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Charles Ives was the son of George Ives, a Danbury, Connecticut bandmaster and a musical experimenter whose approach heavily influenced his son. Charles Ives' musical skills quickly developed; he was playing organ services at the local Presbyterian church from the age of 12 and began to compose at 13. Ives' rural, rough-and-tumble childhood was revisited vividly and repeatedly in the music he composed as an adult.

In 1894 Ives entered Yale to study music, and his father died at age 40 from a heart attack. Professor Horatio T. Parker was not at all interested in encouraging Ives' experimental style. Ives dutifully learned the basics, creating an interesting but conventional Symphony No. 1 as his graduation thesis in 1898. After barely managing to earn his diploma, Ives moved with a couple of his fraternity buddies to an apartment in New York City. He became organist at Central Presbyterian Church and composed his first large-scale attempt to reflect the spirit of America, the Symphony No. 2. In off hours Ives worked on his wild, highly dissonant and ragtime-influenced Piano Sonata No. 1, making a din that his roommates described as "resident disturbances."

In 1902 a friend introduced Ives to the insurance agent Julian Myrick. They co-founded the first Mutual Life Insurance office in Manhattan. Through his hard work and easy ability to communicate with customers, Ives would become a very wealthy insurance executive. In 1906 he married Harmony Twichell, a woman from a prominent New England family. Ives continued to compose his music on commuter trains, in the evening, and on weekends, writing what pleased him without worrying what the outside world might think of it. In order to check details of orchestration, Ives hired out theater orchestras to rehearse his scores. In 1910 Ives gave New York Philharmonic conductor Gustav Mahler a score and parts to his Symphony No. 3, "The Camp Meeting." Mahler tried it in rehearsal after returning to Vienna, but died before he could perform it.

In the 1910s, Ives would produce several of his most important masterworks, the Symphony No. 4, the Orchestral Set No. 1: "Three Places in New England," the String Quartet No. 2, and the massive Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860," commonly referred to as the Concord Sonata. With the beginning of America's involvement in World War I, Ives raised funds for the war effort, supported an unsuccessful constitutional amendment prohibiting a declaration of war without the support of two-thirds of the populace, published a manual (Surveying the Prospect) that for years served as a bible for the insurance industry, and composed at an astounding pace. In October 1918 Ives suffered a severe heart attack that nearly killed him. In 1921 he published the Concord Sonata and in 1922 followed it with 114 Songs, containing songs dating from 1888 to the eve of publication. These editions were sent out free to anyone who wanted them, and many copies wound up in the wastebaskets of music conservatories.

In 1924 pianist and new music enthusiast E. Robert Schmitz made an appointment with Ives to buy insurance, but left instead with a copy of the Concord Sonata. He introduced the work to Edgard Varèse and to Henry Cowell, who became Ives' strongest advocate. Soon Ives' music began to appear on concert programs, and when Cowell launched his New Music Quarterly in 1927, Ives helped back the project financially. But that same year Ives confided to Harmony that he'd somehow lost the gift that compelled him to write music.

In 1930 Ives and Myrick both decided to retire, and from this time forward Ives concerned himself with revising existing works. Ives' eyesight was beginning to deteriorate, so he had huge Photostats made of his scores and also made recordings to work from. Composers Cowell, John J. Becker, and Lou Harrison helped Ives create legible scores of his music, instituting a scholarly tradition of Ives editing that continues to this day. In January 1939, pianist John Kirkpatrick performed the complete "Concord" in a recital so successful that even critics distrustful of modern music gave it rave reviews. In 1947 Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his Symphony No. 3, completed nearly 40 years earlier. With Ives' death in May 1954 his musical legacy became top priority for a generation of biographers, researchers, and performers.

Ives' early works expertly channel European influences into totally fresh constructs; mature works make use of quotation, collage techniques, spatial redistribution of instrumental groups and soloists, metric modulation, homegrown forms of pitch organization and dense, massed blocks of clustered chords. The difficult idiom of many of his pieces has denied Ives the mass appeal of Copland and Gershwin, and he can be an acquired taste. Some critics and conductors, mainly European, discount the value of his innovations, concluding that Ives was an amateur who didn't know what he was doing. By the turn of the twenty-first century renewed researches into Ives' theoretical approach revealed that he certainly did know what he was doing, and he has much to teach us yet today in terms of fresh ideas and techniques.

José Serebrier is better known as a conductor than as a composer, though in the late '90s and early years of the new century, he garnered a fair amount of attention for his compositions. His works are written in a tonal and quite approachable style and divulge his mastery of orchestration and deft sense for instrumental color. A collection of Serebrier's compositions, Last Tango Before Sunrise, was issued in 2021, with the composer conducting several of the works.

Serebrier was born on December 3, 1938, in Montevideo, Uruguay. He began to study the violin at the age of nine with Juan Fabbri and soon began composing. His earliest surviving work dates back to 1948, Sonata for solo violin, Op. 1. He would later take instruction on the piano from Sarah Bourdillion and became a proficient pianist. Following instruction at the Montevideo Municipal School of Music in violin and harmony, Serebrier enrolled at the Montevideo Conservatory, where he studied composition with Carlos Estrada. He remained active as a composer during his student years, turning out such works as the wind quintet Pequeña Musica (1955).

In 1956, Serebrier won a competition in Uruguay with his orchestral overture La leyenda de Fausto. He enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied composition with Vittorio Giannini. He was appointed apprentice conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1958; this post carried with it the Dorati fellowship, which provided Serebrier further composition study, this time at the University of Minnesota. It was during this time that he completed one of his most important works for orchestra, the Partita, subtitled "Symphony No. 2" (1958). He left Minneapolis in 1960 to accept a position as conductor of the semi-professional Utica Symphony Orchestra. The salary was meager, and Serebrier augmented his income by teaching at Utica College. Still, he had to live for a time in a room at the local YMCA. His Fantasia for orchestra dates to 1960 and has proven to be one of his more enduring compositions.

In 1962, he received his first important podium appointment -- associate conductor of the New York City-based American Symphony Orchestra -- where he worked closely with Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski premiered his young colleague's Elegy for Strings at Carnegie Hall in 1962. Serebrier's Carnegie Hall debut as a conductor occurred around this time, also with the American Symphony Orchestra, and was enthusiastically received by critics and the public alike. Serebrier left New York for Cleveland in 1968, serving as conductor of the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra and composer-in-residence at George Szell's Cleveland Orchestra. He left the latter post in 1970 and the former in 1971. Serebrier did much guest conducting in the '70s and '80s. He made his first recording in 1974, the Ives Symphony No. 4 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, an effort for RCA that drew high praise from critics in Europe and the U.S., where it received a Grammy nomination.

Serebrier was appointed principal guest conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in 1982. Two years later, he organized the Festival Miami (now called the Festival of the Americas) and served as its artistic director. He developed a relationship with the Belgian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s, making a highly praised series of Shostakovich recordings with them. Around this time, he also began making recordings with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Rome Symphony Orchestra. He recorded his Winterreise (1999) with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on the Reference Recordings label. He has received 45 Grammy nominations, winning a total of eight Grammy Awards, including one in 2004 for his own Carmen Symphony. He has championed and recorded the works of numerous American composers, both contemporary and from earlier eras, including George Whitefield Chadwick, Charles Ives, and William Schuman, among many others. In 2021, Serebrier conducted several of his works on the album Last Tango Before Sunrise. ~ Robert Cummings

The London Philharmonic Orchestra is a central institution of the British classical concert scene, performing major repertory works, British standards, contemporary music, and more. Especially on recordings, the group has also engaged with music from beyond the classical sphere.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra was formed in 1932 in response to a consensus that London's major orchestras, lacking strong artistic leadership, were inferior to those in Germany and even the U.S. So conductor Sir Thomas Beecham assembled a crack membership of 106 players, and the new orchestra was successful from the start. Beecham steered the group through financial difficulties at the beginning of World War II before resigning for health reasons and due to conflicts over the ensemble's artistic direction. Postwar conductors included Eduard van Beinum (1947 to 1951) and Sir Adrian Boult (1951 to 1958); the latter inaugurated an active recording program, releasing albums that remain standards to this day.

In 1966, Bernard Haitink became the orchestra's principal conductor; his tenure, lasting until 1979, was longer than that of any other conductor of the group until Vladimir Jurowski. The orchestra renovated a disused church, renamed it Henry Wood Hall, and began to use the space for rehearsals and recordings in 1975. Haitink's successor was another giant, Sir Georg Solti, who served as principal conductor from 1979 to 1983 and continued as conductor emeritus afterward, often appearing and recording with the orchestra. Solti was succeeded by a trio of Germans, Klaus Tennstedt in 1983, Franz Welser-Möst in 1990, and Kurt Masur in 2000. Welser-Möst officially installed the orchestra as the resident ensemble of the Royal Festival Hall, which remains its main concert venue.

The orchestra has also had numerous guest conductors over the years, and these have been responsible for many of its crossover releases. Although not as active in this field as the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic has made high-visibility film soundtrack recordings. These include soundtracks for such films as Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), The Fly (1986), and the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, as well as the anthology Academy Award Themes (1984). The orchestra has released albums devoted to the music of progressive rock bands Pink Floyd and Yes, and as far back as 1959, it released the album Hawaiian Paradise. In 2011, the London Philharmonic recorded 205 national anthems in preparation for the London Olympic Games of the following year. The orchestra's album releases, classical and otherwise, numbered 280 by 1997 and has increased by well over 250 albums since then; in the year 2001 alone, the orchestra released 21 albums. The London Philharmonic established its own LPO label in the mid-2000s decade and has issued large amounts of music, both classical and not, including Genius of Film Music: Hollywood Blockbusters 1980s to 2000s, in 2018.

In 2007, the London Philharmonic was in the forefront of taking advantage of the wave of talented Russian musicians who had emigrated to the West, installing Vladimir Jurowski as principal conductor. He remained in the post until 2020, becoming the orchestra's longest-serving conductor and leading the group in a 2021 recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 8 ("Symphony of a Thousand"). In 2020, Karina Canellakis became the orchestra's first female principal guest conductor. Jurowski was succeeded in 2021 by Edward Gardner, who became the group's first British principal conductor for decades. ~ James Manheim

The John Alldis Choir was a durable British choral ensemble especially notable for its performances of modern music. John Alldis was a music student at Cambridge who won a scholarship as a choral scholar to King's College, Cambridge, where his chorus master was Boris Ord. Choral scholars are male students who has passed a rigorous competitive audition to sing in the famous Chorus of King's College. Those who pass receive a Cambridge education in return for singing at the daily King's College Chapel services. After his graduation he formed the John Alldis Choir in 1962, which originally included 16 professional singers.

They made their concert debut in London in 1962 in a program that included the world premiere of Alexander Goehr's A Little Cantata of Proverbs; in the same year they also premiered Malcolm Williamson's Symphony for Voices, a work requiring virtuoso singing and exceptionally detailed ensemble blend. These performances were highly successful, and the chorus became much in demand.

Prior to 1966, the London Symphony Orchestra had no permanent choral organization. A financially uncertain organization until its reorganization in the late '50s, the orchestra engaged one or another available choir to sing with it when needed, sometimes under the name London Symphony Chorus. In 1966, the LSO decided to form a permanent choral group, and engaged Alldis to assemble it as its first music director. He remained with this chorus through 1969, when he took a similar position with the London Philharmonic Choir. In 1972, he also took on the leadership of the Danish State Radio Chorus.

Meanwhile, he maintained the organization of the John Alldis Choir. In 1967, the choir participated in the first European performance of Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles, conducted by Pierre Boulez and prepared by Alldis. From 1968 through roughly the 1970s, they were active in recording studios, mostly participating in opera recordings, particularly with RCA and Decca (London) records. For these studio dates, Alldis would hire additional singers as required by the producer and conductor of the sessions.