Hesketh: Danceries / Skalkottas: 9 Greek Dances / Corigliano: Gazebo Dances / Gorb: Yiddish Dances

Featuring

Clark Rundell
Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra
Kenneth Hesketh
Nikos Skalkottas
John Corigliano Jr.
Adam Gorb

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Performer Biography

The Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra is recognized as one of the leading conservatory ensembles in the world, having performed over 500 works and given the first BBC Prom by a conservatory ensemble in 1991.

Composer Biography

Nikos Skalkottas, the leading Greek composer of the first half of the 20th century, trained with Schoenberg in Berlin and composed in an uncompromisingly modernist idiom.

Composer Biography

John Corigliano, one of the leading American composers of his generation, has won a Grawemeyer Award, two Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, and an Oscar for his film score to The Red Violin.

Composition History

Adam Gorb's Yiddish Dances was written in 1998 as a 60th birthday present for his Royal Northern College of Music colleague Timothy Reynish, who conducted its premiere.

Composition History

Nikos Skalkottas's Nine Greek Dances for large wind orchestra, arranged between 1940 and 1942, was intended for a military band in Athens but was never played during his lifetime and published only in 1990.

Compositional Technique

John Corigliano's Gazebo Dances, originally for piano duet, uses distortions of harmony and metre, including Stravinskyan changing time signatures and frequent cross-rhythms.

Composer's Artistic Vision

The four sets of dances on this album, from different times and places, demonstrate how dance idioms can affirm national identity, evoke distant times or places, or simply entertain.