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The Great American Symphony




The March 2015 issue of The Absolute Sound has an article by Mark Lehman called "The Great American Symphony" in which he nominates 9 symphonies for that title:

In his order, which is chronological and not by order of merit:

Ives Symphony 4
Hanson Symphony 2 "Romantic"
Barber Symphony 1
Harris Symphony 3
Schuman Symphony 5
Piston Symphony 2
Rochberg Symphony 2
Sessions Symphony 3
Fine Symphony

Lehman suggests recordings of these, all available on CD, but since normally I prefer to listen to vinyl I acquired LPs of all of these (pictured), and while not always his preferred recordings, all mentioned in the article. I had the Stokowski Ives already, and the others were easy to find.

I love this kind of curated approach - there is so much music out there, and time is limited, and while one doesn't always have to agree, a list like this is a great way to explore. I very much doubt if I would have gotten around to some- maybe even most - of these on my own and I'm very glad to have heard all of them.

Lehman does not offer his reasoning for his choices, per se, and it is interesting to see that the most recent composition, that of Irving Fine, was in 1962. Tragic story about Fine - he himself conducted this performance and then died a few weeks later of heart disease, just 47 years old. Also there are a couple of major names excluded - no Copland, no Diamond, no Bernstein, although Lenny looms large as performer of some of these works.

I have listened to all of them now at least once, and plan to listen again. Some very early thoughts:

Howard Hanson's Romantic Symphony (which I have known in the Slatkin recording for years) is the most accessible of these symphonies, and probably would have considered to be of greater stature if it had been composed at the turn of the century (the 20th, of course) rather than 1930....very tuneful, and really fun, and at this stage we shouldn't pay heed to the Hanson's reputation as a neo-romantic. I am planning to seek out his Symphony 3 as well.

I was surprised how lively and colorful Roger Sessions symphony 3 actually is. I look forward to further acquaintance with his work - probably next up will be the Concerto for Orchestra - I am unfortunately old enough to remember when that recording was first released.

Walter Piston's Second Symphony shows a real gift for melody, and I plan to seek out the 6th symphony for further hearing. Rochberg's symphony 2 is quite powerful - interesting that he later abandoned serial technique. His work in general seems to deserve to be better known. I would also use the term powerful to describe Barber's symphony 1. Barber is closer to being mainstream than these others, but we still don't hear enough of him.

Fine's symphony is almost cinematic - what a shame it is his only one. It is not perfect, but shows a tremendous amount of promise.

It is hard to know exactly what to think of Ives 4th symphony after a single hearing, but it is an amazing work for 1916....having said that, I cannot imagine anyone who responds to Holst's Planets to not have a positive response to the 3rd movement of the Ives work.

So of all of these works, I found myself responding the least to the Schuman 3rd - well constructed, but "academic" in nature - Schuman did not show any lyrical gift in this work. I actually enjoyed its disc mate more, the 5th symphony, but even so, I am not really tempted to explore a lot more. And my view of Roy Harris' 3rd, based on this hearing and a few others, is that it just might be overrated - it certainly ranked on the lower end of my reactions to these works after a single hearing -but note the qualification. At this stage, I don't feel a need to seek out further works of Harris, either.

The sound quality of the Columbia recordings is unfortunately not as good as that of the other labels, all of which were able to produce juicier sound. There is a grey dullness to the Columbia recordings that distracts from the music.

This has been an extremely interesting process for me. I do wish that our music directors would program some of these works more often. They deserve to be heard live and played by top-notch orchestras.


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  Kimber Kable  


Topic - The Great American Symphony - TGR 12:10:29 03/21/15 (41)

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