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NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
OUR FIRST DVD RELEASE
A Room With A View
A romantic comic opera based on the novel by E. M. Forster
Music by Robert Nelson
Libretto by Buck Ross
Moores Opera Center
Peter Jacoby, Music Director
Buck Ross, Stage Director
NDV 22001
A young woman is torn between social convention and her heart in this beloved story set in Florence, Italy, and the English countryside. British humor and Italian passion are combined into a sweeping, life-affirming romance that well set your heart soaring.
Videotaped live at the Moores Opera House. Recorded in Dolby 5.1 discreet surround. Extras include:
interview with Robert Nelson and Buck Ross
English subtitles.
“…A Room with a View seethes and soars….a strong sense of theatricality, especially when filmlike lusciousness underscored big dramatic peaks.”
- Houston Chronicle
“Nostalgia runs through the music of A Room with a View as deeply as it saturates E. M. Forster’s romantic novel…one hears fleeting recollections of Respighi, Sibelius and more often, lush Hollywood music of the 1940’s…” - The Houston Post
“…I have rarely experienced so high a level of vision, quality and commitment as I did a the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music”
- Dominick Argento
NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
ELECTRIC VIVALDI
Featuring
The Four Seasons
Gregory T. S. Walker,
Electric Violin
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra
Eric Bertoluzzi, Conductor
The Son of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Walker and African-American women’s music scholar Helen Walker-Hill, Gregory T. S. Walker is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra. Since his debut performing with the Colorado Symphony on a borrowed Stradivarius in 1996, Walker has been featured on CRI, Orion, Leonarda, and Albany label recordings. An American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship recipient in 2000, his Dream N. The Hood for Rapper and Orchestra has been described by the Minneapolis Pioneer Press as An American Masterpiece. Walker’s creative range extends from his appearance in Guitar for the Practicing Musician to multimedia performances featured at the Sonic Circuits International Festival. Electric Vivaldi will be the first recording of this work to feature an electronic violin. The Four Seasons contain musical illustrations of the composer's poems that lend themselves to the illustrative sound effects possible with electronic technology, and Walker's electronic interpretation at the Colorado Music Festival in 2002.
NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
Gregg Smith Singers
20th Century Choral
Music in Space!
Gregg Smith Conductor
Featuring Choral Music
by Ross Lee Finney,
Leo Smit, Morton Gould
and Gregg Smith
NPD85674
Founded in 1955 by Gregg Smith, the Gregg Smith Singers remain peerless as performers of choral music. Their enormous repertoire ranges from the music of Monteverdi and Stravinsky to today's living masters, with American music accounting for approximately two-thirds of their overall programming.
The Singers have made over thirty-five national tours, a dozen European tours, and three trips to the Far East. Their recordings have won three Grammy and two Montreaux Awards.
When I began touring with the Gregg Smith Singers, I took an idea from Charles Ives and created "music in space," sending the singers into the audience to sing from all over the hall. This became a hallmark of GSS tour concerts, breaking that invisible barrier between performer and audience, and a way to introduce 20th century music without the audience realizing it! Many of the pieces on this CD have become "signature musics" at Gregg Smith Singers' tour concerts.
-Gregg Smith
NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
"ALMA APASIONADA"
Program
Manuel de Falla - EARLY SONGS
Tus ojillos negros
Oración de las madres que tienen a sus hijos en brazos
El pan de Ronda
Olas gigantes
Joaquín Rodrigo - CUATRO CANCIONES SEFARADIES
Respóndemos
Una pastora yo amí
Nani, nani
Morena me llaman
Carlos López Buchardo - CINCO CANCIONES ARGENTINAS
Prendiditos de la mano
Si lo hallas
Frescas sombras de sauce
Oye mi llanto
¡Malhaya la suerte mía!
Rodolfo Halffter - MARINERO EN TIERRA
Qué altos los balcones
Casadita
Siempre que sueño las playas
Verano
Gimiendo por ver el mar
NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
MusicPlayByPlay
Creating an encyclopedic collection of the worlds most important
music on CD-ROM
The complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas
32 works, over ten hours of high quality MP3 Files,
performed by Seymour Lipkin
The complete sheet music of the sonatas
Over 600 pages of Adobe Acrobat .pdf files
NRM59001
 Here,
for the first time, a CD-ROM containing the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas,
on high quality MP3 Files, performed by Seymour Lipkin. This disk is playable
on any computer with a CD ROM drive, all DVD/home theater players as well
as many new home and automobile CD players.
In addition we have included ALL of the sheet music on Adobe Acrobat .pdf
files that you can read on AND print from your computer.
Also included is a 10,000 word essay on the sonatas by Ted Libbey, and
photos and biographical material on the artist, Seymour Lipkin.
Packaged in a DVD/CD-ROM Box
A $150 value!
$30.00
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NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
Ludwig Van
Beethoven
The Complete Sonatas
Volume One - Sonatas 1-10
NCD60171/3
Volume Two - Sonatas 11-22
NCD60172/3
Volume 3 - Sonatas 23-32
NCD60173/3
Seymour Lipkin, Piano
  
Over the past two generations, Seymour Lipkin has been hailed by connoisseurs
and revered by his colleagues as a pianist of rare cogency, authority and
musical wisdom. Studying at the prestigious Curtis Institute, Mr. Lipkin
developed his immaculate virtuosity as a prize pupil of Rudolf Serkin and
Mieczslaw Howszowski. At age 19 he gave his career an auspicious jump-start
by winning the Rachmaninoff competition, astounding the judges with his
insightful probing interpretation of Beethoven's knotty, enigmatic Op. 101
Sonata.
Mr. Lipkin went on to appear with all of America's "top five"
orchestras - the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia,
Cleveland and Chicago Symphony Orchestras - also performing with many other
major ensembles, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh, St.
Louis and Seattle Symphony Orchestras and the Florida Philharmonic. Legendary
conductors who engaged and reengaged him as a concerto collaborator include
Serge Koussevitzky, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene
Ormandy , William Steinberg and Christoph von Dohnanyi.
Three, 3 CD sets, $25 per set.
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NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
Dominick Argento
Casanova’s Homecoming
An Opera Buffa in Three Acts
Singers and Orchestra of the
MOORES OPERA CENTER
Peter Jacoby
Conductor
NPD 85673/2
 After
years of exile, the legendary but aging lover Casanova returns to Venice
during the height of Carnival. Hoping to procure a dowry for his goddaughter,
he attempts to swindle a rich old woman obsessed with the occult. A gender-bending
subplot that puts Victor/Victoria to shame, a diabolical midnight ceremony
in the lagoon during a terrifying thunderstorm, and the still potent exploits
of the world's most famous lover combine to create a whirlwind comic opera
of zest, jests and fireworks!
Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award winning composer Dominick Argento has been
hailed by both Opera News and Time magazine as America's most eminent creator
of 20th century opera. Casanova’s Homecoming, written in 1984, was
commissioned by Minnesota Opera, and subsequently enjoyed a triumphant two-year
run at York City Opera. This production of Casanova’s Homecoming and
recording, made during a performance of the opera on October 14, 2001, at
the Moores Opera House, Houston, Texas, has been generously underwritten
by the Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, under the aegis of the Moores
Opera Center’s Opera Discovery Project, the Edythe Bates Old Endowment,
the University of Houston and the Rebecca and John Moores School of Music,
David Ashley White, Director.
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NEWPORT CLASSIC
PRESENTS
Shadow Bands
Music for strings and piano by Scott Wheeler
The Gramercy Trio
Sharan Leventhal, violin
Jonathan Miller, cello
Randall Hodgkinson, piano
and Friends
Donald Berman, piano
James Dunham, viola
Edward Gazouleas, viola
NPD85672
 Two
decades ago, the marvelous, jazzy rhythms of the Violin Sonata and its fiery
finale served as my introduction to Scott Wheeler's music. Each subsequent
piece has offered new delights. When I hear the “Camera Dance”
movement of the piano trio, it seems as if I am looking out through a window
at a medieval scene while inside, soft electric lights are a gentle reminder
of the modern world. Then there is the opening of the last movement of Dragon
Mountain with its ghostly and beautiful visions drifting in and out of a
heavy mist, hovering at the edge of perception.
Scott's music overflows with joy, with images invariably surprising and vivid.
His voice is witty, unique, and distinctly American. It is with great pleasure
that we offer this compact disc. – Sharan Leventhal
The works on this disc, all receiving their first recordings here, have met
with acclaim from both audiences and critics. Bernard Holland in the New York
Times wrote that Piano Trio #2: Camera Dances “shines with craftsmanship.”
Of Shadow Bands, Richard Dyer wrote in The Boston Globe: “sunshine and
shadow chase and play throughout this piece, which has a particularly beautiful
close.” Lloyd Schwartz of The Boston Phoenix found Dragon Mountain “a
three-movement gem that incorporates Celtic folk elements of mysterious eloquence.”
Richard Buell in The Boston Globe wrote that the Violin Sonata “takes
flight, often in dizzying spirals; it carries a charge.”
Repertoire
Piano Trio #2: Camera Dances (1996-1999)
1.Entrada
2.Scherzo
3.Camera Dance
4.Toccata
5. Shadow Bands (1991)
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1985)
6.Allegro
7.Adagio
8.Waltz – Bumptious
9.Andante; Allegro
Dragon Mountain (1992-3)
10.Dragon Song
11.Dragon Flight
12.The Dragon and the Mirror
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