Duncan

A top-notch instrumentalist and prolific producer, music teacher, author, and arranger, Nashville-based musical polymath Craig Duncan has appeared on over 90 records and has produced a wealth of successful recordings for the gift shop market. Well established in both the country and classical scene, and a member of the North American Fiddler's Hall of Fame, Duncan is as renowned for his plethora of arrangements and books for Mel Bay Publications as he is for his flawless musicianship and impressive catalog of work. ~ James Christopher Monger

This fourth album by philharmonie zuidnederland includes works by Darius Milhaud, Charles Koechlin, Duncan Ward and Edward Elgar. Principal conductor Duncan Ward takes you on a symphonic journey with Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde for small orchestra, after which we fly to the stars in Charles Koechlin’s mysterious Vers la voûte étoilée — Koechlin had first intended to become an astronomer.

This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others, Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism.