Michael Boder, Werner Heider - Gloria Coates: Symphony No. 15; Cantara Da Requiem; Transitions (2007)

"All of the performances on this remarkable program are top notch. Soprano Teri Dunn gives a moving reading of the soprano part in the Cantata da Requiem, a setting of texts by American and German women written during the Second World War. The instrumental ensembles all play Coates' difficult-sounding music with apparent ease, born of commitment and understanding..." -- Sequenza 21

Gloria Coates, Symphony No. 15, Cantata da Requiem and Transitions performed by Vienna Radio Symphony, Boder Talisker Players and Ars Nova Nuremberg (Naxos 8559371) Fascinating new music from an increasingly known 69-year-old composer receiving its premiere on disc. Kyle Gann's notes to this new Naxos disc matter-of-factly inform us that Gloria Coates is "most superficially . . . the most prolific female symphonist in history." He also tells us she has made "a career out of the slow glissando in orchestral and ensemble music." Her 15th symphony -- already it ties her with Shostakovich, Gann notes -- is reminiscent, at times, of Ligeti or Penderecki and, at other times, of her fellow prolific American symphonist Alan Hovhaness (whose production few outside Villa-Lobos could ever equal). The elements, then, of the symphony are simple, but the effect is far from simple. Nor, until a quotation from his last motet well into its second movement "Puzzle Canon," is it apparent at all why it's "Homage to Mozart." The Cantata da Requiem is a less arresting early work from 1972 but "Transitions" from 1984 is a somber chamber orchestra work with much of the same mystical suspended animation and sonic world as the symphony. (It sounds, at times, as if someone located music school rehearsal studios inside an airplane hangar.) Jeff Simon -- Buffalo News, December 16, 2007, Jeff Simon