Note from the composer: “Gobi Gloria belongs to a series of compositions that grew out of my admiration for Mongolian music.  A principal melody is played against its own inversion, retrograde and retrograde-inversion in an otherwise mostly heterophonic texture. The piece alludes to various genres of Mongolian music that include the long-chant, as well as the music of dance and shaman rituals. It concludes with a rendering of a folk song that I heard during my visit to the Inner Mongolia region in 1996.”

Heralded as “one of the most exciting voices in New Music” (The Wire), Lei Liang (b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by The New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by The Washington Post.  Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission and a Creative Capital Award. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. He was awarded the 2021 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams.