The music of the American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is well-represented in the DELOS CD Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Cello Concerto & Other Works which will be available for purchase in mid-September as a CD or as a download on various platforms.

The prolific Zwillich is excellently represented in this album by several artists with whom she has collaborated in the past, beginning with the Santa Rosa Symphony, and its conductor, Francesco Lecce-Chong.

Also featured in the recording are cellist Zuill Bailey, playing both elegantly and fiercely in Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s inmensely melodic Cello Concerto, the pianist Elizabeth Dorman bringing to life Zwilich’s Peanuts Gallery for Piano and Orchestra, an enchantingly humorous homage to Charles Schultz’s beloved creation, and violinist Joseph Edelberg assuredly soloing in Zwilich’s rhapsodically appealing Romance for Violin and Orchestra.

The Santa Rosa Symphony, led by Francesco Lecce-Chong achieves a lovely sound in the two movement Prologue and Variations for String Orchestra, a work that running well under 14 minutes still manages to demonstrate the creative powers of the enormously talented Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, an accomplished composer who unfearfully embraces tonality without shunning moments of dissonance that serve to give appealing asperity to her works.

The DELOS album is well annotated, produced, and engineered, delivering yet another asset from the label’s catalogue.

Rafael de Acha (c) 2022