Two Views of Piston's Second Symphony

Walter Piston

Friend and longtime supporter David Federman asked me if I had the American Recording Society's release of the Symphony No. 2 by Walter Piston. As it happens, I do, and that fine disk is the basis of today's post. To it, I've added a 1970 recording of the symphony by the Boston Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, which is coupled with a strong performance of William Schuman's Violin Concerto with Paul Zukofsky as soloist.

The ARS Recording

The American Recording Society was a grant-funded operation of the early 1950s that promoted the composers of this country.

ARS-1 was given over to the second symphony of Walter Piston, a most talented composer who was associated with Harvard for many years.

Conducting is the American expatriate Dean Dixon, who went on to helm quite a few ARS releases.

Dean Dixon

As was the standard practice with ARS, the orchestra was only identified as the "American Recording Society Orchestra." However, it was generally understood that the music was taped in Vienna. Discographies sometimes identify the ensemble as the Vienna Symphony, but I think it's likely that the forces were assembled on a freelance basis from the musicians of the city's various orchestras.

ARS could hardly have made a better choice to lead off its releases. Piston's symphony, written in 1943, is a powerful, gorgeous work with a particularly affecting slow movement. The Viennese forces do sound somewhat thin in the strings, but play with a high degree of commitment in this impressive performance from 1951.

In her liner notes to the recording, Sheila Keats described the work as follows: "The Symphony is notable for its clarity and lyric warmth; direct in expression, it reveals an uncomplicated texture and structure which grow easily and inevitably out of the clearly delineated melodic materials. As one has come to expect from a composer of Piston's contrapuntal gifts, it is a primarily linear work."

LINK to ARS recording

The DG Recording

The ARS was the first recording of the Piston symphony. It waited 19 years for its second, which was to be among the first discs led by wunderkind Michael Tilson Thomas, then the assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony.

DG must have been excited to have him - the sleeve note devotes nearly as much space to him than to either of the compositions on the LP.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Here is what the critic Alfred Frankenstein of High Fidelity had to say about the disc:

Two boy wonders of recent years team up here to provide a second time around for two American works of thirty years ago. The Piston comes off marvelously well, the Schuman rather less so.

People tend to dismiss Walter Piston as another academic composer, but his Second Symphony, written in 1942, proves that one can be a Harvard professor and a great creator of music as well. The symphony has everything, in generous measure, that its tradition requires: themes that appeal to the ear and command the respect of the mind, forms of the utmost clarity and logic, and a sense of drama in the building of proportions that confers dignity on rhetoric. This, in short, is a symphony to place alongside those of Ives and Vaughan Williams - the foremost works of their kind this century has produced.

William Schuman's Violin Concerto, composed in 1947 but revised in 1959, is in two large movements, each subdivided into several short sections. The slow sections are extremely effective, lyrical, and beautiful, but the fast sections often come embarrassingly close to the violin concertos of Prokofiev - and over and beyond that they contain a lot of mere fiddling. Zukofsky fiddles magnificently, to be sure, but one expects more musical justification for technical display than is offered here, especially from a composer of Schuman's stature.

William Schuman

Paul Zukofsky

I am rather more kindly disposed to the Schuman than was Frankenstein. Lester Trimble of Stereo Review summed up its appeal: "William Schuman's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is a magnificent work, with some of the most compelling and deeply affecting music, particularly in its slow, philosophical sections, that I have heard in any contemporary piece, by a composer of whatever nationality... Young Paul Zukofsky's performance of the Schuman solo-violin part is first-rate, too. His tone, as always, is a bit wiry, but his technique is spectacularly agile, and in this performance he finds access to more than his usual warmth."

Comparing the two performances of the Piston symphony, the Dixon recording is more strongly characterized than the Boston reading - although the latter's slow movement is beautifully handled. The sound of the ARS disc is reasonably good. The Boston recording is of course much better.

LINK to DG recording

Michael Tilson Thomas and Gershwin

The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who had died age 81, was devoted to the music of George Gershwin. He came by that interest naturally - both his father and grandfather were friends with the composer.

So when MTT (as he was known) began recording as a young conductor, it was natural for him to turn to the Gershwin catalog for material.

Today we will examine some of the fruits of his exploration, in the form of his 1976 LP of the Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. An added attraction is MTT's 1983 recording of the Second Rhapsody, in its original form.

For more about Thomas' life and career, the New York Times had a very good obituary (gift link). Here, it's sufficient to note that he was a gifted conductor, pianist, composer and orchestra builder who was widely admired.

Rhapsody in Blue

The Rhapsody in Blue recording was something of a technical feat at the time. The idea of Columbia producers Tom Shepard and Andrew Kazdin, it featured the original "jazz band" orchestration as conducted by Thomas, accompanying Gershwin himself, with the performance taken from a piano roll the composer had made.

Producing the recording was a chore. The solo piano part on the roll had been augmented by additional notes designed to represent the accompaniment. So the producers laboriously covered over each of those punched accompaniment notes on the roll, leaving just the solo part. MTT then conducted the band while the player piano did its thing.

George Gershwin

The result is surprisingly effective. Gershwin's brisk pace is different from the somewhat sentimentalized readings that are often heard, and the pungent original Ferde Grofé orchestration is right in step with that approach. The members of the "Columbia Jazz Band" are unidentified except for clarinetist Charles Russo, who is credited with the famous opening clarinet glissando.

The recording is vivid, although the solo instruments had a tendency to pop out of the background in a different acoustic from the piano. I've added a small amount of natural reverb to the band (not the piano) to address this issue.

The Rhapsody of course premiered in 1924 in a performance with Paul Whiteman's orchestra. The composer and Whiteman's band then recorded the work in truncated form for Victor. Because the performance was abbreviated, and because it was done via a recording horn rather than the electrical method that would soon come into use, it has been at times overlooked. That recording appeared on this blog some time ago, and I have now revisited the sound, which is one of the best acoustic recordings I have heard. You can find it here. You'll notice that Gershwin is less relentless in this performance than he is on the piano roll - although fast tempos were more the norm than the exception in his pianism. That post linked above also includes several of his piano recordings, which tend to be quite brisk.

Gershwin also recorded the Rhapsody electrically a few years later, but I believe that was with the expanded "symphonic" arrangement that Grofé had prepared.

An American in Paris

Thomas and Columbia used the New York Philharmonic for the recording of Gershwin's 1928 piece An American in Paris. Rightfully so - the conductor of one of the orchestra's, predecessors, Walter Damrosch of the New York Symphony had commissioned the work. This time the composer wrote his own, highly effective orchestrations, auto horns and all.

Michael Tilson Thomas in 1985

An American in Paris is not afflicted by the urtext confusion that besets Rhapsody in Blue and its successor, the Second Rhapsody.

MTT conducts a charming, idiomatic performance of the piece, which was well recorded in Columbia's 30th Street Studio, a former church.

Gershwin himself appears on an early recording of An American in Paris, playing the celeste while Nathaniel Shilkret conducted. On that one - which can be heard on the same set as the acoustic Rhapsody - the Victor engineers emphasized the auto horns and xylophone to a distracting degree.

Second Rhapsody

Gershwin's unloved (not by me!) sequel to Rhapsody in Blue - the Second Rhapsody - started out as an assignment for the 1931 Janet Gaynor film Delicious. Gershwin was excited by the music he composed, which turned out to be much longer than was needed for the film. So he produced a cut down version for filmic use which came to be called Rhapsody in Rivets. Gershwin had the full Second Rhapsody recorded for his own purposes, and then it languished.

When the piece was finally published in the early 1950s, the publisher had had it reorchestrated by Robert McBride. So the original had seldom been heard until Thomas and Columbia had new parts made from the autograph score and recorded it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1982-83 sessions.

At the time of he release, MTT sat for an interview with David Patrick Stearns for High Fidelity, which turned into a gushing article in which Thomas claimed - somewhat incomprehensibly - to have a "Gershwin gyroscope" and the writer posited that MTT's was the first recording of Gershwin's original version.

Trouble was, it wasn't the first. Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski wrote the magazine to point out the composer's own run through, which had been released much later on. Also, Columbia - MTT's own label - had recorded the original version in 1949 with Oscar Levant and the Morton Gould Orchestra. Levant had championed the piece when it was nearly forgotten.

How does MTT compare with Levant? Well, the later version is certainly good and well worth hearing. But Oscar's is more strongly characterized and makes a better case for this fine music. It also provides a more truthful impression of an orchestra in a real acoustic, although the LA recording is certainly not bad.

The Levant-Gould version was one of the first records I ever posted, back in 2008. I've remastered the sound on that 10-inch LP, which includes the also-unloved "I Got Rhythm" Variations and the better regarded Three Preludes.

The interview and Jablonski riposte are included in the download, along with relevant reviews.

LINK to Michael Tilson Thomas recordings

LINK to Oscar Levant recording