In its short twelve-year history, the Nashville Chamber Orchestra has come to be recognized as one of America’s most creative and innovative orchestras. Under the artistic leadership of founder and music director Paul Gambill, the extraordinary music making of this ensemble has heralded a steady stream of national media attention, including feature length articles in Symphony and Eastman Notes magazines, broadcasts on NPR’s Performance Today, recordings for Warner Bros, Angel, Almanac and Alabaster Records, a national award for Adventurous Programming from ASCAP, and now this recording on Naxos.

The NCO has commissioned and premièred 26 works by American composers in the past six years, and in 2002 it hosted the first-ever Nashville Guitar Festival, attracting new audiences for this bi-annual event. Each NCO concert features masterpieces from the traditional repertory, such as these Copland works, alongside new works commissioned by the NCO that fuse folk, jazz, Celtic, bluegrass, American song and World music with the chamber orchestra aesthetic. The NCO’s unique approach to programming and its extensive commissioning is stretching musical boundaries and redefining people’s perception of what a chamber orchestra can be.