GRAMMY® Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty creates colourful musical portraits in this recording, featuring larger-than-life personalities drawn from 20th-century American culture.

William Henry Squire was Britain’s leading cellist from the late 1890s to the late 1920s and a prolific artist in the early recording era.

Ulvi Cemal Erkin was one of the ‘Turkish Five’, contemporaries who established the foundations of twentieth-century Turkish music by combining Western forms with their own folk traditions.

Joaquín Rodrigo is best known for his Concierto de Aranjuez, but the fame of this great work has eclipsed a prolific output of almost 200 works including the rarely heard and profoundly original works for violin that span almost his entire life as a composer.

Dublin-born prodigy John Field enjoyed a wide reputation and great popularity. He was renowned as a soloist for his delicacy of nuance and as a composer for his cultivation of that most poetic of forms, the nocturne.

Tchaikovsky encouraged Georgy L’vovich Catoire to pursue a musical career, remarking that he was ‘gifted with a powerful creative talent’.

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, Kevin Puts now stands in the forefront of contemporary American composers.

Qigang Chen is one of the most prominent Chinese composers working today, whose music has been commissioned and performed by leading orchestras and musicians around the world.