American composers, and explorations of works by Grażyna Bacewicz, Tania León, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Valentin Silvestrov.
New Releases Jul. 22: American Music, Bacewicz, León, Rachmaninoff, Silvestrov
Gabriela Lena Frank
Cellist Aron Zelkowicz is the founder and director of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival which presents rare and diverse works from Jewish musical traditions. In his new album with pianist Christina Wright-Ivanova, Zelkowicz presents late 20th and early 21st century works by six American composers—Carter Pann, Gabriela Lena Frank, Kevin Puts, Margaret Bonds, Stacy Garrop, and Stephen Paulus. Though quintessentially American in spirit, the repertoire is as diverse as the men and women who composed them. Drawing from influences as disparate as the blues, jazz, Broadway, gospel, folksong and the wild west, these ‘American vignettes’ merge popular idioms into a new canon of the repertoire for cello and piano. Three works on this album are receiving their premiere commercial recording and are new to the WFMT library.
The latest album from English flutist Lisa Friend — who has performed as a soloist with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra — is a collection of American works for flute and piano, featuring composers such as Copland, Price, Bernstein, Beach, and Griffes. Joined by pianist Rohan de Silva, Friend explores a range of 20th-century and contemporary styles, from the folk-inspired lyricism of Ashokan Farewell to the jazzy inflections of Bernstein’s Simple Song. This charming album showcases Friend’s technical artistry and reflects her ongoing interest in bringing overlooked repertoire into the spotlight
Pioneering twentieth-century Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s vibrant and dynamic musical language bridges the gap between neoclassicism and modernism. This second volume of conductor Sakari Oramo’s Bacewicz series features three rarely recorded works. The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was written in 1949 for the Frédéric Chopin Composers’ Competition, organized by the Polish Composers’ Union to commemorate the centenary of Chopin’s death. In the category of works for piano and orchestra it received the second prize—no first prize was awarded. The Second Symphony, finished in January 1951, was performed for the first time at the opening of the First Festival of Polish Music later that year. It is in fact the composer’s third symphony, Bacewicz having discarded the first one. She described her four-movement, perfectly balanced work as referring to the tradition of the great classical masters and encompassing her own musical discoveries.
Her Concerto for Large Symphony Orchestra was written a decade later, in 1962. Bacewicz herself regarded the work as part of the evolutionary process that led to the third stage of her compositional path. Both the symphony and orchestra concerto are new to the WFMT library.
Tania León was the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence for two seasons concluding in July 2025. The orchestra’s new album on their in-house label presents four of León’s works which the orchestra has premiered in the UK and Europe including an LPO commission. Horizons (1999) is a shimmering tapestry of asymmetrical rhythms and Latin inflected orchestration. Stride (2020) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work inspired by Susan B. Anthony with a powerful rhythmic language that blends Black music traditions from the U.S and the Caribbean. Pasajes (2022) is a vivid four-part work evoking the sounds, sights, and joyful spirit of León’s childhood in Cuba — a sonic gallery of cultural memory, celebration and radio playing in the street. Finally, Raíces (Origins) — an LPO and Concertgebouw Brugge co-commission which premiered in 20024— explores León’s multicultural heritage through a vibrant, three-part structure that fuses contemplative textures, lively Latin rhythms, and jazz-inflected exuberance. All works are new to the WFMT library.
Pianist Alexander Melnikov new album is dedicated to music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, centering his Variations on a Theme by Chopin. Melkinov traveled to Villa Senar, Rachmaninoff’s Bauhaus summer home on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, to record on the composers’s own grand piano, a birthday gift from Frederik Steinway.
The album also features the luminous soprano Julia Lezhneva who joins Melkinov for a selection of 22 songs by Rachmaninoff. Celebrated as a Baroque specialist, Lezhneva is a surprising collaborator for this program, offering clarity in repertoire which is often presented with darker, warmer voices.
Valentin Silvestrov was forced to leave his native Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022, and his earlier music has an almost prescient quality that seems to express the fate of his homeland. The intimate Violin Concerto and the heartfelt, one-movement Eighth Symphony are notable for their economy of expression and emphasis on beauty, depth and harmony. Silvestorv’s “metaphorical style,” where fragments of Romantic and late-Classical music drift like distant memories, creates a poignant dialogue between past and present in his introspective Symphony No. 8. Following their acclaimed recording of Silvestrov’s Symphony for Violin and Orchestra, “Widmung,” violinist Janusz Wawrowski reunites with conductor Christopher Lyndon-Gee and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra for the concerto. Both works are new to the WFMT library.
