This is most welcome; three concerted works for cello and orchestra
by Americans never heard outside the USA. We haven’t had much
chance to hear Perry’s work because it is brand new and was premièred
only four months before this recording was made.
I
recently reviewed a Naxos disk of film music by Perry and I
was not impressed for much of it seemed trite. This Concerto,
however, is quite different. In five movements, each introduced
by the soloist, the music, which was commissioned to celebrate
the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first
permanent colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, commemorates
certain events and places, but let’s not worry about that now.
It’s the music which matters and this is a delightful divertissement
of a piece, light and frothy, with good tunes and sparkling
orchestrations. There’s nothing profound or searching about
it but it communicates, and that’s half the battle these days!
Schuman’s
Song of Orpheus was written for Leonard Rose, who gave
the première in 1962 and recorded it,
with the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by George Szell on 11
January 1964 (Sony (Japan) SRCR 2560). It’s a one movement meditation
on the famous lines by Shakespeare, preceding this performance
actress Jane Alexander reads the poem. Schuman’s work is not
as vivacious as the poem, being quite dark at times, especially
the opening which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Orpheus
and his lute making trees and the mountaintops that freeze,
and I don’t feel any connection, anywhere in the work, with
the concept of killing care and grief of heart, but the
end could be said to mirror the final lines “…fall asleep
or hearing, die”. Perhaps we should forget the poem and
understand the music as a very beautiful evocation for soloist
and orchestra; it’s quite approachable and it doesn’t have any
of the slightly academic feel, and angularity, which some of
Schuman’s music displays. Quite simply, this is a superb work
for cello and smallish orchestra.
Virgil
Thomson’s Concerto is rather more serious than one might
expect, and it’s in a very discernable classical form. There
have been other recordings over the years, most notably by Luigi
Silva (the dedicatee of the work) with the Janssen Symphony
of Los Angeles, Werner Janssen (coupled with a Suite for Orchestra
from the opera The Mother of Us All (CBS AML 4468 – 1973)) and
this is the second recording of it on CD in recent years. Each
of the three movements have descriptive titles. The first is
Rider on the Plains and it’s open air music, one can
almost see the man on horseback, his Stetson on his head, riding
off into the sunset after a job well done. The slow movement
is a set of variations on a Southern Hymn Tune and it is stately
and measured, but never sombre. The finale is named Children’s
Games and it is skittish and great fun – with a prominent
part for xylophone. As the Concerto fell out of the repertoire
– Pierre Fournier and Anthony Pini had championed it – Thomson
wondered if the solo part was too difficult but a performance
as committed as this proves that, in the long run, Thomson was
right not to tamper with the piece.
Soloist
Yehuda Hanani, who plays brilliantly throughout, has a special
connection with all of the music on this disk. He gave the première of the Perry, studied with Leonard Rose for whom Schuman wrote his
work and he plays the cello used by Paul Olefsky at the first
performance of Thomson’s Concerto in 1950. He is ably
partnered by the RTÉ Orchestra under its former Principal Guest
Conductor. The notes are very good and the recording, if a little
dry, is clear with a good balance between soloist and orchestra.
This
is a very interesting disk of American cello concertos and, as
with so many of Naxos’s disks of neglected music, it makes us
yearn to hear the pieces in the flesh. This is a real bargain
for anyone wanting to investigate some newer music which they
might otherwise, at top price, ignore. Enjoy it.
Bob Briggs
