November 4, 2011

  • Review: Herrmann's Moby Dick

     

    Herrmann: Moby Dick; Sinfonietta
    Richard Edgar-Wilson, tenor; David Wilson-Johnson, baritone; Danish National Choir,
    Danish National Symphony Orchestra/Michael Schonwandt
    Chandos 5095
    Total Time:  63:24
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

     

    The Bernard Herrmann centenary has not unleashed the sort of recorded testament that one might expect.  The 1990s saw a bit of a resurgence of interest in the composer’s film music and there have been some resurrections this year of his one opera, Wuthering Heights.  This new Chandos disc gives a window into two important early works from the mid-1930s before Herrmann’s work on radio and film began to take up his composing time.

    In the 1930s there is a working out of the modernist and post-romantic styles in many works.  Most will understand this in terms of some of Copland’s pre-Americana pieces, the latter which begin to appear as the decade ends. There is another thread though of composers revisiting Baroque forms eschewing the symphony as a viable avenue.  The more modernists seemed to latch onto this well creating an alternative tonal language to the ultra-romantic and Impressionist styles.

    Moby Dick is perhaps the last thing some might choose to encapsulate into a musical form.  Herrmann had initially considered using Melville’s novel as the basis for an opera.  But that was abandoned in favor of a “cantata” form.  The religious connection formally was an appropriate one as Melville’s novel might be understood as a sort of Revivalist religious retelling of American experience in life.  The music will be a revelation to those unfamiliar with the work which Sir John Barbirolli proclaimed as one of the most important works of the generation.  He premiered the piece with the New York Philharmonic in April 1940—with a young Benjamin Britten in the audience. 

    The opening chorus, “And God Created Whales,” is like those big Shostakovich symphonic choral moments.  But throughout this and subsequent moments in the work one hears Herrmann’s style already cementing itself.  Deep dark orchestral colors are everywhere.  Brass swells and intriguing musical combinations are among some of those early stylistic aspects of the composer’s style which will become instantly recognizable in his later film work.  The woodwind writing also bears similar stylistic similarities.  These musical signatures are what make the work stand out in the midst of other language that is very much of the modernist-romantic style of the period.  The sense of drama in the writing is simply amazing throughout the piece and already one hears Herrmann’s near perfect sense of narrative underscoring and dramatic writing.  There are many times in this piece when one feels like Herrmann’s style somehow developed parallel to similar musical responses of Prokofiev or Shostakovich.  Compare it to say Alexander Nevsky and one will find many fascinating musical responses that have the integrity of each composer’s style with different end results.  This work certainly stands well against Prokofiev’s and deserves far more exposure.  Songs like “Oh! Jolly is the Gale” could have come from Shostakovich and yet still have Herrmann’s decidedly unique scoring style.  Somehow the music captures the thrust of Melville’s narrative with the emotional undercurrent ever present in the orchestration and dramatic support the texts receive.  At any rate, the piece as recorded here receives what may be one of its finest performances.

    Like many composers, Herrmann experimented with other avant-garde styles.  His Sinfonietta, composed between 1935-36, is the seminal work in his output that exhibits this experiment.  The piece was revised in 1975 in preparation for a recording project that was never realized due to the composer’s death.  The present recording is a premiere of the original version of this piece.  Even here, Herrmann’s later style is part of this string work which some may find echoes of in his score for Psycho.  The five movement piece, ending in a set of variations, is a more astringent and harsher intellectual piece that falls into that style of music that one hears in Berg especially.  Herrmann’s sense of dramatic writing is still rather unique.  Something to note is the way he can take a single note and infuse it with an amazing amount of intensity.

    What really makes this new Chandos release an important recorded document is that it comes at this music on its own terms.  There is no overemphasis to try and make this sound like Herrmann’s film music and the result is that we get at a purer performance of the text of this music with all of its wealth of hints of what was to come.  Not only an important release for Herrmann fans, but also an important release of American symphonic music from the 1930s.