This album presents a vibrant program of 20th-century American and Brazilian music for wind quintet, performed by the acclaimed Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. Samuel Barber’s Summer Music (1956), composed during a break from writing his opera Vanessa, is a lyrical and atmospheric one-movement work. Created in close collaboration with the New York Woodwind Quintet, it highlights the expressive range of each instrument in vivid summer scenes—"languid, not killing mosquitoes," as Barber jokingly put it. Elliott Carter’s Woodwind Quintet (1948) pays tribute to his teacher Nadia Boulanger. The first movement is melodic and contrapuntal; the second is a dazzling, jazz-infused rondo—a nod to the Groupe des Six and South American rhythms. Gunther Schuller’s Suite (1957) blends classical structure with jazz idioms, part of his vision for a "Third Stream" genre. It moves from American folk song and blues to a rhythmically complex Toccata inspired by Stravinsky. Kazimierz Machala’s witty American Folk Suite condenses iconic tunes—from "Yankee Doodle" to the U.S. national anthem—into a whirlwind encore. South American voices include Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Quintette en forme de Chôros (1928), using the rare original scoring with cor anglais, lending the piece a lean, transparent sonority. Julio Medaglia’s Suite popular brasileira and Chôro em Berlin, written specifically for the ensemble, draw directly from Brazilian folk traditions with dance forms like baião, seresta, and frevo. Liduino Pitombeira’s Ajubete jepá amo mbaé, also written for the group, evokes the energy of northern Brazil through jazz-based polyrhythms and modal harmony. This recording celebrates musical crosscurrents between North and South America, classical and popular idioms—all delivered with the color and finesse of one of the world’s leading wind quintets.