MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


 REVIEW

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

 

Buy through MusicWeb for £9 postage paid World-wide.

Musicweb Purchase button

 


Alan HOVHANESS (1911-2000)
Symphony No. 2 Mysterious Mountain op. 132 (1955) [16:45]
Lousadzak op. 48 (1945) [16:35]
Lou HARRISON (1917-2003)
Symphony No. 2 Elegiac (1942-1975) [33:58]
Keith Jarrett (piano)
American Composers Orchestra/Dennis Russell Davies
rec. SUNY Purchase, New York, USA. 1989. DDD
first issued on MusicMasters MMD 60204
NIMBUS NI 2512 [67:00]
Experience Classicsonline



Two symphonies, one apiece, by West Coast Americans: Harrison, typically Californian with a wide-eyed receptivity to Pacific voices and Hovhaness, the Armenian mystic.

Mysterious Mountain is the second of Hovhaness's sixty-seven symphonies. From a name that was the fringe denizen of the MGM, Unicorn and Poseidon labels, Hovhaness's music made rapid progress in his last ten years and since his death. His catalogue is vastly forbidding but the accommodating catholicism of taste of the listener to recorded music has encouraged an industry now vigorously engaged in unveiling one recorded premiere after another.

Mysterious Mountain bid fair to be his most famous work in the long-lived LP era. RCA recorded it with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Fritz Reiner in 1955. That recording is still available and although a classic it has a fierce edginess absent from this Nimbus-MusicMasters version. The Symphony is a work of long lines, smoothly surging and singing. It carries a redolence of Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony. The massed string choirs are to the fore and the music serves as a great anthem rolling high - sanguine, benign and muscular. This is a symphony about exaltation and that is the effect and the aim. The last of its three movements opens with a suggestion of the spatter of ice-cold rain and a great vorticial storm high amid towering peaks. The brass are allowed a momentary prominence before the return of the Tallis-like writing.

Lousadzak is a single-movement piano concerto inspired by the Greek mystic painter, Hermon DiGiovanno. Here it is played by jazz composer-pianist Keith Jarrett. It lasts about the same time as the symphony. There is a sustained fusillade of determined violin pizzicato proving a tense undergrowth for the musing and then increasingly machine-gun stutter of the piano. The style is very much that of the symphony. Here the massed strings also carry that middle-eastern sway and ululation. The writing is also notable for the remora-like solo violin here heard as if in a coursing hieratic trance. Later the music returns to the drumming rain pizzicato noted in the finale of Mysterious Mountain. Elsewhere the music has the vigorous insistence of de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. The premiere was attended by Harrison and John Cage who were stunned by the work's freshness and originality and its total sever from anything else on the American musical arts scene. The performance is all you would hope for except that towards the end the strings take on a coarse hard edge which I suspect is down to the orchestra rather than the sound engineer.

The Harrison connection takes us onto that composer's Elegiac Symphony. It was written in memory of Serge Koussevitsky and his wife Natalie. Interesting also that Harrison credits the second and fifth movements to Pierre Monteux. Koussevitsky was a virtuoso of the largest string instruments is reflected in writing for two contrabasses in the third movement which carries the title Tears of the Angel Israfel.

A pity that the notes are unchanged from their original issue. Both composers are now dead. Otherwise the essay by Tim Page is good. 
So this makes a welcome return to the catalogue for the music of two West Coast outsiders with a predilection for the East, arcana and lyricism.

Rob Barnett


 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.