As founder and music director of the English Symphony Orchestra William Boughton built a significant discography of internationally acclaimed recordings of English music with Nimbus Records. In July 2007 he became the tenth Music Director of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. This release is their first recording together.

Kurt Nikkanen has appeared internationally on the concert stage for more than two decades. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he began his violin studies at the age of three and at twelve he made his Carnegie Hall debut, performing Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo capriccioso with the New York Symphony. An enthusiastic advocate of contemporary music, he has performed the John Adams Violin Concerto (under the composer’s direction), Aaron Jay Kernis’s Concerto for Violin and Guitar, and H.K. Gruber’s violin concerto Nebelsteinmusik, also under the composer’s direction.

He gave the world premiere of John Zorn’s Contes des Fées for violin and chamber orchestra and has recorded Steven R. Gerber’s Violin Concerto, written especially for him.

The New Haven Symphony Orchestra first rehearsed in 1894 and gave its inaugural concert in January 1895 under the direction of Horatio Parker at Yale University. It is the fourth-oldest symphony orchestra to have performed continuously in America, after the New York Philharmonic (1842), the Boston Symphony (1881), and the Chicago Symphony (1891).