Charles Wuorinen, Vol. 3

Charles Wuorinen has always been comfortable in a range of genres, embracing the traditional forms of opera, symphony, or string quartet as readily as he accepts the challenge unusual combinations that have become a second norm since Pierrot Lunaire more than a century ago. Nor has any particular focus dominated any period of his nearly sixty-year career: his eight symphonies span more than fifty years, his piano concertos forty. He has written everything from piano bagatelles to ballets, a Mass setting, eight symphonies, and three operas. This album features the latest and most traditionally structured of Wuorinen’s four piano sonatas—“sonata” being a term the composer has used on a number of occasions otherwise—as well as two vocal works setting poetry of two of our greatest modernist poets, John Ashbery and James Tate.