Sessions: String Quintet / String Quartet No. 1 / Canons (To the Memory of Igor Stravinsky)

Featuring

Benjamin Hudson
Carol Zeavin
Lois Martin
Jenny Douglass
Joshua Gordon
The Group for Contemporary Music

Roger Sessions

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Performer Biography

The Group for Contemporary Music, founded in 1962, was awarded a citation from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for redefining standards of performance for contemporary composition.

Composer Biography

Roger Sessions had a parallel career as a writer about music, publishing four books and over forty articles, including his Norton lectures at Harvard University.

Composer Biography

Roger Sessions, an American composer, won every major award, including a Pulitzer Prize, and was highly productive after the age of sixty, composing for three-quarters of a century.

Composition History

The String Quintet by Roger Sessions was requested by the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley and dedicated to its chairman, Albert Elkus.

Recording & Production

This album features the first recording ever released of Roger Sessions's String Quintet and his Canons (to the memory of Stravinsky).

Composer's Artistic Vision

Roger Sessions's musical style is characterized by a 'long line' of gracefully arching phrases within a complex contrapuntal texture, and rhythmic flexibility achieved through frequent shifts of time signatures and polyrhythms.