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LOPATNIKOFF: Festival Overture. HELPS: Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra.
THOMSON: Filling Station. KURKA: Symphony No. 2, Op. 24.
Alan Feinberg, pianist; Albany Symphony Orch/David Alan Miller, cond.
ALBANY TROY 591 (F) (DDD) TT: 64:33
In the halcyon years of Grammy
Awards, both of these releases would be neck and neck nominees for
first-place trophies. But the Grammys had
already become a travesty when the Classical Music Industry encouraged
egomaniacal artists, managements and publicitors to glut the market with
duplications and hyperbole. Remember the bunco-artists based in Atlanta
who enrolled the entire orchestra as members of the voting committee,
resulting in several years of Grammys going to the Atlanta Symphony for “Best
Orchestral Recordings”?
Atlanta’s still in the business, thanks to Telarc and its superior
technical product. So, of course, is Yo-Yo Ma, who could get a Grammy
in these spavined times with a karaoke collection because he continues
to be hot merchandise. Meanwhile, by sheer volume and business savvy,
Naxos has built the biggest active catalog worldwide, whereas Albany
has thrown down the gauntlet with a painstaking mixture of the right
persons performing carefully chosen repertoire in a superb acoustic environment—the
concert hall in a bank at Troy, NY, as congenial for orchestras as it
is for solo artists and chamber ensembles. More’s the pity, in
this newest Troy Series issue, that neither the producer nor engineers
are identified, although the cover art (an Edward Hopper painting) is
named along with a design-firm and sponsors individually and collectively.
The technicians’ work is magnificent in this hybrid SACD confection
sent for review, with a bass response in particular that equals those “Living
Stereo” remasterings from Japan by JVC. But not only is bass impressive:
the clarity of wind and brass playing in hair-trigger balance would be
collectable even were the music (OK, most of it) of less merit and character
than the works by Robert Kurka and Virgil Thomson in particular. Only
the Albany Symphony strings lack the weight and sonorous polish of our
nation’s front-ranking six (or seven, depending on who’s
counting where).
David Alan Miller is still a young conductor as podium figures go, but
he’s able to finesse the challenges of Robert Helps’ angularly
motivic (rather than thematic) 13-minute Piano Concerto No. 2, still
arcane after three hearings, with Alan Feinberg as his Messianic soloist.
Lopatnikoff’s Festival Overture is a good deal more ingratiating
and generically propulsive than the Hindemith- spinoff Concertino on
a Sony/Lenny-B mono collection reissued on CD in Y2K. But Thomson’s
1937 ballet score (complete here for the first time, rather than the
suite Thomson made from it) is choice V.T. to a libretto by Lincoln Kirstein,
originally choreographed by Lew Christensen—by turns sassy,
nostalgic, laced with familiar folk-tunes, altogether the first ballet
ever with
an American subject. I have the nagging recollection that the concert
suite was recorded by Vox when the New York City Ballet revived Filling
Station in 1953 (could Leon Barzin have been the conductor?), but it
made little impression at the time because David Alan Miller and the
Albany Symphony were not its champions. They do for Filling Station what
James Sedares and the NZSO did for Thomson’s three symphonies on
a classic, Grammy-caliber Naxos disc. Certainly the Louisville Orchestra
(guessing again) made quasi-Prokofiev of Kurka’s Second Symphony
from 1957, just months before the composer’s cruelly premature
death from leukemia at the age of 35. Miller and his Empire State Albanians
play it with verve and muscle, plentifully spiced and resoundingly recorded.
My Rotel 1070 HDCD player handled it proudly, meaning that more than
the suite from his opera The Good Soldier Schweik now represents Kurka
on discs.
Leaving George Rochberg’s music for last is no reflection on its
beauty, grit, imagination or—for a couple of decades—his
courage in disavowing the international avant garde. The Chicago
Symphony commissioned Symphony No. 5 in 1983 for that city’s forthcoming
sesquicentennial, where Georg Solti conducted the world premiere in January
1986 (a year early; Chicago’s official birthdate was March 4, 1837).
But it was never played again—anywhere—until this
recording at Saarbrücken in March of 2002 with Christopher Lyndon-Gee
in charge! He was auditioning to be Solti’s assistant at premiere
time, and finally was able to conduct and record this 29-minute work
in a single
movement—a masterpiece in my judgment, on a near-par with
Lutoslawski’s
Third Symphony, also commissioned by the Chicago Symphony (for its diamond
jubilee season, but so slowly composed that its debut was seven years
late). Rochberg cast his single movement in seven sections: an assertive,
brass-dominated “Opening Statement,” followed by “Episode
I,” then “Development I,” “Episode 2,” “Development
2,” and a “Finale” that brings forward music from “Episode
I” that lifts a dark curtain on much “bleak reality,” in
the conductor’s words. The “Episodes” are “contemplative,
even dreamlike in character” (again C.L-G), but their developments
rise to mighty outpourings of personal anquish combined with anger. Like
the Albany Orchestra, the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony is not the
Chicago Symphony, but they play at the top of their capacity for Lyndon-Gee,
who deserves a medal for his perseverance as well as his conducting chops.
Black Sounds was commissioned by Lincoln Center in 1965 as a ballet score
for Anna Sokolow, who performed it as The Act. It comes from the same
chrysalis as Symphony No. 5, but from an earlier time of shattering familial
tragedy. Rochberg reworked it from his 1964 Apocalyptica for wind ensemble,
piano and lots of percussion (originally untuned but in Black Sounds given pitches). It acts here as a powerfully dramatic, almost demonic
entr’acte before the beatific Transcendental Variations for string
orchestra, derived from the Third String Quartet of 1971-72, in which
the composer returned to tonality. Again there are seven sections that
rise to a Mahlerian apotheosis without direct quotation or enfeebled
imitation. It and the Fifth Symphony are first recordings of the 85-year-old
composer’s timeless creations. Not to hear them, learn them, and
be deeply moved on return visits would be musical masochism. The German
recording team(s) have produced a distinguished DDD soundstage for these
acts of dedication by everyone who participated. Welcome them all. Please.
R.D. (August 2003)