JOHN VEALE (1922-2006): Clarinet Concerto, BRETT DEAN (b.1961): Ariel's Music, WALTER PISTON (1894-1976): Clarinet Concerto, WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI (1913-1994): Dance Preludes, NIGEL SABIN (b.1960): Au Australian Holiday.

Description: The most substantial work here is Dean's passionate concerto, named for Ariel Glaser, the young AIDS victim whose death inspired her mother's activism in the late '80s and early '90s. After an amorphous, hesitant, whispered opening, more tonal elegiac music puts a sad, protesting human face on the tragedy, followed by the somber, funereal elegy proper. The second movement is more conventionally neo-romantic, with a more traditional dialogue between vehemently declamatory soloist and orchestra, in an harmonic vocabulary with echoes of Shostakovich, finally ending the work in an atmosphere of sad remembrance. Veale's attractive concerto, while conservative in idiom for 1953, is colorful and rich in both harmony and orchestration, suggestive of the film scores for which the composer was best known. The Sabin is a lively, dancing little encore commissioned especially for this recording. Piston's little concerto is strangely under-recorded, exquisitely crafted and tremendously appealing. Paul Dean (clarinet), Queensland Symphony Orchestra; Richard Mills. Original 1999 release.