American Piano Concertos: Barber, Copland, Gershwin
Xiayin Wang, piano. Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Peter Oundjian
Chandos 5128
Total Time: 75:44
Recording: ****/****
Performance: ****/****
Lovers of American classical music know that recordings of pre-1950s American music are still rare, though some works are certainly gaining a foothold in the general repertoire. A host of great young violinists has meant that we now have a host of fine Barber Violin Concerto recordings, for example. The present release brings together lesser know works by three of America’s most well-known composers. Arguably, the most familiar work on the disc is Gershwin’s 1925 Piano Concerto in F. It is the oldest work on the album, with Copland’s rarely heard concerto from 1926 serving as the centerpiece after the more substantial Barber concerto that opens the disc. The latter two have less competition for Wang, whereas the Gershwin finds her in a crowded field, but the inclusion of the work on this disc helps raise awareness for the other two pieces for listeners new to the other works.
Samuel Barber’s tendencies for Neo-Romanticism did not lend themselves well to academia which preferred more complex music. His work, along with a host of similar mid-century American composers would tend to be criticized for having one foot in the past far too often. As classical audiences began to dwindle however, there was a renewed interest in modern works that were more accessible and work’s like Barber’s have become more respected with time. His earlier Violin Concerto (1939) is perhaps the most popular of his works in this form with the Cello Concerto (1945) a distant second and the Piano Concerto, Op. 38 from 1962 a closer third. Over the last few years, however, there have been several fine recordings of the work such that now the choices are more about additional repertoire on the CD than the performances necessarily themselves.
The Piano Concerto was written for John Browning who premiered the work with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony upon the opening of Lincoln Center’s new Philharmonic Hall. The work managed to win the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year and would receive a number of international performances. The concerto certainly has its moments of romanticism heard early in the orchestral response to the more modern piano solo style. The piano itself takes some of its inflection from Prokofiev and Bartok and yet there are less angular lines here than in the work of those composers. Barber’s themes always have pitch arrival points that are still quite like vocalises and the symphonic explosions are very dramatic in an almost filmic sort of way. The central slow movement is another of those gorgeously romantic moments in 20th Century music reminiscent of Shostakovich’s second concerto.
Browning recorded the work a couple of times, once closer to its premiere with George Szell. He revisited the work again in 1991 on an RCA release with Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra all at the top of their game.
Wang’s overall performance is a bit quicker shaving off about a minute and half overall in the total performance. Her opening bars are simply quite wonderful demonstrating her technical virtuosity and the slow movement is equally breathtakingly shaped. It is in this central movement where many listeners will find much to revel in after the more modern romanticism of the opening. The final movement returns us to more modern territory but now with a jazzier sense of harmony and rhythm that is hinted at in the opening intense ostinato in the piano and picked up by the orchestra. The ending is an exhilarating conclusion.
Aaron Copland’s musical legacy casts a long shadow over the 20th Century. His historical importance tends to rest on his Americana works of the 1930s and 1940s where he was really part of a host of composers from Virgil Thomson to Roy Harris essentially “discovering” the idea of open intervals to depict the wide open expanses of America. Copland returned from Paris though as a bona fide modernist and enfants terrible. He quickly adapted jazz ideas into his works in the 1920s to further capitalize on the trend in contemporary art circles enamored with this new “American” style and thus rejecting the more romantic European models. After mild success with his Music for Theater (1925), Copland wrote his only Piano Concerto the following year and performed it with Serge Koussevitzky in Boston in January 1927. Though compared to Gershwin’s work which had appeared the year before, Copland could (somewhat honestly perhaps) assert his more Francophile training and interest in jazz through the styles of Les Six and perhaps more specifically Darius Milhaud. Perhaps the negative reception of the work was a deciding factor in Copland’s abandoning modernism soon afterwards. The premiere received scathing reviews and the work was hissed by musicians when it was played at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. It quickly disappeared and went unperformed until 1946 when Leonard Bernstein, one of Copland’s biggest advocates, would convince Leo Smit to perform it. (Bernstein may have had more personal reasons to support his own musical career as a classical jazz symphonist with a tradition connecting to Copland at the root of this decision.)
The opening bars of the concerto are certainly signature Copland stamps with open harmonic movement and lyrical lines that have a bluesy quality. The work tends to feel somewhat episodic with sections delineated with piano material and warm orchestral interjections contrasted with bolder brass statements. The ideas tend to spin out from their initial statements in the opening movement towards a the climactic final bars that grow gradually more intense harmonically with stark dissonant hits that begin to set up the jazzier rhythms of the second movement. The piano opens the second movement with a series of jagged jazz styles that seem to come from Tin Pan Alley and feel quite out of place. Certainly they would be heard as unconnected ideas with the shock of jazz orchestral writing and syncopations not helping matters for 1920s ears. Though the work may feel a bit tame today, heard against the backdrop of other concertos by Rachmaninov one can see why audiences of the time hated the piece. The episodic quality of the second movement will strike modern listeners as being the germ of Bernstein’s orchestral jazz and the kinship is certainly easier to hear with the passage of time.
The performances here are really superb. Wang gets at the modernism of the first movement quite well and pulls together the jazzier inflections of the second movement in such a way that her attacks manage to differ as much as the polar modernist opposites of the musical style. Today, the work feels like a grand Hollywood film score with piano. The orchestra responds equally well to these stylistic shifts with exquisite solo line captured excellently in Chandos’ sound. The performance manages to come fairly close to matching the classic 1964 Columbia recording with Bernstein and Copland.
When it comes to Gershwin’s Piano Concerto there are a host of great performances from Earl Wild’s classic with the Boston Pops (RCA) to Jeffrey Siegel’s lesser known, but fine performance with Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony (Vox) and even Garrick Ohlsson’s with Tilson-Thomas (RCA). Each of these performances brings a unique approach and historical connection to the work recorded at various times in history when there was a need to establish Gershwin as an important American classical composer, show off jazz styles, or return to “original” manuscript approaches of the score. Wang is performing from an edition edited by Frank Campbell-Watson of which very little is said.
Gershwin’s work itself was another of the “experiments” in connecting jazz to classical forms being supported by Paul Whiteman and came after the success of Rhapsody in Blue (1924). The concerto was commissioned by Walter Damrosch for the New York Philharmonic who gave the highly-anticipated performance December 3, 1925. Gershwin was undoubtedly still concerned about such a great artistic opportunity for recognition and even hired an orchestra to play through the work to see how it sounded. The initial response was mixed as most contemporaries did not know what to make of the more stream of conscious formal approaches.
The Gershwin turns out then to be the icing on a very rich cake of fabulous music making. Wang’s affinity for Gershwin has been proven already in a previous Chandos release. Here she manages to shape each phrase exquisitely bringing a mix of romanticism and jazzy inflection that works quite well throughout her performance.
Chandos captures these performances in superb sound. The other quite nice aspect of the recording is that there is a proper amount of silence between works so that one’s ears can “adjust” before we launch into the next musical style. By organizing the performances from the most recent work to oldest one can hear each piece in a fresher way. This is seriously one of the finest collections of performances of these three concerti though that we may see. Most will not want to be without the others mentioned above, but here in one wonderful recording you can hear them all played in performances that manage to capture each work’s style perfectly. These are not three American concertos played by Europeans adding “American” touches, but three performances that get at each composer’s style with an understanding of the ethos that surrounded them at the time. Here’s to the next release by Xiayin Wang who delivers here a series of performances that are among the best you can get and on a release that is a must have for any American music fan.
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