Instrumentaion: Woodwind

On her new album NOUVELLE VIE, flutist Michelle Batty Stanley and pianist Margaret McDonald breathe new life into classic 19th and 20th century compositions. The duo dream up new interpretations of both familiar French favorites as well as works by lesser known composers.

Mexican composer Felipe Pérez Santiago introduces the follow up to his 2013 album, Mantis with his first Navona release, FORMIKA, an album of chamber music. Pérez Santiago continues his series with a vast notational layering and timing propelled by traditional instrumentation. Masterful playing by choice ensembles like Tamayo and Onix, create a particularly kaleidoscopic nostalgia in this pitching album.

FLEETING REALMS is an inviting compilation of chamber music featuring six composers. Though the album obviously mixes different compositional voices, the different pieces share many characteristics. FLEETING REALMS is defined by a pervasive uplifting quality. Many of the album’s works feature driving rhythms and a joyfully relaxed sensibility. Even dissonance is used playfully or as a counter weight to beautiful lyricism. Such consistency in manner across six pieces by six diverse composers is obviously remarkable, and it makes FLEETING REALMS a very special musical collection.

This triple re-release contains a collection of works for small ensembles comprised of a diverse selection of instruments. Along with two albums from Allen Brings, this reissue includes a compilation titled CONTRA-PUNCTUS (1994).

When approaching his latest chamber album BLISS POINT, Polish-born violinist and composer Piotr Szewczyk turned to a unique lens of inspiration – food science. His interpretation of a “bliss point” in the culinary sense embodies the technique’s saturation of a flavor just before the point of diminished potency. Of course, he trades in the contents of his spice cabinet in favor of diverse instrumental pairings, and in doing so, the composer explores the “saturation limits in the full spectrum of emotions, textures, and characters.” In doing so, Szewczyk is confident that the resulting collection of chamber works “covers the entire expressive range of my vocabulary and artistic sensitivity.”

FOREVER BEELER represents a sampling of composer Alan Beeler’s prolific output throughout his musical career, which is generally defined by his commitment to compositional craft and structural clarity. The works featured on this album also reveal a playfulness lying just under the surface of Beeler’s compositional perspective. This quality of Beeler’s music is most notable in the seven sonatas for piano, often accompanied by another instrument, included in FOREVER BEELER.

PARMA Recordings artists Peter Greve and Hans Bakker have come together to give us LINES TO INFINITY, a stunning album that revolves around emotive and dramatic scores for primarily piano and flute. The two composers hail from the Netherlands and share a knack for creating thoughtful contemporary chamber works that appeal to the listener’s imagination.

Sound and space are two elements that emerge at the heart of Jane O’Leary’s THE PASSING SOUND OF FOREVER. The collection showcases O’Leary’s compositional gifts through a variety of her chamber compositions. O’Leary’s string writing soars in THE PASSING SOUND OF FOREVER, and demonstrates her remarkable sensitivity to the instruments’ sonic palette and expressive potential. Every color, from ethereal natural harmonics to frenetic bowing, is at O’Leary’s disposal, and is exploited beautifully to produce evocative and compelling soundscapes.

Composer Lawrence Ball has long been fascinated by the intersection of subjective human emotion and algorithmic mathematical objectivity.  In his 2012 Navona Records release METHOD MUSIC, produced by Pete Townshend of The Who and PARMA Recordings CEO Bob Lord, he took Townshend’s long-gestating concept of automatic musical portraiture first explored in LIFEHOUSE and WHO’S NEXT and turned it into reality, creating a system which could translate personal information and experiences into sound.

Navona Records presents ONYX, the 29th edition of the acclaimed Society of Composers, Inc. CD Series and the fifth SCI release on the label. Founded in 1965, SCI celebrates their 50 year anniversary with the release of this album, marking their continued dedication to the promotion, performance, understanding, and dissemination of new and contemporary music.

I met the Swedish saxophonist Anders Paulsson in the early 90s through my friend and mentor John Corigliano. Anders, always a very entrepreneurial sort of musician, was to be the focus of a 1996 concert on Swedish Public Television. Fortunately for me, the program included funding for a commission of a new concerto, and Anders kindly asked me to compose something for soprano sax and large orchestra.

TRANSITS: Minimal to Mayhem, his fifth full Navona Records release, is an abridged sequence of five works from a set time and concrete place that maps composer Sergio Cervetti's creative progression over four decades of composing.

With an innate sense of curiosity and a drive for knowledge, humans constantly push the boundaries of their physical and psychological environments, attempting to break through and discover the unexpected. On his debut Navona Records release ASTRAL TRAVELS, composer and double bassist David Arend explores several frontiers, including perceived boundaries between musical genres, earth and outer space, humanity and nature, and perception and reality.

On her debut Navona Records release THEY WERE MYSTERIOUS GUESTS, composer Zae Munn showcases works for alto saxophone in eclectic chamber combinations, featuring internationally-renowned saxophonist Timothy McAllister.

What do you get when you cross a composer, a bassist, and a conductor? It's no joke, and neither is Aleksander Sternfeld-Dunn. It is, however, a piece called Joker's Wild which opens up Sternfeld-Dunn's debut Navona Records release FIREWORKS, and it's a doozy, a crackerjack double concertino expertly crafted and written to showcase the talents of the Cameradschaft Duo. The piece won Best in Show from the Global Music Awards in 2012.

Don't mistake the inference in the title of Emmy Award-winning composer Bruce Babcock's multi-faceted new Navona Records album TIME, STILL - the music is serious and contemplative at points to be sure, but the effervescence of Babcock's metrically shifting style and sound percolates to the surface throughout.

A stroll along the Seine - Notre Dame reflected in the waters below - the Eiffel Tower illuminated in evening skies - bistro conversations echoing in the streets of the Left Bank. Parisian scenes such as these come to mind when listening to the nuances of pianist Kathryn Goodson's debut Navona Records release, BELLE NUIT, a collection of works from the La Belle Époque and beyond, with arrangements for piano and wind instruments.

The 28th edition of the Society of Composers, Inc. release series and the 4th on Navona Records, PENDULUM extrapolates and elaborates on several themes relating to variation, transformation, repetition, and more.

On his debut release on Navona Records, INNER MUSIC, composer Ruud van Eeten presents three works that highlight the refinement and control evident in his compositional style. Throughout the four movements of Piano Quintet No. 1, the composer adds no excess; every note has a role. Yet the piece exudes emotion, particularly the second movement which develops a deep sense of longing.

The Navona Records debut from chamber-jazz group Douglas Detrick's AnyWhen Ensemble features composer and trumpeter Douglas Detrick's ten-movement suite, The Bright and Rushing World, commissioned by Chamber Music America. This work, which George Grella called "impressively clear, inventive and compelling," (Big City Blog, 2.4.14) is not a pastiche of styles, but a thoughtfully-constructed hybrid of music with a unique and personal sensibility inspired by sources as diverse as Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky.