Recordings and publications

Composer Jeremy Beck ’92MMA ’95DMA released his sixth album on the Innova label. The recording, by moonlight, features a variety of chamber, orchestral, and vocal music and includes performances by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sofia Session Orchestra.

In March, composer Ethan Braun ’21DMA released his debut album of original compositions, READ ME, on the Brooklynbased label figureight records. In July, New Amsterdam Records released Terrain, an album of music by composer Jacob Cooper ’06MM ’07AD ‘10MMA ’14DMA. A Pitchfork. com review read, “In a collaboration with the stunning singers Theo Bleckmann and Jodie Landau, the sharp young composer processes poems and strings into surprisingly magnetic meditations on time.”

Goldberg Hallucination Remix by composer Sidney Corbett ’84MM ’85MMA ’89DMA appears on a new CD, Goldberg Reflections, which was released this year by Sony. The album also includes arrangements by Andreas Tarkman and other new compositions. Violinist Gerald Elias ’75BM/MM was commissioned by Centaur Records to make the first recording of the complete Op. 1 Sonatas for Violin and Cembalo by Pietro Castrucci. Elias performed from the only extant edition—the original 1718 publication by Jeanne Roger (Amsterdam).

Recordings by violinist and composer Ralph Evans ’74BA ’76mm ’77MMA ’80dma, first violinist of the Fine Arts Quartet and professor of violin and chamber music at the Mannes School of Music at The New School, will be released by Naxos in early 2021. The albums will feature compositions by Dvořák and Mozart.

Composer Michael Finegold, ’68MM ’69MMA artistic director of the Essex Chamber Music Players, supervised the release in spring 2020 of the group’s album Local Cultural History Through Music: The Merrimack Valley (Volume 1).

Guitarist Sharon Isbin ’78Ba ’79MM, a Grammy Award-winning artist and Musical America Worldwide’s 2020 Instrumentalist of the Year, released two new bestselling albums in summer 2020: Affinity: World Premiere Recordings and Strings for Peace: Premieres for Guitar & Sarod with Amjad Ali Khan. Bassoonist Linda Kaastra ’93MM recently authored a book for Routledge/Taylor Francis titled Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance: Distributed Cognition in Musical Activity. The book is part of a series called Explorations in Cognitive Psychology.

Sheridan Music Studio released American Melting Pot, an album by pianist Susan Merdinger ’84BA ’85MM. The recording, which reflects musical influences from China, Eastern and Western Europe, South America, and American classical music, was nominated for Grammy Awards in the Best Classical Solo Instrumental, Best Classical Contemporary Compositions, and Best Arrangement— Instrumental categories. Guitarist An Tran ’16MM released Stay, My Beloved, an album of Vietnamese guitar music, on Frameworks Records.

A recording of When There is Peace, an oratorio by Zachary Wadsworth ’07MM, was nominated for a JUNO Award for Best Classical Album of the Year: Vocal or Choral.

Kotekan Records released a recording of And Here We Are, a new opera by composer Matthew Welch ’13MMA ’17DMA and librettist/ singer Daniel Neer. A timeless story of isolation, the work is based on the memoir of Welch’s greatuncle, who was a prisoner during World War II of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.