against an irregular repetition of the same dense piano chord. That chord periodically resurfaces in “River of The long day ended with vodka, black bread, cheese and smoked meats shared Blood and Ice,” perhaps as a reminder of the origins of the blood in the ice, but now the strings take on an with the UN guards and the Human Rights Watch monitors in the dreary, chilly even eerier character: the violin screeches out a supplication against seemingly impervious arpeggios on the banquet hall of the hotel. cello. “Ghost Chorale” is a brief return to the texture of the earlier “Death Chorale” only now the piano’s dense The Performers chord is prefaced by a series of even denser tone clusters in the piano’s lowest register. The concluding Acclaimed as one of America’s outstanding ensembles, the Manhattan-based Cassatt String Quartet “Dance of Devastation” begins with all three instruments in unison, but it hardly sounds like agreement. (Muneko Otani and Jennifer Leshnower, violins; Sarah Adams, viola; Nicole Johnson, cello) has performed Soon, each is off on its own furious path, though the music retains a rhythmic insistence until the very end throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East, with appearances at New York’s Alice Tully Hall, Weill when pulse is finally completely stripped away and each instrument offers one last cry, in turn. Listening to Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Bargemusic, and Symphony Space; the Kennedy Center and Library of Congress the Vukovar Trio is an intense, and often difficult experience, though ultimately it is a highly cathartic one. In in Washington, DC; Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris; and Maeda Hall in Tokyo. The Cassatt celebrated that same essay about musical responses to war, Kaminsky urges listeners to “stop and think.” Indeed, her its twentieth anniversary in 2006 with a performance at the Library of Congress on the Library’s Stradivarius music requires deep and thoughtful consideration. And, in so doing, the listener is constantly rewarded. Collection. Their awards include first Prizes at the Fischoff and Coleman Chamber Music Competitions, two —Frank J. Oteri top prizes at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, and two CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming. Equally adept at classical masterpieces and contemporary music, the Cassatt has ASCAP award-wining composer and music journalist Frank J. Oteri is the composer advocate at New Music collaborated with pianists Ursula Oppens and Marc-André Hamelin, soprano Susan Narucki, flutist Ransom USA where he also serves as the senior editor of the web magazine NewMusicBox (www.newmusicbox.org). Wilson, jazz pianist Fred Hersch, didgeriedoo player Simon 7, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, narrator Isaiah Sheffer, astrovisualist Dr. Carter Emmart, and many others. Their deep commitment to nurturing young musicians has brought the Cassatts to Princeton, Yale, Syracuse University, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Pennsylvania, while summers find them in residence at the innovative Seal Bay Festival of Contemporary American Chamber Music. Named three times by The New Yorker magazine’s Best Of...CD Selection, the Cassatt’s discography includes quartets by Steven Stucky and Tina Davidson (Albany Records), Daniel S. Godfrey (Koch International Classics), and Sebastian Currier (New World). The Cassatt is named for the celebrated American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. www.cassattquartet.com

The Colorado Quartet (Julie Rosenfeld and D. Lydia Redding, violins; Marka Gustavsson, viola; Katie Schlaikjer, cello) is one of the pre-eminent ensembles internationally since winning both the Banff International String Quartet Competition and Naumburg Award in 1983. In addition to performing in international concert halls and festivals, the Colorado Quartet has been active in commissioning and recording new works by composers both young and established. Its most recent world premiere was of a work by Pulitzer Prize- Ensemble Pi (represented on this recording by members Airi Yoshioka, violin; Claire Bryant, cello; and Idith winning composer Paul Moravec for string quartet and shakuhachi. The Colorado Quartet can be heard in Meshulam, piano), a socially conscious new music group founded in 2002, features composers whose work works of Katherine Hoover, Karel Husa, Laura Kaminsky, Jan Kryzwicki, Ezra Laderman, Richard Wernick, seeks to open a dialogue between ideas and music on some of the world’s current and critical issues. The and others on the Bridge, World, Albany and Parnassus labels. A recording of works by Henry Cowell (Mode) Ensemble commissions new works and collaborates with visual artists, writers, actors, and journalists, among was named a “best of 1999” by Gramophone Magazine, and a CD of Schubert and Mendelssohn received them South African artist William Kentridge and American journalist/writer Naomi Wolf. The ensemble was the 2001 Chamber Music America/WQXR Recording Award. The first female quartet in history to perform in residence for four American music festivals presented by the American Composers Alliance in New York, the complete Beethoven cycle in Europe and North America, their recording was released to critical acclaim and now collaborates with the Association for the Promotion of New Music. For the last eight years, Ensemble in 2010 on the Parnassus label. The Colorado Quartet has taught at Bard College and Yale University, Pi has presented an annual Peace Project concert, about which The New York Times noted: “the music and has held residencies at Oberlin, the Banff and Orford Centres in Canada, Amherst, Swarthmore and performed clearly evoked conflict and anguish…gracefully played…(this was) a fiery and emotive perfor- Skidmore Colleges, and the New School of Music in Philadelphia. They founded and direct the Soundfest mance.” Ensemble Pi has also created programs in response to exhibitions at the Chelsea Art Museum, The Chamber Music Festival and Quartet Institute, which originated in Cape Cod in 1991, and is now based Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. Gramophone wrote that the ensemble’s first at the University of Connecticut/Storrs. The Quartet has been awarded grants by the National Endowment CD, Keep Going, was “a touching tribute to Elias Tanenbaum, played with conviction and verve.” for the Arts, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Meet the Composer, Mary Cary Flagler Trust, Chamber Music www.ensemble-pi.org America, Naumburg Foundation, Lila Acheson Wallace/Readers’ Digest Fund, and other organizations. As Artistic Director and pianist of Ensemble Pi, Idith Meshulam’s interest in contemporary composers www.coloradoquartet.com began as she studied for her bachelor’s degree from the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv, and grew as she worked for her Master’s degree from University of South Florida under the guidance of Jacque Abrams and Robert Because of Ensemble Pi’s commitment to performing engaging music with a social and political message, Helps. She received her PhD from NYU, where she taught for ten years and researched the unpublished we are always looking for new works. Laura Kaminsky’s compelling Vukovar Trio captured our imagination piano works of Stefan Wolpe. At NYU, she became interested in the work of Nikos Skalkottas and recorded instantly. (Right after we discovered this exciting new work, and as it still sat on my piano, I was coinciden- his 32 Piano Pieces with composer/conductor Gunther Schuller for GM Recordings. tally introduced to the composer in a café on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which catalyzed this re- warding collaboration.) The Vukovar Trio inspired violinist Airi Yoshioka and me to delve into the monumental and challenging duo Wave Hill, in which Laura captures a powerful American landscape of frozen nature, under which lies unconscious thoughts and passionate feelings. Throughout our collaboration with Laura, we were given a wide range of freedom in our interpretations and playing. —Idith Meshulam M usic by

Laura Kaminsky L a ur a K am ins ky

troy1393/94 CD1 CD II 1 Vukovar Trio [14:06] Transformations [19:13] A Sky Torn Asunder | 1 I. Forcefully [4:18] The Shattering of Glass | 2 II. Slowly Emerging from the Distance [4:23] Lost Souls | Revenge/Retreat 3 III. Andante (in memorium Hetty Sarna) [4:07] Death Chorale | River of Blood and Ice | 4 IV. Adagio - Prestissimo - Adagio [6:21] Ghost Chorale | Dance of Devastation Colorado String Quartet Ensemble Pi 5 Triftmusik [6:12]

2 Cadmium Yellow [15:44] Sanctuary | Wangerweg Cassatt String Quartet Idith Meshulam, piano Music for Artur [16:04] Wave Hill for violin and piano [29:02] A suite in six movements for piano 6 I. Palisades [12:38] 3 I. Danza Ritmico [1:16] 7 II. Grey Ice [7:31] 4 II. Nocturne Agitato [3:34] 8 III. Arbores Venerabiles [8:33]

5 III. Windswept Bluff [1:45] Ensemble Pi

6 IV. Prayer; in the mist [1:59] 7 V. Boulevard [2:57] CD 1 Total Time = 48:03 8 VI. Clarion [4:28] CD 2 Total Time = 54:03 Idith Meshulam, piano Ensemble Pi Duo for ’cello and piano [12:00] Airi Yoshioka, violin | Claire Bryant, cello 9 I. Lamento [6:56] Idith Meshulam, piano 10 II. Primitivo [5:00] Ensemble Pi troy1393/94

ur a K am ins ky www.albanyrecords.com TROY1393/94 albany records u.s. 915 broadway, albany, ny 12207 L a tel: 518.436.8814 fax: 518.436.0643 albany records u.k. box 137, kendal, cumbria la8 0xd tel: 01539 824008 usic by © 2013 Albany Records made in the usa DDD warning: copyright subsists in all recordings issued under this label. M