None of these works is completely unknown. What is unusual is
to have three such contrasting piece in harness. The recordings
are about 55 years old so this is a bit of an exception to the
general EMI
American Classics approach. The sound does
nothing to defy expectations. It's a bit raw but undeniably vivid.
There are modern recordings of all three ballets but none quite
catches the virile charge imparted here. The stage sense is palpable.
That is no surprise as these pieces were written and played by
this director and this orchestra as staged and danced ballets.
The
Capital of the World based on a Hemingway short story
premiered on US television in 1953. You can tell from the neon
glare, fiesta romps redolent of Auric and Milhaud and the generality
of Iberian mannerisms that this is both a tragedy and a technicolor
spectacular. The California glare of this music is accounted
for by Antheil's busy engagement with Hollywood even if he never
had a big score success unlike his West Coast based contemporaries,
Korngold, Waxman and Rózsa. Schuman is more of an original,
more subtle. He worked on
The Undertow with Anthony
Tudor but was never told the plot. He wrote to Tudor's commission
to write music for a particular atmosphere which Tudor fed to
him in a series of mini-commissions. The story of a sex murderer,
drunks, prostitutes, remorse and desolation may recall Bliss's
Miracle
in the Gorbals and Bartok's
Miraculous Mandarin at
least in relation to the plot. Each of the episodes is separately
tracked in twelve segments. This is comparatively early Schuman
though in time not that far distant from iconic scores such as
the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony. Schuman allows himself
a few Coplandisms along the way and in
Entrance of Ate there
is a touch of Piston's
Incredible Flutist and in
Drunken
women of Ives’ revivalist band music. It's a predominantly
dark score as we have come to expect from Schuman - one of the
strongest of the twentieth century’s American voices.
Gould's
Fall River Legend dates from 1948 and was
written for Agnes de Mille. Like the other two ballets here it
has death as a dramatic component: this time the murder of her
father and stepmother by Lizzie Borden and her own fate at the
gallows. Gould like Virgil Thomson and Ives makes use of revivalist
material and sentimental songs. In
Church Social we hear
elements of Stravinsky and Copland. There's something of a hoedown
in the plunging
Cotillion. The feral romping wildness
of
Murder recalls some of the demented street-scenes of
Sondheim and Gemigniani's orchestral writing for
Sweeney Todd.
The
Epilogue and the violent
Prologue carry the
cargo of violence and this is especially true of the
Prologue.
The Gould and Antheil were recorded within two years of their
theatre premieres.
Not one of the strongest presences in the American Classics marque
but undeniably fascinating. More of a curiosity than a clamant
purchase.
Rob Barnett
Ballet Theatre Orchestra/Joseph
Levine 
