Kenneth Fuchs is one of America’s leading composers and his music is performed worldwide. After writing Falling Man, a work for baritone voice and orchestra based on the post-9/11 novel by Don DeLillo, Fuchs explored the principal theme in his rigorously developed Falling Canons for solo piano. Falling Trio grows out of the same theme, and from its ethereal opening presents a series of seven fantasy variations. String Quartet No. 5 is an exciting, large-scale work that explores the contrapuntal possibilities of a single ‘American’ theme.

Kenneth Fuchs has received considerable acclaim for his orchestral and chamber music. His String Quartets Nos. 2, 3 and 4 were released on Albany to acclaim and this Naxos disc continues the sequence with No. 5, an exciting example of the ‘symphonic’ American tradition that has occupied Fuchs’s music lately.