AVAILABILITY
www.firsteditionmusic.com
info@firsteditionmusic.com
When first issued the
Louisville Edition would often mix and
match two composers on each album. Matthew
Walters’ First Edition label adopts
a more logical and satisfying approach
for the most part gathering together
the various Louisville tapes on a single-composer.
This William Schuman disc uses analogue
tapes from 1959, 1968 and 1972. The
tapes are in good fettle.
The Fourth Symphony
had a very hard act to follow. After
all, the Third is one of the most impressive
- even awesome - symphonies of the 1940s.
It was completed a few months after
completion of the Third. The premiere
was given in January by the Cleveland
Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski.
After a troubled and typically tumultuous
first movement comes a second movement
lento with more repose than you
find anywhere in the Third. That consolatory,
restful quality is eight parts Barber
Adagio and two parts chilly-haunted.
The bustlingly busy third movement bears
the sardonic quality of Shostakovich
far more than anything in the Third.
Those desperately energetic, exultant
pizzicato - so much a Schuman hallmark
- also appear here. What a fine and
serious composer Schuman is. There is
a gravity and greatness about his writing
that places him at least in the company
of Bernstein and Barber and possibly
more. Mester has a good feeling for
the music and the recording sounds very
good and the only downside is a hint
of razz and steel in the violins. The
Prayer in Time of War can
be grouped with the Third and Fourth
Symphonies and the rarely heard secular
cantata A Free Song setting poems
from Whitman’s Drum Taps (compare
similar contemporary settings by Randall
Thompson and Howard Hanson). As expected
this is a powerful invocatory piece
not at all brazenly victorious nor especially
confident. Foreboding, supplication,
and an understated gritty determination
are the order of the day. The five movement
Choreographic Poem - Judith came
at the end of the 1940s. It was a Louisville
commission and its premiere was given
there with Martha Graham in January
1950. The style is now noticeably more
explosively fragmentary than in the
other two works on the disc and yet
this is still noticeably the same man
who wrote the coruscatingly violent
Third Symphony and the belligerent and
poetic Violin Concerto - both confident
masterpieces in their own right.
Jorge Mester conducts
for the Symphony and the Prayer -
both taken down in good stereo. The
Whitney Judith is in vivid mono
from 1959.
The presence of this
recording of the Fourth Symphony means
that Schuman’s symphonies 3-8 are now
easily accessible. If only BMG could
be persuaded to couple the Ninth Fosse
Ardeatine (Ormandy/Philadelphia,
RCA) and Tenth (Slatkin/St Louis RCA)
the sequence would be complete. The
first two symphonies (1935, 1937) were
withdrawn by the composer.
This disc represents
the second time on CD for the
tapes of the Prayer and the Symphony.
In the late 1980s Albany Troy licensed
several Louisville tapes and these two
appeared on TROY027-2 in harness with
Becker’s Third Symphony, Roy Harris’s
march When Johnny Comes Marching
Home and his JFK - Epilogue Profiles
in Courage. Still a disc worth tracking
down.
Judith has been
recorded in stereo several times. It
appears, conducted by David Effron with
the Eastman Philharmonia, on an all-Schuman
disc alongside In Sweet Music (1978)
and that other Martha Graham score of
the 1940s Night Journey. It is
also on Composers Recordings Inc
CRI CD791. Again this has been deleted
but you may be able to find it on e-bay,
There is also a Judith on a deleted
Delos CD with the New England Triptych
and Variations on America.
This CD offers vigorous
and imaginatively vivid recordings of
three representative and substantial
scores by Schuman. Two of them are available
only in this form. A very satisfying
collection offering a classic Schuman
anthology for the listener who wants
to move on beyond the Third Symphony
and who perhaps has discovered this
composer from the Violin Concerto (Quint
on Naxos or Zukofsky on DG), the Bernstein
disc of Symphonies 3, 5 and 8 (Sony)
or the more recent Bernstein Schuman
3 in the DG Bernstein and the Americans
bargain box..
Rob Barnett
Louisville Orchestra/Robert S. Whitney,
Jorge Mester, 
