Roy Harris' Folk-Song Symphony

This interesting LP was transferred as the result of a request. It is a 1975 recording of Roy Harris' Folk-Song Symphony (Symphony No. 4), in a very good performance by the Utah Symphony and Utah Chorale under Maurice Abravanel. 

The symphony - really more of a choral suite - consists of settings from American songs collected by John and Alan Lomax's Cowhoy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads and Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag. It is a very enjoyable, and little known, example of Americana, dating from 1940. The release was timed for the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976.

Roy Harris

The work had been recorded once previously, by Vladimir Golschmann and Viennese forces in 1960 - but has not been revived for recording purposes, to my knowledge. I have the Golschmann LP if anyone is interested.

Like the Schubert one-act operas I have uploaded and a few other items, the Abravanel album is apparently SQ-encoded, but I haven't had quad equipment for a long time, so I can't confirm that.

Maurice Abravanel

Maurice Abravanel (1903-93), who led a fascinating life, was conductor of the Utah Symphony for 32 years, until 1979, when he retired. He made many recordings with the ensemble, whose profile he raised immeasurably.

Here's what Robert C. Marsh had to say about the Harris LP in High Fidelity: "British composers can write extended works for chorus and orchestra, call them symphonies, and get away with it, but I sense that this Roy Harris score has been needlessly put down over the years because of the presence of 'symphony' in its title. In the classical sense it is not a symphony at all. Folksongs do not invite thematic development and variation, and Harris is more interested in preserving the identity of his material than in treating it the way Beethoven treated that waltz by Diabelli. The idiom is the American nationalist style of the '30s and '40s. and you might mistake this for a Copland score of that period, since both men were working in this spirit.

"The songs are all familiar, and the settings are craftsmanlike, sensitive to the texts, tasteful, and well-scored ... This is not great music, but it is thoroughly respectable music in terms of its limited artistic goals, and in a performance and recording of this quality it should see you through '76 and beyond with some pleasant moments." Nearly 50 years hence - approaching the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding - this disc and the music hold up well.

If you are interested in such Americana, I recently posted an LP of music by Alec Wilder - his Names from the War and Carl Sandburg Suite, the latter also inspired by the poet's American Songbag. 

LINK to Roy Harris' Folk-Song Symphony

New Remasters of Roy Harris' Music

I've newly remastered three significant LPs of Harris' music, as follows:

Harris - Symphony No. 3, Hanson - Symphony No. 4

This 1953 LP features Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester orchestra in convincing performances of Harris' third symphony - generally considered his best - and Hanson's own Symphony No. 4.

LINK

Harris - Symphony 1933 and Symphony No. 7

Classic performances of the Symphony 1933, in the 1934 recording from Boston and Serge Koussevitzky, coupled with the Symphony No. 7 from Philadelphia and Eugene Ormandy, in a 1955 recording.

LINK

Harris - Piano Fantasy, Abe Lincoln Walks at Midnight

Recordings from 1955 with Johana Harris in the Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, conducted by Izler Solomon, and Nell Tangeman in a setting of Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

LINK

American Music with Foldes and Winograd

Today's subject - as it often is around here - is mid-century American music. The sources are two albums that are not often seen. The first is an anthology of piano works by eight composers performed by an artist whom I did not associate with this repertoire - Andor Foldes. The second is the first recording of Aaron Copland's Music for Movies, coupled with a suite derived from three of Kurt Weill's American musicals, as conducted by Arthur Winograd on one of his many M-G-M LPs.

Andor Foldes Plays Contemporary American Music

I was surprised to discover this 1947 album of Andor Foldes (1913-92) playing American piano music. I associate his name with the music of his teacher Bartók and other stalwarts of the European canon. He was, however, a naturalized American citizen, having emigrated here in the 1930s, remaining until he returned to Europe in 1960 for professional reasons.

Foldes' 1941 debut in New York was devoted to Bach-Busoni, Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Bartók and Kodaly, but by the time of his 1947 Town Hall program, he had added works by the Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson and Paul Bowles to the mix, likely the items on this Vox album.

In addition to the three Americans, the Vox collection includes short works by Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and William Schuman. These were among the first recordings of these compositions.

The album was also among the first from the now-venerable American Vox label. (There had been a German Vox earlier in the century.) The US company started up in 1945, and made this recording the following year, per A Classical Discography. The resulting set apparently did not come out until 1947, when it was reviewed late in the year both in the New York Times and Saturday Review. Both brief notices are in the download, along with reviews of Foldes' 1941 and 1947 recitals.

Andor Foldes

The album reviews were good; the recital notices were mixed. Foldes was praised for his accuracy, but at least in 1941, the recital reviewer found his sound hard and his playing loud. By 1947, this had moderated into the notion that his secco tone was well suited to the contemporary repertoire, borne out by these recordings.

Copland - Music for Movies; Weill - Music for the Stage

Conductor Arthur Winograd (1920-2010), once the cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, made any number of recordings for the M-G-M label in the 1950s, when it was active in the classical realm. Quite a good conductor, Winograd these days is remembered primarily for his long tenure as the head of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

This particular recording dates from 1956 and was made with the "M-G-M Chamber Orchestra," probably a New York studio group. The LP combines two appealing scores, one prepared by the composer, the second by other hands following the composer's death.

Aaron Copland's Music for Movies, which comes from 1942, assembles themes he wrote for The City, Of Mice and Men and Our Town. The best - and best known - are "New England Countryside" from The City and "Grovers Corners" from Our Town. I believe this was the first recording of this suite in orchestral form, although "Grovers Corners" had been recorded on piano twice - including by Andor Foldes in the album above, under the name "Story of Our Town." The other recording, by Leo Smit, is available on this blog in a remastered version. It is from a 1946-47 Concert Hall Society album Smit shared with Copland himself.

Arthur Winograd at work

Kurt Weill's Music for the Stage was arranged for this recording by M-G-M recording director Edward Cole and composer Marga Richter, whose own music has appeared here. The arrangers followed Weill's own procedure, utilized in Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, of employing the theater arrangements while substituting a solo instrument for any vocal lines. It works seamlessly for this suite assembled from lesser-known (to me, anyway) items from Johnny Johnson (three pieces), Lost in the Stars and Lady in the Dark (one each).

Contemporary reviewer Alfred Frankenstein pronounced the Copland suite to be effective and the Weill "trash," strange considering that the latter composer influenced the former. Reviewers were more to the point back then, and held (or at least expressed) stronger opinions.

Frankenstein also opined that the "recording and performance are of the best." I can agree with the latter judgment, but the recording is another matter. It was close and harsh, so I have added a small amount of reverberation to moderate those qualities. [Note (July 2023): these files have now been remastered in ambient stereo.]

By the way, Winograd had almost no conducting experience when he began recording for M-G-M. Edward Cole had turned up at a Juilliard concert that Winograd conducted, was impressed, and offered him a recording session. This anecdote is contained in an interview with the conductor included in the download. Also on this blog, Winograd can be heard conducting music by Paul Bowles.

Both these recordings were cleaned up from lossless needle drops found on Internet Archive.

LINK

Hanson and Harris Symphonies

I promised a return to the America Festival Music Series that came from Rochester on Mercury records during the 1950s, so here we go with a notable pairing of symphonies. Howard Hanson and his Eastern-Rochester group present the work most often nominated as the "great American symphony" - Harris' third - with Hanson's own fourth.

The performance of the Harris is less muscular than you might be used to, if you are used to Leonard Bernstein's way with this music. I'm not complaining, just observing - I do prefer this approach. Hanson's symphony, meanwhile, is enjoyably Sibelian.

One of my favorite aspects of the LP (as often happens) is the American Scene-style cover, so appropriate in style if not in content for the Harris work. The cover artist (named Maas) may have been inspired by one of my favorite paintings in this style, John Rogers Cox's Gray and Gold from 1942.

The download includes the February 1955 review of this recording from The Gramophone, which observes that "one sometimes feels as though a guiding hand is reaching out to lead us into a particular section of the orchestra." If so, the guiding hand is Hanson's - these performances were recorded with a single microphone.

LINK - remastered in ambient stereo March 2025

First Recordings of Roy Harris

I so much enjoyed the previous post of Roy Harris' music that I wanted to follow it with this LP of two premiere recordings of his symphonies. It couples a then-new recording of Harris' seventh symphony with a reissue of the composer's Symphony 1933.

Performing the seventh symphony is the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, who conducted the first performances. The sessions were in October 1955 in the Academy of Music.

The Symphony 1933 (which is sometimes called Harris' first) was a Boston Symphony performance under Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the work. This was a February 1934 recording in Carnegie Hall, made shortly after the first performance.

Both works display the muscular approach that Harris brought to his symphonies. The Philadelphia performance manages to sound refined, nonetheless, and the sound is well balanced without being especially vivid. In transferring the earlier work, Columbia has troweled on the reverb (as customary). This has the effect of making the timpani in the first movement sound strangely prominent and makes the atmosphere woolly. The earlier performance must have been all that Harris could have hoped for, although in truth the orchestra sounds a little uncomfortable with the meter changes in the Allegro.

The 1934 recording was thought to be the first recording of an American symphony when this LP came out, but I am not sure if this is still considered to be the case.

LINK - new remastered in ambient stereo, March 2025

Roy Harris on M-G-M

The recent anniversary of the moon landing reminded me that I attended the premiere of Roy Harris' twelfth symphony, which although named for explorer Père Marquette was written for a ceremony in honor of the Apollo astronauts. I thought Harris' music was anachronistic then and I suspect most music lovers and almost all music critics think so today.

But when you listen to a record such as this, all you think about is how beautiful and vital it sounds. This is one of a fine series of classical LPs put out by M-G-M in the 1950s, and it contains two superb Harris works from that era in recordings made in his presence and involving his wife Johana as pianist. The M-G-M Symphony under Izler Solomon accompanies her in the gorgeous Fantasy, and Nell Tangeman is the fine mezzo voice heard in Harris' setting of the Vachel Lindsay poem Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.

Lindsay was born in Springfield, and the poem, written in 1914, has a troubled Lincoln arisen from the dead and pacing about that town, fretting about the state of the world. It's a high-school conceit, but Harris made it into something moving.

Harris is one of the many composers who have used Lincoln as a symbol of American wisdom, including Harl McDonald and Aaron Copland, in works we already have encountered on this blog. Lindsay's work also was set by Charles Ives (General William Booth Enters into Heaven).

M-G-M's recording is excellent.