George Frederick McKay’s
music is not likely to be familiar to
those outside the USA unless they have
already heard the other two Naxos discs
issued over the last eighteen months.
Enterprising Naxos must be credited
with giving McKay’s reputation one of
its biggest ever boosts, certainly since
the composer’s death thirty five years
ago.
So for those who do
not know his music, what is it like?
Well, the Violin Concerto, the main
work here, is late-romantic in style;
very late. It is not unlike Korngold’s
better known work of slightly earlier
(1937) which was revised five years
after McKay’s in 1945. McKay spent nearly
all his life in his native Washington
State, most of it as a university professor
in Seattle, a relative musical backwater.
Korngold, Austrian émigré,
together with so many other musicians
from the German-speaking world, was
living just down the coast in the service
of Hollywood. Their compositional styles
are not a million miles away. One of
the most obvious differences is that
the textures of McKay’s concerto are
less thick than those in the Korngold
work and there are fewer of Korngold’s
squelchy romantic harmonies. Some might
regard that as a virtue. However, I
will stick my neck out and suggest that
those who enjoy Korngold’s Violin Concerto
are bound to be impressed by McKay’s.
In spite of the relative
clarity of texture, it could be possible,
in performance, to over-romanticise
the music with, for example, indulgent
lush string tone. The Ukrainians do
not do this – their strings are fairly
thin in tone but I do not mean that
pejoratively. The whole performance
is convincing: conductor, soloist and
orchestra in accord interpretively.
Brian Reagin, a man who manages to combine
a distinguished solo career with the
leadership of the North Carolina Symphony
Orchestra, gives a most persuasive account
of a work that I have never heard before.
The Suite on Sixteenth
Century Hymn Tunes is a lighter
work for double string orchestra. It
started life as an organ piece. Although
based on themes of Frenchman Jean Bourgeois,
to English ears it will have something
of Tudor pastiche about it, with hints
of Granville Bantock (1868-1946). On
hearing the opening modal-sounding Méditation
movement, listeners cannot help
being reminded of Vaughan Williams’
famous Tallis Fantasia. I found
it delightful listening in its own right.
The Sinfonietta,
like the concerto, is in classical fast-slow-fast
form, the first movement characterised
by rhythmic drive and a certain neo-classic
rigour. The second movement, pastoral
in style, has a richness of both texture
and ideas.
So far we have had
three works that are, within the context
of a conservative style for the period,
quite different in nature. Put these
together with the music of Naxos’s other
two McKay discs showing native influences
such as Jazz and pop, then we have a
composer displaying an eclecticism of
which Leonard Bernstein might have been
proud. What Bernstein knew of his music
though, I have no idea. Perhaps someone
could tell me.
The final work is a
single movement lasting a quarter of
an hour. It is a programmatic, rhapsodic,
pastoral piece evoking the stirring
of spring over the "brooding landscape"
of the plains. On first hearing, it
seems to me a distinguished example
of the nature genre. The use of a piano
is innovative, especially in the fact
that it plays the role of a meadowlark.
Western music has always associated
birds with wind instruments, specifically
reed ones. The piano tends to play in
high register to suggest elevation and
flightiness. Mind you, this might be
pragmatism rather than innovation. The
work was a commission to celebrate the
centennial of the Steinway Piano Company.
It is a typical Naxos
touch that in leading a revival of the
music of an American composer from North-West
U.S.A., a Ukrainian Orchestra is employed,
recording in Kiev which is as near as
dammit on the opposite side of world
from Seattle. One might have had doubts
about this, but the players, under their
American conductor John McLaughlin Williams,
appear astonishingly at home with this
unfamiliar music. Having already recorded
one orchestral disc, they must now be
considered world experts in the playing
of McKay’s music. Congratulations to
them and to Naxos for this deserved
revival.
John Leeman
see also
George
Frederick McKAY (1899-1970)
Caricature
Dance Suite (1924)From My Tahoe
Window - Summer Moods and Patterns,
Americanistic Etude (1924) An April
Suite (1924) Dance Suite No. 2 (1938)
Dancing in a Dream (1945) Excerpts
from Five Songs for Soprano (1964)
Every Flower That Ever Grew (1969)
Suite for Viola and Piano (1948) 
William Logan, Logan Skelton, Sanford
Margolis (piano) Joan Morris (mezzo-soprano)
Mahoko Eguchi (viola) rec July 1999-Feb
2001, The Brookwood Studio, Ann Arbour,
MI, USA DDD
NAXOS AMERICAN CLASSICS 8.559143
[64.00] [RB]
