Hanson Conducts Piston, Riegger, Hovhaness and Cowell

Howard Hanson

Composer-conductor Howard Hanson was legendary for his devotion to American music, as exemplified in the "American Music Festival Series" of LPs he conducted for Mercury in the mid-1950s.

We've been slowly making our way through the series. Today we have two albums - one devoted to Walter Piston's Symphony No. 3, the other to works by Wallingford Riegger, Alan Hovhaness and Henry Cowell.

Piston - Symphony No. 3

The third symphony of Walter Piston (1894-1976) is a distinguished work that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

The critic Alfred Frankenstein has described it as follows: "[T]his is a very profound symphony, one of the most important of modern times ... The sonorities of the slow movements are very large and resonant, with strong emphasis on the darker colors; to this is contrasted a singularly vital, brilliant scherzo, and a broad, fine, march-like finale. The whole thing is mature, ripe, reasoned, and elemental in feeling; it is a symphony in the grand style and the great tradition. Hanson plays it with full, keen appreciation of its stature, and Mercury's engineers have given the music their best."

Walter Piston in 1948

The recording comes from 1954, and was made - like most if not all Hanson's recordings - with the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra in the Eastman Theater. The sound is very similar to the other recordings in the series - clear and just a bit astringent.

Piston's best known work is the ballet suite The Incredible Flutist, which has appeared here in two different recordings by the Boston Pops and Arthur Fiedler - from 1939 and from 1953.

LINK to Piston Symphony No. 3

Music by Riegger, Hovhaness and Henry Cowell

Hanson tended to be conservative musically, and even when he programmed such figures as Wallingford Riegger and Henry Cowell, he was apt to choose their less radical works.

Which is not to say these compositions were without merit. The longest item on this record is the Symphony No. 4 by Cowell (1897-1965). This work is in his later style, markedly less violent and experimental than works using such devices as the tone clusters that made him famous (or notorious).

Henry Cowell

Cowell's colleague Virgil Thomson wrote: "No other composer of our time has produced a body of works so radical and so normal, so penetrating and so comprehensive. Add to this massive production his long and influential career as a pedagogue, and Henry Cowell's achievement becomes impressive indeed. There is no other quite like it."

Another fellow composer, Arthur Berger, said the Cowell symphony "is one of his most successful and congenial achievements. It contains the evocations of early American music that have become a recognizable trademark of Cowell’s style, but never, to my knowledge, has he handled them with more polish. The work is one of the finest examples of the genre that, for want of a better name, we may call 'American neo-Gothic.'"

Wallingford Riegger

The New Dance by Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961) is, again, a conventional work. In its initial form it was part of a longer piece for piano four-hands and percussion written for the Humphrey-Weidman dance group. The composer later orchestrated the final section, which is what Hanson recorded.

Critical opinions were mixed, with Berger calling it slick and Peter Hugh Reed, conversely, writing: "This perorative fragment, based throughout on à single rhythmic patter which juxtaposes the rhumba and conga beats is a stunning tour de force that needs no reference to its primary context for maximal effect."

Alan Hovhaness

Critics tended to be dismissive of Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000), often accusing him of producing meandering, innocuous music. Reed was more positive than most: "The Hovhaness effort, subtitled Arevakal after the Armenian word for the Lenten season, is à recent (1951) opus of a kind with every other composition for which this singular figure is known to concert audiences. That is to say, briefly, that it mingles the modes and melodies of the composer’s homeland with a kind of post-Scriabin theosophy." Audiences did and do find Hovhaness' works attractive, and they are pleasant to hear.

This second LP dates from 1953, and displays sound very similar to the Piston symphony.

Hovhaness's St. Vartan Symphony and The Flowering Peach are available on the blog, both newly remastered. Also on the blog is a suite called Images in Flight, with both Cowell and Hovhaness (and Paul Creston) making use of the Eastern Airlines theme in a promotional effort shepherded by Andre Kostelanetz. The resulting LP ican be found here, along with an unrelated PanAm promotional record.

LINK to the Hanson recording of Riegger, Hovhaness and Cowell

Previous Installments in the American Music Festival Series

• Morton Gould's Latin American Symphonette; Samuel Barber's School for Scandal Overture, Adagio for Strings, Essay for Orchestra No. 1

• Barber's Symphony No. 1; Hanson's Sinfonia Sacra and Cherubic Hymn

• Music for Democracy: Randall Thompson's The Testament of Freedom and Hanson's Songs from Drum Taps.

• Edward MacDowell's Second Indian Suite

• Americana for Solo Winds and String Orchestra, including Hanson's Serenade for Flute, Strings and Harp

• Hanson's Symphony No. 4, along with an alternative recording led by Dean Dixon

• American Music for String Orchestra with works by Mennini, Foote and Canning

• Music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Charles Martin Loeffler