"... All five works are splendidly played and recorded."

"... this is a winning anthology of a major American romantic."

"... parkin has recorded Excursions before, and shows that he has a strong affinity for the local accents which inflect these short essays in Americana. His performance of the other pieces is equally persausive ..."

"... Among all these works, from the easy going Excursions, Op.20 and the humorous but carefully wrought Souvenirs, Op. 28, through to the serious and virtuosic Sonata, Op. 26. Barber's uniquely romantic American voice is heard. In communicating Barber's personality, Eric Parkin is a willing accomplice. While being fleet with his fingers, Parkin is also sensuous with the simple, and it it this latter attribute that marks him out as a distinguished interpreter... The Souvenirs are a delight from start to finish ..."

"The disc contains Harris' complete piano music, plus the Violin Sonata...As usual, one can hear that Harris was an uneven composer, but there are treasures of delight here. The most immediately attractive music of the new collection will surely be the American Ballads. They include gorgeous arrangements of some of the best folk songs...But the heroic, gaunt Piano Sonata in four movements deserves attention - a grandly noble piece of open textures. The Suite, like the Sonata, is basically symphonic in style, essentially joyous - as is most of Harris....Still, the most important work here is surely the Violin Sonata....Harris achieves something akin to the poetry of Walt Whitman here, mixing sweeping lyricism with granite strengths." 

Editor’s Choice

"One of the most valuable releases yet in Naxos's American Classics series. Composed in 1898-99, Amy Beach's ambitious, singularly impressive Piano Concerto is at long last coming in from the cold. Alan Feinberg brings extra charisma to bear without any loss of delicacy or poetry, and his collaboration with Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony undoubtedly generates greater thrust and spontaneity. Schermerhorn and his eager Nashville band more than hold their own by the side of Neeme Jarvi and the Detroit SO. Theirs is a convincingly paced, tidy performance with real fire in its belly and plenty of character. The sound is truthfully balanced and eminently vivid. A thoroughly enjoyable issue, whose claims are strengthened by a lucid booklet- essay from Beach scholar Adrienne Fried Block."

"This new Naxos disc has now to be a top recommendation, especially at budget price... Beach is a landmark female composer who deserves the widest possible hearing for her accessible and beautifully crafted music."

“It is Naxos who have had the happy idea of coupling Amy Beach’s attractive Piano Concerto with the equally diverting Gaelic Symphony, which was written in 1894-6 after she had been impressed with the Boston première of Dvořák’s New World Symphony and determined to build her own symphony by drawing on four traditional Irish tunes of ‘simple, rugged and unpretentious beauty’. Yet much of the invention is her own and of high quality to match the concertante work for piano. Alan Feinberg’s performance of the latter is in the grand romantic tradition, with splendid digital bravura in the finale, balanced by warm and often passionately lyrical support from the excellent Nashville orchestra. The Symphony receives a no less sympathetic and committed reading under Kenneth Schermerhorn. The recording is vivid throughout, not in the very front rank perhaps, but bright and atmospheric.”  ***

2013 ECHO Klassik Award Winner for Orchestra of the Year

2013 Grammy Award Winner for Best Orchestral Performance

"... The recording is both technically first-rate and generous, the orchestra is superb, and Boughton brings an infectious enthusiasm to the proceedings...welcome, elucidating, and refreshing..." 

“... Conductor Patrick Gallois and his Finnish band play this music with energy and even more important, without an air of condescension. They take it seriously and so turn out performances that are fun, unstuffy, but respectful of the composers’ intentions. This is a very enjoyable recreation of music from a lively time in American cultural and political history. An attractively warm yet detailed recording from Hankasalmi Church in Jyväskylä completes the package.”  ****

“... Whatever the story behind the recordings, kudos to van Boer, conductor Patrick Gallois, and the adaptable musicians of the orchestra for rescuing these curiosities and bringing them to our attention. The execution is polished and enthusiastic. The engineering is top-drawer. No one will mistake anything other than the Mozart quotes for great music, but the overtures are amusing, and this release adds an important tile to the mosaic of American music.”

“... Urgently recommended, but please explore further. Naxos has recorded a good deal of Foote’s chamber music, which was his real forte, and I cannot urge you too strongly to discover it.”

“...These are effective and interesting pieces…”

“American concertgoers—indeed, conductors—are largely unaware of American music before Ives, Gershwin and Copland. But composers including Horatio Parker, Amy Beach, Charles Martin Loeffler, Charles Tomlinson Griffes and John Alden Carpenter penned music that bears comparison with that of late 19th and early 20th-century Europeans. Most of these Americans were trained at least partly in Europe. But Arthur Foote (1853–1937), a Bostonian most of his life, was entirely homegrown. Still, his early tone poem Francesca da Rimini sounds like an attractive amalgam of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. The four Rubáiyát pieces suggest more up-to-date influences from Dvořák and Tchaikovsky; the Suite, for strings, could almost pass for Elgar. Dating from around the turn of the 20th century, these are beautifully crafted and unfailingly appealing pieces…this is a CD well worth hearing. “