Uniquely in the record
industry the powerhouse that is Naxos
sees education as part of its mission.
Their catalogue reaches
wide and deep, covering standard repertoire
and extending out to the periphery and
beyond. They are continually pushing
the periphery outwards. Their commercially
savvy missionary zeal is multitudinous
and the present two CD + booklet set
is completely at one with their ambitions
which are both idealistic and market-aware.
The format of the set
is two CDs in a single width case plus
a 130 page booklet all in a card slipcase.
The book is by eminent
and lively American critic Barrymore
Scherer who, across sixteen concise
chapters, surveys the period from the
Mayflower through the Europe-tribute
years to the two world wars and onwards
to the growing academic and concert
confidence of the post-war period.
It's an overwhelmingly
rich canvas and can only be skated over
but Scherer does a respectable job even
if he has his blindspots.
Broadway and musicals,
bandstands, marching bands, and piano-stool
sentimentalists all get their place.
Cowell and Antheil put in appearances
but not Ornstein. Scherer is off the
mark in not even mentioning Piston's
symphonies. Piston is myopically represented
by the Incredible Flutist an overrated
work anyway. Hanson and Barber get a
mention but there no room found for
Giannini or Flagello.
Schuman's symphonies
might was well not have been written.
I find that utterly bewildering. On
the other hand Scherer quite adroitly
presents the first three Creston symphonies.
Babbitt, Cage and Partch
get a mention but nothing for Nancarrow
or Lamonte Young
Opera: Thankfully Scherer
mentions Barber’s Vanessa and
also throws in a reference to the same
composer’s Antony and Cleopatra which
I rather hope Naxos will favour when
they can find a worthy production. Much
the same would go for Lee Hoiby's opera
Summer and Smoke. Scherer brings
things bang up to date with a mention
of the intended premiere of Picker's
An American Tragedy after Theodore
Dreiser. This is to appear at the Met
later this year (2005).
I was delighted to
see that Scherer spent time on the most
enjoyable and masterly contributor to
American musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim.
Let’s have some Naxos recordings of
the complete Sweeney Todd, Into
the Woods and A Little Night
Music.
The last chapter surveys
the 'current' scene with helpful observations
on the music of Crumb, Earle Brown,
Lou Harrison, Foss, Bolcom (his superb
Songs of Innocence and Experience
recently issued on Naxos), Harbison,
Coates, Schwantner, Rochberg (whose
death has just been announced), Hartke,
Liebermann, Torke, Libby Larsen, Meredith
Monk and Zwillich. I am a little discomfited
to see the women composers lumped into
the final paragraph as if a ghetto afterthought.
However overall what
you have here is not at all anonymous
or bland. Scherer’s cuts a very personal,
provocative and readable survey.
The rest of the book
lists composers by name with dates and
places of birth and death. There’s a
map showing places of birth. There’s
also a useful timeline with contemporary
events set against musical events. A
list of suggested further listening
is drawn only from the Naxos catalogue.
That’s one place where the commercial
dimension obtrudes.
The book is dotted
with photos and plates of the composers.
The text keys explicitly to particular
tracks on the CDs
When it comes to the
music on the two discs you can't fault
Naxos for their exhaustive use of the
CD medium: look at the playing times.
The recordings are
all sourced from the company’s burgeoning
and still extending ‘American Classics’
line.
The 2 CDs take the
music chronologically. We launch with
the undigested influences of Wagner
and Weber in Fry's overture Macbeth.
Gottschalk's Festa Criolla is
fun if a little too foxy for the Hot
Springs Music Festival orchestra. It
from his Symphony: A Night in the
Tropics once an exclusive fixture
of the Vox catalogue. The brooding then
glittering Macdowell Piano Concerto
No. 2 finale becomes Tchaikovskian and
rumbustious as things progress. Foote's
Piano Quartet smiles optimistically
in a Schumann-Grieg-Dvořák
mood-set. Chadwick's Angel
of Death again touches on Schumann
(First and Fourth Symphonies) with a
twist of Elgarian nobility and Froissart
gallantry to add spice. The Ukraine
Orchestra tackle the third movement
of his Fourth Symphony - a work memorably
recorded in Karl Krueger's SPAMH series
in the 1960s. This gurgles and chortles
along in good mood - more of a suite
than a symphony in mood. Amy Beach's
Gaelic Symphony is left to one
side in favour of her Piano Concerto
from which we get the Largo - somewhere
between Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and
Dvořák's
Serenade for Wind Instruments. Griffes
- as much a great known and unknown
as George Butterworth in England - is
represented by the gently Debussian
Prelude No. 2. There's no Farwell here
(shame!) but we do have the work of
another Indianist, Charles Cadman.
His From the Land of the Sky Blue
Water is
lullingly sentimental, recalling the
native Indian work of Coleridge Taylor
and with a restful Dvořákian trill.
Ives is seen as the great revolutionary
but his Second Symphony is much closer
to Brahms and Dvořák - very successful
it is too. Ives shook off the heavy
cloak of imbibed tradition for The
Unanswered Question which, in its
quiet mystery and hieratic language,
links back to RVW's Tallis Fantasia
and in the high-priestly oratory
of the trumpet to Scriabin's Poem
of Ecstasy. This work also looks
forward to Barber's Adagio and
to Franz Schmidt's Fourth Symphony which
is also opened and closed by an ikonic
trumpet singing of nostalgia and disillusion.
Ives’ transformation of rowdy raucous
Broadway and rat-a-tat popular tawdry,
Sousa gone to seed, can be heard in
the Country Band March. We get
some real billowy and bombastic
Sousa in King Cotton. CD1 ends
with Peskanov's knockabout exuberance
in Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag.
CD2 kicks off with
a respectable but not irresistible Gershwin
Cuban Overture - still you can
smell the cigars and taste the sea salt
on the promenade. Antheil's Symphony
for Five (wind) Instruments is busy
and just a touch Stravinskian-heartless.
The Spanish Waltz from Piston's
Incredible Flutist adopts the
grand swagger and recalls Barber's Souvenirs
with a great dollop of Massenet
along the way. Pity though that Piston
is not represented by something from
the Second Symphony (maybe the adagio
or the explosive finale). Schuman suffers
in the same way with the Chester
movement from New England Triptych;
how much better a movement from the
Violin Concerto would have been. Chester
is trivial Schuman by comparison.
Copland is representatively rendered
by the finale from his Billy the
Kid suite - all gentle evening air
and elegies. Judd and the NZSO do an
excellent job here rising to the grand
oratory of the close. In much the same
crepuscular mood we hear the introduction
to Barber's Knoxville - touchingly
done by Alsop and the RSNO and intelligently
and sensitively sung by Karina Gauvin.
Big gear-change for Confrey's Kitten
on the Keys played by the miraculous
Eteri Andjaparadze playing pianola-cheeky.
Speaking of crashed gear-changes we
also hear Cage's metronomically sustained
Totem ancestor played by Boris
Berman on prepared piano. Bernstein's
murderously businesslike Tonight
melts direct from planned mayhem
into a crackingly sung and propelled
love song. Schuller's Piano Trio presents
the strong vein in dissonance and self-regarding
modernism. It was a movement that swept
old-fashioned music and audiences from
the radio waves and concert halls in
the period 1946-1985. The same applies
to the fragmented dissolution represented
by Carter's Piano Concerto. Now there's
a composer whose language changed dramatically:
from his early American idealism-lyricism
of the Pocahontas Suite and Symphony
to the dissonance and avant-garde frolics
of The Symphony in Three Movements
and the rest of his mature works.
I recall the concerto from an RCA recording
made by Jacob Lateiner in the 1960s.
On the other hand George Rochberg's
Violin Concerto is a miracle of inventively
intense accessibility without sacrificing
20th century context. This has something
of the impelled drive of the Schuman
violin concerto. a deeply impressive
work. The minimalist line is heard in
the memorable propulsive finale of Glass's
Violin Concerto and in Adams' Short
Ride in a Fast Machine which has
the same woodblock rhythmic drive -
surely imbibed from the finale of Schuman
3? Listen if you doubt me and at the
same time discover in the Schuman one
of the great works of the last century.
Torke's trilling and tintinnabulatory
Rapture is for percussion and
orchestra. Its snappy jazziness and
positive zest recalls the zippy nervy
optimism of Constant Lambert's Rio
Grande and Horoscope. Hovhaness's
Angel of Light, with its brass
oratory and trembling pulse, proclaims
the voice of the many romanticists who
wrote on at the periphery and who are
now gaining ascendancy.
All these extracts,
each presented as a complete strand
of music rather than part movements
or bleeding chunks, are referenced to
the CD from which they were taken and
the tracks and artists are fully listed
in the Scherer book.
By the way the essay
stays in the book and does not stray
onto the CDs. This is not one of those
read essays to be played back by the
listener. You must read the book and
listen to the CDs which are given over
exclusively to the music.
Where will the Naxos
Classics series go next? I fervently
want them to return to Roy Harris with
Kuchar in the Ukraine after their superb
CD of symphonies 7 and 9. We need all
the Harris symphonies but priority to
The Folksong (No. 4), then 1,
3, 5, 6 10-14 - in that order. Also
the line will be incomplete without
a good production of some Sondheim -
how about a Sweeney Todd and
an Into the Woods. We also need
Farwell's orchestral music especially
his massive Gott Symphony and
the tone poem Gods of the Mountains.
Then we need CDs of the orchestral music
of Grant Fletcher, Edgar Stillman Kelley
(especially his The Pit and the Pendulum)
and Cecil Effinger (the symphonies and
major choral works such as The Invisible
Fire and Paul of Tarsus).
Nathaniel Dett's Ordering of Moses
oratorio is a superb work lying unrecorded
as also is Dett’s Chariot Jubilee.
The Violin Concerto by Edward Burlingame
Hill and the symphonies of Frederick
Converse need attention as well. Their
catalogue will be seen as desperately
incomplete while we lack a Schuman Third
Symphony - an epochal work in the American
cavalcade. Then a good Hanson Second
Symphony coupled with No. 6 and later
perhaps No. 4 or No. 5. While we are
on the subject of Hanson let's have
a modern recording of the opera Merry
Mount. We have some impression of
it from the 1930s original production
issued by Naxos back in 1999. Of course
we must have more Hovhaness, the unrecorded
symphonies (plenty to be picked off
yet), the Violin Concerto written for
Menuhin and the oratorio The Revelation
of St Paul.
After this venture
can we hope for Lewis Foreman being
invited by Naxos to do a similar job
for British music.
This is a handsome
but opinionated, wrongheaded but satisfying,
infuriating but intriguing set. Read
it, be encouraged to explore but don’t
limit yourself to Mr Scherer's horizons.
Once you discover the symphonies of
Hanson, Schuman and Piston, of Ray Luke,
Cecil Effinger and Grant Fletcher you
will realise what a varied and comprehensively
rewarding world of experience American
music represents.
Rob Barnett
NAXOS
8.558164-65 [78:39 + 79:22] 
