Strongly crafted Chamber music by Dan Locklair - reviewed by CARSON P COOMAN '... an important American voice who deserves further recognition and performances.'

This double CD release is devoted to the chamber music of American composer Dan Locklair (born 1949), professor and composer-in-residence at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA. This reviewer wrote very favorably about Locklair's all-orchestral disc also released on Albany Records in 2002. It is now wonderful that Albany has followed that successful release with this new set of Locklair's chamber compositions. Best known in America for works for organ (some of which have become standard American contemporary repertoire) and choral ensembles, in recent years Locklair's music for orchestral and chamber forces has been gaining much deserved greater exposure.

This disc shows a larger emotional range of music than the orchestral disc, but Locklair's style remains the same -- strongly crafted music of tonal character with 'American' harmonic and rhythmic inflections. Locklair's harmonic language often favors small collections of pitches, particularly pentatonic ones, which he uses to build entire movements or sections.

As is almost always the case with Locklair's music, all of these works are inspired by extra-musical ideas: paintings, poetry, nature, etc. Spanning nearly twenty years of compositional activity, these works provide an excellent sampling of Locklair's instrumental music.

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