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Dr. Sarah Daughtrey Album: "A Touch of Blue"

Voice Area Coordinator Dr. Sarah Daughtrey Announces the Release of a new album on Centaur Records, “A Touch of Blue” 

 

Associate professor of voice Dr. Sarah Daughtrey is releasing a new album, “A Touch of Blue,” featuring works for voice, saxophone and piano. The album was officially launched on March 18, 2022 and will be available for streaming across a wide variety of platforms, including Apple Music, Amazon Music and Naxos Direct. 

 

Centaur Records, founded in 1976, is one of the oldest and largest independent classical labels in the U.S., with recordings available in major markets throughout the world. The label is well-established in classical music with highly regarded artists and performances as part of its broad catalog and to be included among its artist roster is a real honor for Dr. Daughtrey.  The album features Daughtrey, mezzo-soprano, on several works, as well as Justin Badgerow, piano, and David Box, saxophone.  Dr. Badgerow is professor of piano at Elizabethtown College in central Pennsylvania, and Mr. Box is an active musician in Lubbock, Texas.   The album was recorded at UTEP’s Fox Fine Arts Recital Hall with engineer Steve Haddad in El Paso in the summer of 2021.  

 

Included on the album are 20th century works (and one recent composition) for the trio of musicians, as well as works for voice and piano, saxophone and piano, and solo piano.  From the album’s liner notes by Daughtrey: “This album was inspired by not only the unusual combination of saxophone and voice in several works, but also by the thread of blue (a sense of melancholy, a jazz sensibility or in looking over the ocean to the new world from the old) running through it.”  Most of the selections were originally performed on recitals in New Mexico and Texas, and of special note are the premiere recordings of two song cycles for the trio:  Dr. Lon Chaffin’s “Blue Diminuendo,” written for the group, and featuring the elegiac poetry of Texas Poet Laureate Larry D. Thomas, and Dutch composer Marius Flothuis’ songs on poems by Langston Hughes, “Negro Lament.”  Also included are songs by Darius Milhaud and Celius Dougherty, saxophone works by Wiliam Grant Still, Maurice Whitney and Jacques Ibert, as well as solo piano selections by Brazilian composer M. Camargo Guarnieri and Aaron Copland, along with solo piano selections and songs by Joaquín Nin and his son, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, both Cuban composers.