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Imagining Worlds

Music for Solo Violin

Adolphus Hailstork composer
Judith Shatin composer
Meira M. Warshauer composer
Jeffrey Mumford composer
John Corigliano composer

Wanchi Huang violin

Release Date: January 5, 2024
Catalog #: NV6592
Format: Digital
21st Century
Solo Instrumental
Violin

Praised for her “incisive technique and an exceptionally rich and beautiful tone,” violinist Wanchi Huang performs a fascinating group of compositions written by a beautifully curated selection of noted composers on IMAGINING WORLDS from Navona Records. Huang’s virtuosic performance takes listeners on a dynamic voyage through the elegant grandeur of the baroque era to the historic hilltops of Italy, passing through reflections on our darkest moments and soaring towards the brighter days that lie ahead. Featuring new music by composers John Corigliano, Adolphus Hailstork, Jeffrey Mumford, Judith Shatin, and Meira Warshauer, IMAGINING WORLDS is a stunning showcase of Huang’s artistry and the compelling voices in contemporary American music.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Suite for Solo Violin: I. Prelude: Energetico-Scherzando Adolphus Hailstork Wanchi Huang, violin 2:06
02 Suite for Solo Violin: II. March: Adagio-Spirito-Marziale Adolphus Hailstork Wanchi Huang, violin 1:45
03 Suite for Solo Violin: III. Melody: Allegretto grazioso-Allegro-Allegretto grazioso Adolphus Hailstork Wanchi Huang, violin 2:18
04 Suite for Solo Violin: IV. Finale Energetico-Allegro con brio Adolphus Hailstork Wanchi Huang, violin 4:19
05 For the Fallen - for Amplified Violin and Electronics Judith Shatin Wanchi Huang, violin 7:05
06 In Memoriam - for Solo Violin Meira M. Warshauer Wanchi Huang, violin 5:05
07 Bracha - for Solo Violin Meira M. Warshauer Wanchi Huang, violin 4:59
08 an expanding distance of multiple voices: I. Estatico e molto appassionato Jeffrey Mumford Wanchi Huang, violin 2:25
09 an expanding distance of multiple voices: II. Sparso ed expansive Jeffrey Mumford Wanchi Huang, violin 3:40
10 an expanding distance of multiple voices: III. Molto delicatissimo ed stereo possible Jeffrey Mumford Wanchi Huang, violin 1:01
11 an expanding distance of multiple voices: IV. Molto appassionato Jeffrey Mumford Wanchi Huang, violin 1:45
12 an expanding distance of multiple voices: V. Maestoso Jeffrey Mumford Wanchi Huang, violin 1:58
13 The Red Violin Caprices John Corigliano Wanchi Huang, violin 8:58

Recorded May 25-27, 2023 at James Madison University School of Music Recording Studio in Harrisonburg VA
Session Producer & Engineer David Cottrell
Assistant Session Engineer Mickey Glasgo
Editing, Mixing, and Mastering David Cottrell

Executive Producer Bob Lord

A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Danielle Sullivan

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Chelsea Kornago, Kacie Brown, Aidan Curran
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Wanchi Huang

Violinist

Huang is the Full Professor of Violin at James Madison University School of Music and contributes to the community as a concertmaster of the Waynesboro Symphony. Her recordings of the complete Sonatas of Eugène Ysaÿe, Partitas and Sonatas of J.S. Bach for unaccompanied violin, and music by William Walton and Benjamin Britten in a collaboration with longtime friend and pianist Robert Koenig, are all on the Centaur Records label, have been excellently reviewed. “. . . her incisive technique and an exceptionally rich and beautiful tone. . .” was noted by Phil's Classical Reviews, Audio Video Club of Atlanta.

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Meira Warshauer

Meira Warshauer

Composer

With a musical palette ranging from traditional Jewish prayer modes to minimalist textures with rich melodic contours, and from jazz-influenced rhythms to imaginative orchestrations of the natural world, composer Dr. Meira Warshauer’s music has been performed live to critical acclaim and heard on broadcast and online media worldwide. In much demand for commissions, she writes for orchestras, chamber and vocal ensembles, and soloists, as well as opera.

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Judith Shatin

Composer

An explorer of sonic realms, Judith Shatin is equally known for her acoustic, electroacoustic, and digital music. Called “highly inventive on every level” by the Washington Post, her music has been commissioned by organizations including the Barlow Endowment, Fromm Foundation, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Wintergreen Performing Arts, and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Arts Partners Program.

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Adolphus Hailstork

composer

Adolphus Hailstork received his doctorate in composition from Michigan State University, where he was a student of H. Owen Reed. He had previously studied at the Manhattan School of Music, under Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond, at the American Institute at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, and at Howard University with Mark Fax.

Hailstork has written numerous works for chorus, solo voice, piano, organ, various chamber ensembles, band, orchestra, and opera. Hailstork’s second and third symphonies were recorded by the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra (David Lockington) and were released by Naxos. Another Naxos recording, AN AMERICAN PORT OF CALL (Virginia Symphony Orchestra) was released in spring 2012. His most recent recording is Piano Concerto No. 1 on Naxos Records conducted by JoAnn Falletta (2023).

Hailstork’s new pieces include THE WORLD CALLED (based on Rita Dove’s poem TESTIMONIAL), a work for soprano, chorus, and orchestra commissioned by the Oratorio Society of Virginia (premiered in May 2018) and STILL HOLDING ON (February 2019), an orchestra work commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

This last has become the first movement of Symphony No. 4 premiered by the Mannes School of Music on March 8, 2023. Other new works recently receiving notable first performances (2023) are A KNEE ON THE NECK (George Floyd Requiem), BLEST BE THE DAY (a Juneteenth Overture), premiered by the Baltimore Symphony, and Piano Concerto No. 2 commissioned by Lara Downes.

In 2023, Hailstork was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jeffrey Mumford

composer

Born in Washington DC in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards, and commissions.

Awards include the “Academy Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.

Other grants have been awarded by the Ohio Arts Council, Meet the Composer, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music Inc., the ASCAP Foundation, and the University of California.

Mumford’s most notable commissions include those from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Parker Quartet, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Library of Congress (co-commission), the BBC Philharmonic, the San Antonio, Chicago & National Symphonies, Washington Performing Arts, the Network for New Music, cellist Mariel Roberts, the Fulcrum Point New Music Project (through New Music USA), Duo Harpverk (Iceland), the Sphinx Consortium, the Cincinnati Symphony, the VERGE Ensemble /National Gallery of Art/Contemporary Music Forum, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Nancy Ruyle Dodge Charitable Trust, the Meet the Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music/USA, Cincinnati radio station WGUC, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, and the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress.

His music has been performed extensively, by major orchestras, soloists, and ensembles, both in the United States and abroad, including London, Paris, Reykjavik, Vienna, The Hague, Russia, Lithuania and Latvia

Current projects include a new work for the JACK Quartet, entitled deepening paths of resonant light, commissioned by the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, a new work for solo cello, entitled from within . . . unveiling brightness, commissioned by Alisa Weilerstein as part of her “Fragments“ project, for Clare, a new work for solo piano commissioned by pianist Clare Longendyke as part of “UnRaveling”, a project responding to and reimagining Ravel’s piano music, a new work for the Parker Quartet entitled blossoming fragments of appreciation, a new work for violist Jordan Bak, and harpist Ashley Jackson entitled stillness echoing, a new work for the String Orchestra of New York City (SONYC), cavernous echoes of expanding brightness, a harp concerto for Anne-Sophie Bertrand, a new work commissioned by the Grossman Ensemble (in residence at the University of Chicago), and a CD of recent concerti.

Mumford has taught at the Washington Conservatory of Music, served as Artist-in-Residence at Bowling Green State University, and served as assistant professor of composition and Composer-in-Residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.

Mumford is published by Theodore Presser Co. and Quicklight Music and represented by Black Tea Music.

jeffreymumford.com

John Corigliano

composer

John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano’s scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like “symphony” or “concerto” and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European avant-garde as from his American forebears.

Notes

This project was inspired by conversations with Judith Shatin, whom I met after my solo recital at the long-established Wednesday Music Club in Charlottesville VA. As we discussed compositional approaches and composers, my desire to create this album took shape. While I am a fan of traditional western music and have spent more than half of my life performing this music, I also feel strongly about performing and promoting music by a diverse range of living composers. With the support and encouragement of my family and my parents, I am delighted to have worked with my expert music industry recording colleagues here at the James Madison University, David Cottrell and Mickey Glasgo, with whom I look forward to working together again. Additionally, I am grateful to have had opportunities to collaborate with most of these esteemed composers, while preparing their music and planning to perform it widely in both the United States and abroad during the coming seasons.

— Wanchi Huang

This piece was written for Dr. Paul Kim, the violin teacher-orchestra director at Old Dominion University in Norfolk Virginia.

Cast in a formal mold inspired by the Bach partitas, my four-movement Suite for Solo Violin begins with a perky Prelude, followed by a March with a few subtle winks at music from the Prelude. The third movement is a beautiful Melody with slow-fast-slow form, and the fugal Finale incorporates a few remembrances of the previous movements in building a dramatic drive to the finish.

— Adolphus Hailstork

For the Fallen was inspired by the tremendous Campana dei Caduti (Bell of the Fallen), situated on a large hilltop in Rovereto, Italy, where it was installed to commemorate the fallen in WWI. It is still rung daily at sunset in memory of those fallen in all wars, and For the Fallen is dedicated to this sadly expanding group. Trumpeter Ivano Ascari, based in Rovereto, commissioned the original version, for amplified trumpet and electronics. I fashioned the latter by processing recordings of the bell. This version was composed for violinist Wanchi Huang, whose delightful collaboration contributed to it in no small measure.

— Judith Shatin

In Memoriam was my response to the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, which felt like a shattering of the illusion of invulnerability. My initial sketches turned out to fit the solo cello, and settings for other instruments soon followed. In this version for solo violin, commissioned by Gregory Harrington, Huang’s innate musical sense shines. With little input from me, she inhabits the soul of the music.

— Meira Warshauer

Bracha (Blessing) intends to bring blessings into this world. Originally for violin and piano at the request of Daniel Heifetz, Huang’s recording is the debut of the solo violin version, and we worked closely on interpreting and tailoring it for violin alone. I am grateful she has included Bracha in this album, not only for her beautiful rendition, but also because I feel that we need special blessings to come together in healing our precious living planet.

— Meira Warshauer

an expanding distance of multiple voices was written for violist Lina Bahn. It was commissioned by a Washington DC based consortium consisting of Pamela Johnson, Kathryn Judd, Philip Berlin, and Otho Eskin, to each of whom I am tremendously grateful.

In addition to being a celebration of her extraordinary talents, the work is also a celebration of her commitment to the music of our time both in a solo capacity and as a member of the Corigliano Quartet. She has given tremendously insightful, passionate, and knowing performances of quartets of many living composers, including my own (as well as those of the past).

Cast in five movements, the work displays many changes of mood, tempo, and timbre. As is the case in my work for solo viola wending, much of the harmonic material is based on the letters of its dedicatee (in this case linA BAHn). Movements one through four are played together without pause.

The title for me suggests a layered space suspended and vast, in which many sources and gradations of light radiate from the continually shifting pockets of its interior. The present recording by Wanchi Huang is one for which I am enormously grateful.

— Jeffrey Mumford

The Red Violin Caprices were composed for violinist Joshua Bell and are derived from Corigliano’s music for The Red Violin, which received the 1999 Academy Award for Best Original Score. These Caprices, composed in conjunction with the score for François Girard’s film The Red Violin, take a spacious, troubadour-inspired theme and vary it both linearly and stylistically. These variations intentionally evoke Baroque, Gypsy, and arch-Romantic principal theme from differing aural viewpoints. The Caprices were created and ordered to reflect the structure of the film.

— John Corigliano