This sequel to the Gramophone Award-nominated Americascapes album (ODE1396-2) by the Basque National Orchestra and Robert Treviño is a thrilling and a deeply personal journey into the music of three American composers. All three composers had very unique aesthetic worlds and with two of the composers conductor Robert Treviño also had direct artistic collaboration.

Where my first Americascapes album looked at lesser-known major American works that had influenced European composers (rather than the other way around), for this follow-up, I went back to a more basic thought – “What is America?”. Since America is many things to millions of people, I realise that my question had to mean, “What is America to me? (…) Selecting the composers for this American Opus took well over a year. Yet I eventually refined the list to these three composers, with all of whom I feel a close kinship and all of whom are deeply meaningful to me. Two of them I even had a direct artistic relationship with. As a group, they also embody some of the diversity and the radically different aesthetics that thrive in the Americas.” – Robert Treviño

All three works on this album deserve a rightful place among the American Classics. George Walker’s three-movement Address for Orchestra (1959) was the first orchestral work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. It was Walker’s expressed hope that Treviño would one day record this piece. Alongside references to folk music and gospel, Robert Treviño feels that this music also represents well what was America in that particular moment in history: “There is forthrightness, clarity of purpose, directness, and a sense of optimistic belief in America’s future.”