This imposing recording of two leading American composers came out on LP in 1984 and has not been reissued, to my knowledge.The record didn't receive much coverage at the time - I couldn't find a review in my usual sources - despite being beautifully performed and recorded.
I actually did not know of its existence until a reader alerted me to it a month or so ago. I then acquired it for the blog.
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| Leonard Slatkin |
The record presents two works commissioned by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Leonard Slatkin, its music director from 1979 to 1996.
Happily, almost all of the principals involved here are still alive - Slatkin (b. 1944), composer Joseph Schwantner (b. 1943), poet Águeda Pizarro (b. 1941) and soprano Lucy Shelton (b. 1944). Composer William Schuman, from an earlier generation, died in 1992.
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| Joseph Schwantner |
Schwantner, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1979, has been associated with Yale for many years. He is, however, at pains to distance himself from so-called "academic" music. He described his journey as composer to Bruce Duffie as follows: "In my early work ... I was interested in serial music and the most kind of demanding musical rhetoric played by highly specialized chamber ensembles, and there was a very limited audience for that kind of music, obviously. I’m part of a generation of composers, who, in the mid-seventies really began to look around and realize that a way to move forward was not only to abandon the past, but to embrace it ... Academia gives you skills and techniques and procedures, and a body of work that is important, but at some point in time you have to find out who you are as an artist, and move beyond your academic training."
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| Águeda Pizarro |
His work Magabunda is a setting of four magical realist poems by the Colombian-American writer Águeda Pizarro. She is director of the Rayo Museum dedicated to Latin American drawing and engraving, in recognition of the painter Ómar Rayo, located in Roldanillo, Colombia.
The music (and poetry) is highly colorful and evocative, featuring a huge orchestra and a virtuosic singer in Lucy Shelton who specializes in contemporary music. True to his credo above, Schwantner makes use of an enormous fund of techniques, with some vocal passages harking back to Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire of 1912. There is nothing simple about this music, although some critics like to complain because it is more immediately communicative than Elliott Carter's intricate compositions.
Here is Andrew Porter in his book Musical Events: "The later works of his [Schwantner's] I've heard have struck me as pretty empty - conventional responses to poetic texts, carried out, admittedly, with confidence, technical skill, and an able command of color." In the same passage he took Slatkin to task for preferring such composers as Rouse, Adams and Reich to Carter's formidable works. "The 'new romanticism' draws close to old commercialism and old laziness," he insisted.
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| Lucy Shelton |
To me, these are preferences, not matters of being "commercial" or "lazy." Goodness knows, this record was not "commercial." It is, however, communicative. Here is Shelton describing an audience member's reaction to one of Schwantner's settings of Pizarro's poems: "One time I did a new piece by Schwantner that had a very, very beautiful poem about a mother and a daughter. After, this woman came up to me in tears and said, 'I’ve been having so much trouble with the relationship with my daughter, and that piece just hit me. Thank you so much.' If you strike feelings that way, you know that it’s worth doing."
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| William Schuman |
William Schuman was one of the most distinguished composers of the 20th century. His American Hymn (Orchestral Variations on an Original Melody) is quite a contrast to Schwantner's work. Annotator Philip Ramey thought that American Hymn "is one of the highpoints of his [Schuman's] output - fresh, eloquent, continually inventive, impressive in architecture and in detail (among which might be mentioned the striking use of the cornet [in this recording, trumpet], both in the initial statement of the hymnlike theme and in the third section's amusingly bizarre waltz episode)."
Schuman himself wrote, "The development is a continuum - a huge arc, encompassing six discernible sections - that goes from the first note to the last without interruption." Ramey explains further: "A natural orchestrator, he produces symphonic works whose most notable features are long breathed melody, a bustling, often quirky rhythmic life, and arresting brass writing - music which, like that of his teacher Roy Harris, is imbued with a kind of no-nonsense masculinity that seems especially American in character. Schuman's instrumentation is seldom coloristic; rather, it is structural, best thought of as a part of the ongoing compositional process."
The works are handled remarkably well by the St. Louis Symphony in a glowing early digital recording by the team of Marc Aubort and Johanna Nickrenz, who had few peers.
