Spirit of the American Range: Works by
Antheil, Copland, and Piston
Oregon Symphony/Carlos Kalmar
Pentatone Records 5186 481
Total Time:  65:21
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Over the last couple of years, the Oregon Symphony, under its Music Director Carlos Kalmar, have released impressive recordings of significant 20^th Century masterpieces.  Having explored English repertoire, he turns now to three important American works by equally diverse composers.  The title of this disc, Spirit of the American Range, seems a bit odd as other than possible sparse landscapes suggested by Copland’s third symphony, American music enthusiasts may be a bit surprised at what actually shows up on this release spanning two decades of musical history.  The title aside, each of the works here are important 20^th Century contributions and worthy of wider exposure, still (!), and with the sort of excellent sound Pentatone has captured in the past it bears promise from the start.  The pairing of the pieces here is though in and of itself unique and oddly there are few good recordings of any of them, though the ones that there are are still pretty hard to beat.  The Copland has fared best, and personal preferences here lean toward Leonard Bernstein’s last recording of the work (on Deutsche Grammophon), and Mata’s with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.  The live recording made in April, 2013, and January, 2014, perhaps also allows for a bit more energy and excitement in the performances.

Walter Piston (1874-1976) is one of the great composers and educators of the 20^th Century.  His impact on his Harvard composition students (as diverse as Leroy Anderson to Elliot Carter!) was given further reach by publication of significant texts on orchestration, harmony, and counterpoint.  The ballet, The Incredible Flutist, was undertaken at the request of Arthur Fiedler in 1938 for the Boston Symphony and choreographer Hans Wiener (aka Jan Veen).  The present recording is of the more oft-performed 11-movement suite, albeit presented as one track which makes it more difficult to access a particular movement.  From the start, the orchestra is on superb display with crisp sound that allows textures to cut through appropriately with excellent articulation.  The different layers of Piston’s orchestration are thus given real room.  The shifts in character for the suite also work equally well.  Those unfamiliar with Piston’s work will likely be surprised from some of the more Romantic moments here that appear almost the same way as his most famous student, Leonard Bernstein, would do.  At any rate, this is an exciting performance that captures the spirit of Piston’s music, though one hopes maybe Kalmar will tackle one of the pithier symphonies some day.

The Ballet Mecanique is perhaps George Antheil’s (1900-1959) most famous, or infamous, work.  It caused a riot at its performance (oh, the days when the arts did such a thing!).  It was preceded in the program by the work recorded here, A Jazz Symphony.  Premiered in 1927 it is an amazing pastiche of musical styles from the period coupled with modernist sensibilities.  Here it becomes a little buffer between the two slightly more serious works.  If the work is new to most listeners, it is worth noting just how sporadic it might feel.  On one hand it is like walking down a busy American city hearing all these different musical ideas floating out on the street.  Somehow Antheil ties all these threads together with a thematic idea and rhythmic motif that move through the work.  This is at times gradually more dissonant music that comes at a time of other Jazz experiments by Les Six (especially Milhaud).  Why it is not performed much is anyone’s guess, other than it is somewhat hard to pull off.  Accents and intonation are the culprits when things go awry and that is not a problem at all here as the orchestra relishes the challenge.  From Tin Pan Alley to silent movie and Broadway romance, everything is here for the taking.

The more monumental work on the disc is Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony.  Begun in 1944 as a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the piece certainly is quite evocative of the open spaces and simpler times perhaps anticipated at the end of the WWII.  Of course, the final movement is more familiar as it houses the Fanfare for the Common Man that Copland had composed for the Cincinnati Symphony and which was relatively unknown at the time.  It serves here to mark perhaps the Allied Victory.  The composer’s acolytes were more than willing to quickly brand this as the best “American Symphony” ever written.  It certainly is one of the finest, but one can think of many equally fine works of the periods before, during, and after where the same could be said.  Such was the cult of Copland for the time and it was this style that he would embrace most successfully over the next decade.

The sound for the symphony seems to back up a bit to capture the larger grandeur of the ensemble.  One thing that is often hard to bring off here is the contrast between these long, open lyric lines, and the more angular punctuations that are flung about the orchestra instigated mostly by brass.  The opening movement feels a bit breezy at times, Kalmar knocks a full minute from the work compared to Bernstein and even Mata.  Somehow, this helps make the ending work as it slowly calms things down after its more intense middle section.  It is almost as if we pan out to take another look at this American landscape.  The second movement is one of Copland’s most rustic-sounding reminiscent of the Martha Graham ballets.  This moves along at a good pace again with articulation and forward motion helping to shape the excitement in this movement that sometimes veers into Prokofiev territory.  He will make up for that later with a slightly longer third movement that features intensely high string writing—though the ensemble acquit themselves well.  This is a languid reflection after all the previous energy that sometimes seems to meander a bit too long, but the beauty lies in discerning the development of the primary motivic idea that will soon explode in the fourth movement’s fanfare.  Sometimes too it can feel a bit kitchen-sinkish as even a little Appalachian Spring and a few other stylistic tropes that Copland would return to, appear in this languid balletic movement.  The fanfare in this performance does not feel tacked on, as it can sometimes seem, but does feel like a natural growth out of the opening of the movement and a final true statement of the symphony’s thematic motifs now in all of its splendor.  The conclusion is equally exciting. Sometimes it can feel that it is a bit overlong, and Kalmar does try to move things along just enough to prevent that from happening.

While these timings seem unusual, what is notable is that Kalmar interprets the lines and drama of the work creating a freshness to the music which is further aided by the response of the orchestra to his direction.  The result is another valid interpretation of this work with a bit more excitement and shaping that seems far more faithful to the text.  Kalmar also makes less of the sections where others have added bigger ritards.  A table of comparison for timings of two personal favorite performances is provided below.

When music making is this good, the only thing left to really lament is that there is not at least one more short work here to bring the disc to a little longer play time (though 65 minutes is certainly nothing to complain about!).  These are three somewhat disparate works, but the goal here is to also help music lovers discern how these are all still examples of American music with common sounds that indelibly link them to a distinct musical voice that has its roots, at least in these three composers, in the 1920s and the shift to French-influences rather than the more Germanic ones of the previous generation of American composers.  Three great works by an orchestra that is being given fabulous sound to boot.

Hallowed Ground: Copland/Lang/Muhly
Dr. Maya Angelou, narration.  Nathan Wyatt, baritone.
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra/Louis Langree
Fanfare Cincinnati 003
Total Time:  47:06
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Though less well known than its Northern compatriots in Cleveland, the Cincinnati Symphony has an equally grand history on disc.  It is the fifth oldest symphony orchestra in America founded in 1895 and was the first orchestra in the state.  Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is that it was responsible for commissioning Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.  The ensemble was also the first nationally broadcast orchestras in 1921!  Over the past few decades, the ensemble has made a few critically noticed recordings, perhaps more overshadowed by their Pops releases under Erich Kunzel.  Louis Langree became the new music director of the orchestra in 2013 and the present release comes from these early concerts.  The program is taken in  part from the MusicNOW Festival last March.  However, for many, the primary interest may lie in one of the last recordings of the great Dr. Maya Angelou reading the narration for Copland’s Lincoln Portrait.

Copland’s work was another commission premiered by the CSO in 1942 by then director Andre Kostenlanetz.  Three “portraits” were actually commissioned.  The others were by Jerome Kern (who chose Mark Twain) and which was recorded by the CPO with Kunzel, the other is the relatively forgotten one by Virgil Thomson (based on NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia).  While there are many recordings of this work, most tend to use politicians, military heroes, or famous actors.  Dr. Angelou’s contribution is almost like having Wisdom itself speak Lincoln’s words.  As one of the very rare versions featuring a female narrator, the disc would be worth seeking out, but it has additional interest in it being perhaps one of the last appearances by the legendary poet prior to her death.  It is a small shame that some of the narration gets covered by the orchestra a few times.

The album also features two recently commissioned works by younger American composers David Lang and Nico Muhly.  Lang has garnered a great deal of critical acclaim recently including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music.  His work, mountains, is a rather intriguing work that centers around a harmonic pulse and a bit of an “echo” that is a residual after effect of 3-4 smaller pulses.  Essentially, the piece revolves around the repetition of a tonal harmonic impulse and smaller ones.  Occasionally, a drone, or pedal point, will appear to offer a continuous line across these pulses, perhaps serving as a sort of musical horizon.  It would certainly be interesting to see how the music looks on the page as it must give an additional visual cue to this “minimal” work that seems rather intent on a single concept.  The harmonic language is fairly accessible overall, though the piece does feel a bit overlong at times.

Nico Muhly gained attention in film music circles a few years ago with his score for The Reader (2008) and more recently Kill Your Darlings (2013), but he has a firm foot in the concert world as well and a number of recordings of his concert work.  The present piece, Pleasure Ground, in some respects hearkens back to the conception of the opening Copland piece as it focuses on providing a portrait of the 19^th century American architect Frederick Law Olmsted.  The texts come from the mid-19^th Century and address aesthetics of the natural world and how it can be shaped, the aftermath of the Civil War, and images of trees as a sign of new hope and growth.  Accompanying these intriguing texts is a musical style that begins rather innocently in a post-minimalist style at first but also owes some to Post-Romantic lyricism.  The music does a very good job of creating the appropriate atmosphere for these powerful texts, of which the central movement is perhaps the most intense.  However, the final movement some will find reminiscent of Corigliano.  A play on the idea of “ground bass” is also incorporated into the music with recurring bass lines at times, but often cycles of a set number of chords that help create the “grounding” of the music.

The unfortunate thing about this release is its brevity and this is further too bad as these are really fine performances that leave one wanting more.  Langree’s interpretation of Copland allows textures to really be distinguished well and it would be interesting to hear some more from him in this repertoire.  The Lang piece will be an interesting curiosity.  Muhly’s work though feels like it could really find a place in the repertoire of contemporary orchestral song settings.  The performance of baritone Nathan Wyatt certainly makes the case for the piece.  The audience’s response suggests that it made a quicker connection where the Lang may take a few times.  Performances in the modern works are superb and the sound is quite excellent.  Audience applause does occur after each performance but not until the works have truly finished.