FROM THE COMPOSER - I have always thought of wind chamber music as fanciful problem solving. From the environment of the serenades by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Igor Stravinsky's Octet, there is a kind of lighthearted agility that underlines the music, not that it is superficial, but it can have great weight like Mozart's Serenade in C minor, K.388. Wind quintet music stands in sharp contrast to the implied gravitas of string quartets and their concomitant sweatiness. The biggest influence in my wind writing, overall, is probably the music of French composers of the last century. There is an almost neo-classical balance in the progress of materials in those works. The title I have chosen for the album, Children's Palace, has an oblique reference to Maurice Ravel s L'enfant et les sortilèges. In Ravel's one-act opera, familiar objects come to life and assume dramatic personae. My wind instruments in these sonatas develop lifelike qualities as each piece proceeds. The word Sonata implies abstract structural procedures. Here, the pieces are more like tiny dramas. Paul Reale has a catalogue of compositions large and diverse which over the course of his career has retained a distinctly fresh, original voice. It includes 12 piano sonatas, of which Sonata No.6 The Waste Land received a New Ariel Music Competition prize, three piano concertos and nine concertos for various instruments, including the Columbus Concerto for organ and winds, which was composed for the 500th anniversary of the Discovery of America. Reale has also written two song cycles and several other vocal and dramatic works. His vocal piece Two Madrigals was a finalist in the 2009 Cincinnati Camerata Choral Composition Contest. Among Reale's orchestral music, Caldera with Ice Cave (MSR MS1703) reached the semi-finals of the 2015 American Prize competition. His distinguished chamber music has also been widely performed and recorded. Seven Deadly Sins for violin and piano (Naxos 9.70204) was released in a series of recordings of his complete works for violin, in addition to Chopin's Ghosts, which features music for cello (Naxos 8.559820). In 2017, Reale's Le Bonheur de Vivre clarinet trio was chosen by the Pierrot Ensemble for Volume 1 of their Ablaze series (Ablaze Records, AR-00035). His Sacred Geometry 2 for violin and viola received a Special Mention at the 2005 International Epic Music Composition Competition, and the Simplexity string quartet was a winner in the First Seattle Composers' Alliance String Quartet Competition in 2014. As an author, Reale has written both aesthetic and analytical articles on 20th century composers, from Ives to Boulez. Reale began his education at Columbia College studying English literature and the hard sciences, and in 1967 received a degree in composition under the primary tutelage of Otto Luening and Chou Wen-Chung. A decision to enter the teaching profession prompted further study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he came under the influence of George Rochberg and George Crumb. A dedicated educator, Paul Reale received the Charles and Harriet Luckman Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1995, and since 2004 is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
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