Faculty Bookshelf

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Complete Sonatas and Sonatina for Violin & Piano

Grigory Kalinovsky , Tatiana Goncharova

Mieczyslaw Weinberg is now recognized as one of the outstanding Russian composers of the second half of the twentieth century. Fêted for his symphonies and string quartets, he also wrote a sequence of Violin Sonatas crucial to the development of his distinctive and elusive musical idiom. Shostakovich's influence is evident in the Third Violin Sonata, as are Jewish melodic elements, while the Fourth Violin Sonata is alternately sombre and hectic. His masterpiece is the Fifth Violin Sonata, symphonic in scale but subtle in form, and containing some of his most affecting writing.

What is Ours - Music for an America in Progress

Dominick DiOrio , Roger Roe , D. James Tagg

There are generally two ways one can face a crisis. One can give up, or one can persevere and use it to one’s advantage. Choir director Dominick DiOrio definitely chose the latter during the pandemic, turning his reflections and sentiments about it into a profoundly engaging, almost philosophical choral album titled WHAT IS OURS. DiOrio conjures a formidable cross-section of music by a range of contemporary composers that not only reflects the diversity and multiplicity of modern-day America, but also its underbelly of struggle, challenge, and an eventual triumph of humanity.

Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon

Joseph Gramley , Yo-Yo Ma, Silkroad Ensemble

This is the second recording by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. The musicians are from Mongolia, Turkey, Japan, India, China, Korea, Azerbaijan, Canada, Uzbekistan, and the U.S. Rather than driving them apart, the musicians' differences made them curious to learn more about each other.