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

RCA Victor's 'The Ballet'

In the early LP years, RCA Victor was blessed by a remarkable roster of conducting talent: Arturo Toscanini, Leopold Stokowski, Charles Munch, and Pierre Monteux - and the inimitable Arthur Fiedler of Pops fame as well.

So the label could call upon all of them when it came time to assemble a prestige product such as the one before us today - 1954's The Ballet, a three-record set with those conducing eminences presenting popular ballet suites, in recordings dating from 1949-53.

Not that Victor made use of the conductors in its marketing. They aren't noted on the cover (nor are the works or composers) and they only warrant a paragraph each at the end of the elaborate 16-page booklet (included in the download).

No, this package would seem to have been aimed at the listener who wanted to learn more about the ballet. It includes a overview of the art form and notes on the works themselves by Robert Lawrence, and evocative photos by George Platt Lynes, a famed commercial photographer.

But what of the works and the performances? Let's run them down.

Meyerbeer - Les Patineurs (excerpts)

Anya Linden and Desmond Doyle in Les Patineurs
(Covent Garden 1956)

Fiedler and the Boston Pops present four excerpts from the ballet score that Constant Lambert assembled from melodies found in Meyerbeer's operas Le Prophète and L'Etoile du Nord, principally the former. As I noted when I presented the John Hollingsworth/Sadler's Wells performance a year or two ago, "Although seldom heard today, Meyerbeer's works were very popular in the 19th century, and this immensely tuneful and pleasing score shows why."

This performance, I am told, has not been reissued. It originally came out as a companion piece to Fiedler's Gaîté Parisienne recording, which was later reissued in stereo with a different disc mate. The 1953 Les Patineurs was mono-only so was left on the shelf.

Piston - The Incredible Flutist (suite)

The most popular work by the American composer Walter Piston is also his only ballet score, The Incredible Flutist. The work was written for and premiered by the Boston Pops and Fiedler, and then a suite recorded by them in 1939. That recording was posted on this blog a few years ago. This set includes the Fiedler remake of 1953, with James Pappoutsakis as the flute soloist.

Arthur Fiedler and Walter Piston

As I wrote in connection with the first recording, The Incredible Flutist "is an entirely delightful piece of music that must have made for an effective ballet. Piston wrote the scenario with choreographer Hans Wiener, who also took the role of the flutist. The setting is a marketplace; a circus comes to town with its main attraction - the magical flutist."

This recording is apparently another mono orphan. It was originally coupled with the Ibert Divertissement and the Rossini-Respighi La Boutique Fantasque, which were later reissued in stereo.

Stravinsky - The Firebird (1919 Suite)

Maria Tallchief and Francisco Moncion in The Firebird

Stravinsky's The Firebird is another score that is heard far more often in the concert hall than as a ballet. Here we have Leopold Stokowski's 1950 recording of a suite with a New York pickup orchestra. The American Record Guide thought highly of the performance, even though the review began with a back-handed compliment: "Stokowski seems less wayward in his latest performance of this work, and he does not make the cut he made in his other versions . . I cannot say when I have heard this music played more beautifully; every detail, every nuance is brought out."

Leopold Stokowski

The ballet was written for Diaghilev in 1910 and originally choreographed by Michel Fokine. I believe the photo at top of this section is from a George Balanchine production. Stokowski conducts the 1919 suite, the most popular of the three devised by the composer.

Ravel - Daphnis et Chloé (Suite No. 2)

Michel Fokine and Vera Fokina in Daphnis et Chloé

Maurice Ravel wrote Daphnis et Chloé both as a concert work and as a ballet score, calling it a "symphonie choreographique." It dates from 1912 and again was originally choreographed by Michel Fokine. The Ballet set contains the Suite No. 2, the most frequently heard incarnation of the music.

Leading the 1949 performance was Arturo Toscanini, with his NBC Symphony. He was the most famous living conductor when these records were made; even so, he is not the first name that comes to mind when thinking about Ravel's music.

Writing in the Saturday Review, Roland Gelatt explained why: "I must confess to being impressed but unmoved by his 'Daphnis.' Taken measure by measure the recording is replete with wonders. There are magnificent examples of blending woodwind and strings, and the climax in the 'Daybreak' movement is a marvel of orchestral transparency. But gambits like these do not solve the secrets of Ravel's sybaritic score. Note-perfect though it may be, I cannot believe that this rigid and unyielding reading does full justice to the composer’s intentions."

Arturo Toscanini

Weber-Berlioz - Invitation to the Dance

Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina in Le Spectre de la rose

Carl Maria von Weber wrote Invitation to the Dance as a piano piece. Hector Berlioz orchestrated it as a ballet for a production of Weber's Der Freischütz in Paris, where interpolated ballets were de rigueur in opera productions. The orchestration was popular, and in 1911 Michel Fokine used it for his ballet La Spectre de la rose. (The photo of Nijinsky and Karsavina above is from the original production.)

The performance here is again by Toscanini and the NBC Symphony from 1951. It is phenomenally well played, very impressive, and certainly not designed for dancing.

Delibes - Sylvia (excerpts)

Margot Fonteyn (Sylvia) kneels before Julia Farron (Diana)
(Covent Garden 1952)

The French composer Léo Delibes wrote two ballets, both important and influential and both still staged. Sylvia, from 1876, is actually the second of the two.

Tchaikovsky was hugely impressed by the score: "The first ballet in which the music constitutes not just the main, but the sole interest. What charm, what grace, what melodic, rhythmic and harmonic richness."

Victor had just the conductor for such a score: Pierre Monteux, who had been closely associated with Diaghilev, and who had conducted the premiere of Daphnis et Chloe. (One wonders why RCA did not use Monteux's 1946 recording of the first suite in place of the uncongenial Toscanini Suite No. 2.)

Regardless, it's a pleasure to have Monteux's 1953 recordings of both Delibes suites, made with "Members of the Boston Symphony." The Sylvia excerpts were taped in the Manhattan Center in New York.

Pierre Monteux

Delibes - Coppélia (excerpts)

Margot Fonteyn in Coppélia

Coppélia was Delibes's first ballet score and remains the most familiar. It has appeared on this blog twice before; first, in excerpts conducted by Constant Lambert in conjunction with a 1946 Covent Garden production. (I believe the photo of Margot Fonteyn above is from that season.) Then, too, there was a later disc from another Covent Garden conductor, Hugo Rignold, with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. That LP also had excepts from Sylvia.

In the Boston performance, the opening horn passage is fairly slack, but the strings are lovely, and the famous Mazurka is dynamic. The recording from Symphony Hall is good, although the horns are distant. Alfred Krips is the violin soloist both here and in the Sylvia excerpts. Manuel Valerio is the clarinet soloist.

Both Delibes scores are delightful - as are all the selections in this album, for that matter.

Ravel - La Valse

Diana Adams of the New York City Ballet in La Valse

Monteux often conducted the Boston Symphony, but that orchestra's music director from 1949-62 was the Alsatian Charles Munch, who led the final two items on this program.

Ravel wrote La Valse as a "poème chorégraphique pour orchestre" for Diaghilev, who refused to stage it. It later was choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, and in 1950 by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet. (Balanchine used Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales as a preface to the La Valse music.)

Ravel's music is mysterious, lush and macabre in turn, all of which are made for Munch's gifts as a conductor. (Also for Balanchine, who made the piece into a dance of death.) Munch often aimed for excitement, and the critics were at times critical of that tendency. "The kind of performance with which Munch closes a frenzied evening of music making, faithfully duplicated in every particular," observed the Saturday Review. The Gramophone's Andrew Porter complained, "La Valse turns into a noisy roar at the climax." But others were appreciative. The recording is from 1950.

Charles Munch

Roussel - Bacchus et Ariane (Suite No. 2)

Bacchus et Ariane set by Giorgio de Chirico

The ballet Bacchus et Ariane is a late work by Albert Roussel (1869-1937), staged in 1930 with choreography by Serge Lifar and sets by the painter Giorgio de Chirico. Roussel derived two orchestral suites from the ballet - Suite No. 1 was premiered by Charles Munch in 1933; Suite No. 2 by Pierre Monteux in 1934. Regardless of this lineage, Munch programmed the second suite for this 1952 recording from Symphony Hall.

The ballet concerns the abduction of Ariane by Dionysus (aka Bacchus). Early on Roussel was considered an Impressionist, but by this late stage of his career was called a neoclassicist. That term, however, doesn't really capture his multi-faceted music, of which this is an excellent example. Munch's performance is definitive, in my view.

* * *

It's worth noting that although the set is called The Ballet, none of the recordings are of full ballets, except for La Valse and Invitation to the Dance. Nor does the set include anything by the arguably most famous ballet composer, Tchaikovsky.

The sound is generally excellent. As Victor sometimes did back in those days, it provided information about the number of microphones and their placement, ranging from the multi-miked Stokowski to a single microphone for the Toscanini-Ravel, Delibes and Roussel sessions.

I transferred this set from my collection, belatedly responding to a request. I did make use of the booklet scans on Internet Archive, suitably cleaned up and presented along with the covers as a PDF.

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

First Recordings of Piston and MacDowell from the Boston Pops

Today's post is devoted to two important first recordings of American music made by the Boston Pops and Arthur Fiedler in the 1930s. First is Edward MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2, recorded in 1936 with soloist Jesús María Sanromá. The second is a suite from Walter Piston's ballet The Incredible Flutist, from 1939. My transfers come from one of the pseudynonymous 1950s RCA Camden reissue LPs, which ascribed the performances to the "Festival Concert Orchestra." I was not fooled.

I also have a bonus for you - Piston's orchestration of the Moonlight Sonata's first movement, as recorded in abridged form by the Pops circa 1954.

MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2

Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) was considered the leading American composer for quite some time, and many think the second piano concerto of 1890 is his best composition. The piece is sometimes likened to Grieg's concerto, although to me it is most reminiscent of Liszt. A high-Romantic work to be sure, and very effective in meeting its aims.

MacDowell lived in Boston from 1888 to 1896, and appeared with the Boston Symphony as a pianist. When this recording was made in 1936, he was still famous, enough so that he was memorialized on a 1940 postage stamp. Today his music is seldom heard, with the possible exception of his piano suite Woodland Sketches and its "To a Wild Rose."

Jesús María Sanromá

Considering the composer's renown, it is perhaps surprising that the second concerto was not recorded until 1936. But the performance by the Boston forces and particularly the soloist is all that one could hope for.

Sanromá (1902-84) was born in Puerto Rico and educated at the New England Conservatory. Soon after graduation he became the Boston Symphony's pianist, remaining in that post until 1940. Victor recorded him fairly extensively during this period, including Gershwin and Paderewski concertos with Fiedler; Bartók, Grieg and Rachmaninoff concertos with Charles O'Connell; music of Hindemith with the composer, and the Chausson Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet with Heifetz.

Piston's The Incredible Flutist

Walter Piston, Arthur Fiedler, Hans Wiener
and designer Marco Montedoro, 1938

Walter Piston (1894-1976) also had strong ties to Boston and the Boston Symphony. Educated at Harvard, he taught there from 1926-60. His students included many illustrious names among the succeeding generation of American composers - Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, John Harbison and many others.

Hans Wiener as
the Incredible Flutist

Piston's first symphony was premiered by the BSO in 1938, the same year as the ballet The Incredible Flutist was staged by the Pops. His Symphony No. 3 later was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and Symphony No. 6 by the BSO for its centennial. The orchestra recorded the latter work in 1956 under Charles Munch.

The Incredible Flutist is the only stage work in Piston's catalogue. It is an entirely delightful piece of music that must have made for an effective ballet. Piston wrote the scenario with choreographer Hans Wiener, who also took the role of the flutist. The setting is a marketplace; a circus comes to town with its main attraction - the magical flutist.

While Fiedler and his forces recorded a suite from the ballet in 1939, they technically did not give the public premiere of the work in that form - the Pittsburgh Symphony and Fritz Reiner did so in 1940.

Beethoven-Piston - Moonlight Sonata

I don't know the background of Piston's orchestration of the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata, only that the Pops and Fiedler recorded it in abridged form circa 1954. RCA Victor put it out on a single that I believe was backed by Piston's orchestration of Debussy's "Clair de Lune." I remastered the Beethoven transcription from a lossless needle drop on Internet Archive, but the Debussy was nowhere to be found.

Like The Incredible Flutist, the Beethoven arrangement is an  attractive work.

The sound from the 1930s items came up nicely, although the piano overshadows the orchestra in the MacDowell concerto. The Moonlight Sonata orchestration sounds good as well.