Harbison: Symphony No. 4

This is the third recording in a multi-year partnership between the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic and Naxos to release one album of American music each year. A study in dramatic contrasts, Carl Ruggles’ Sun-Treader is an overwhelming, granite-hued tone poem by one of New England’s most original and uncompromising composers. Steven Stucky’s luminous Pulitzer Prize-winning Second Concerto for Orchestra is a riveting exploration of sonority and soundpainting while John Harbison’s Fourth Symphony is a big, bold, jazzimbued work by one of America’s most important living symphonists.