This
disc provides a generous quantity of 21 pieces, all of them
either dedicated to or arranged by the great American violinist
Maud Powell (1867-1920), a hugely significant figure in the
history of music on that continent. Not to put too fine a point
on it, Powell was single-handedly responsible for establishing
the violin recital in North America, in many ways as pioneering
a person as those who were striking out west in the spirit of
exploration for whatever motive. It clearly ran in the family
for her uncle explored the Grand Canyon, headed the US Geological
Survey and Bureau of Ethnology, and founded the National Geographic
Society. She was clearly a formidable violinist with a huge
repertoire, capable of entertaining and communicating at the
highest level while in no way reluctant to let her hair down
with arrangements of Dixie and the like as encores. One can
understand the review which wrote of her ‘most intimate and
personal appeal to her audience’ from the stylish mix and wide-ranging
emotional levels in the music on this CD. Her biographer, Karen
A Shaffer - president and founder of the Maud Powell Society
for Music and Education and whose comprehensive, masterly book
Maud Powell, Pioneer American Violinist is highly recommended
by this reviewer - has written detailed yet highly readable
booklet notes, while Naxos have issued her complete recordings
on four CDs, so Powell is getting the exposure she is long overdue.
Powell dedicated herself to performing music by American composers
and rejected criticism for so doing because ‘American artists
owe it to their country to play the best examples of American
music. How can we expect to have any national music if someone
does not play these works in public?’ She went on to point out
that foreign musicians had no intent other than to take money
out of America. ‘They have not served us vitally, they are not
in sympathy with our institutions, and they rarely play works
by American composers, so I must try to do what I can for American
music’.
While many of the usual suspects on this disc are
to be found among composers featured in recitals of Powell’s
day such as Chopin, Dvořák, Sibelius, or Massenet, it also
provides new encounters with some American composers and arrangers
from the last decades of the 19th century through
to the end of the First World War. Amy Beach - as pioneering
a woman composer as Powell was for women violinists - may already
be familiar but less so is the long-lived Cecil Burleigh, a
composer and violinist who studied in Berlin and later with
Ernest Bloch and Leopold Auer, before joining the teaching staff
of the University of Wisconsin – Naxos have a recital of his
music on 8.559061. Herman Bellstedt Jr., a cornet virtuoso in
John Philip Sousa's band, turned the minstrel song from the
Civil War (Dixie) into a formidable solo violin showpiece
for Powell, worthy, as she herself stated, of the great violin
virtuoso Paganini. The strangely named Hart Pease Danks - one
can see why initials HP were preferred - takes the more sentimental
path, while Romances are provided by the German-born but Texas-based
violinist, conductor and composer Carl Venth, and Henry Holden
Huss (founder of the American Guild of Organists). Max Liebling
typifies the patriotic fervour prevalent at the turn of the
20th century with his Fantasia on Sousa themes, ending
predictably - and why not? - with a stirring excerpt from The
Stars and Stripes forever. Powell played it as an encore
with Sousa’s band on a tour to Britain in 1905. One of the most
striking works is by the woman composer Marion Bauer. It is
an evocative tone picture of a journey undertaken by Powell
and subsequently described by her to the composer, who promptly
came up with a work which staggered Powell by its pictorial
accuracy, as if the composer had been there too. Of huge significance
was Powell’s deliberate decision to cross the colour barrier
by including African-American spirituals in her recital programmes.
One such spiritual, Deep River, which Powell heard in
a piano transcription by Coleridge Taylor, so inspired her that
she decided to create her own. J(ohn) Rosamond Johnson - not,
as the booklet states, James, who was John’s brother James Weldon
Johnson - was a black composer and singer, responsible for editing
four important collections of spirituals and folksongs. He urged
Powell to arrange Nobody knows the trouble I see, which
she did and played at a benefit concert for his New York School
Settlement for Coloured People in the autumn of 1919. A year
later she died of a heart attack on stage in St Louis, playing
this very piece, a moving self-epitaph.
Rachel
Barton Pine is admirably accompanied – and where required sounding
truly orchestral - by Matthew Hagle. Pine sets out her stall with
fine playing, commanding technical skill and stylish phrasing.
One cannot but fail to regard her and Karen Shaffer as a modern-day
pioneer ŕ la Powell. Without going too far into the realms
of sentimentality - a little may be vital, but too much puts one
immediately in the land of parody - her warmth of tone, impish
humour (there are some charming scherzi to enjoy) and fiery
passion, keep this long but highly enjoyable recital on the move.
I had anticipated dipping in to this disc, but found, like reading
any truly good book, I could not put it down or, in listening
terms, switch it off.
Christopher Fifield
