Comparison Recordings:
Mt. St. Helens Symphony, Schwarz, Seattle SO DELOS DE 3137*
Mysterious Mountain, Schwarz, Seattle SO DELOS DE 3157*
Mysterious Mountain, Fritz Reiner, CSO
RCA/BMG 61957
Mysterious Mountain, Dennis Russell Davies, ACO MusicMasters
MMD 60204D
Mysterious Mountain, John Williams, LSO Sony SMK 62729
*All Seattle SO recordings are now owned by Naxos
and plans are underway to re-release many of them in the Naxos
American Classics series.
I came to love the music of Alan Hovhaness at
once upon hearing some of it in the late 1950s, the St. Vartan
Symphony and the Celestial Fantasy #1 in particular.
But dodecaphony had yet a while to reign and it amazes one now
to think back upon the calumny and derision Hovhaness had to endure
while joyously pursuing his own path. Fortunately he has always
had champions and his music has always been available if you were
willing to look for it. Gerard Schwarz who was Hovhaness’s champion
for the final 15 years of his life was able to accomplish the
recording many of the composer’s finest works in state of the
art sound on CDs. Hopefully the current popularity of this composer
will bring back into the catalogue many older recordings long
gone out of print. Hovhaness’s music always inspired recording
engineers to do their best, and he has never received a bad recording
that I am aware of, so these older recordings will still be of
great interest, especially since many of them were made with the
composer’s active collaboration.
We now have an embarrassment of riches with several
better-than-adequate recordings of the Mysterious Mountain
Symphony. The Reiner is still probably the best performance
overall but the pre-Dolby sound and the fluffed trumpet note during
a fugal entry are small but not insignificant annoyances. The
Davies recording is so indolent as to be almost an insult; I think
they spent all their rehearsal time on the Harrison work on the
same disk and threw in the Hovhaness as an afterthought in the
hope the disk would thus sell a few copies. The John Williams
recording has good sound and good playing but the interpretation
is overly reverent, approaching somnolence. The first Schwarz
recording with the Seattle SO, compared directly with this new
one, shows occasions where concentration lapsed or orchestral
balance was slightly off. This new recording by Schwarz has none
of these difficulties, builds feeling and manifests grandeur,
and is the only real challenge to the Reiner recording; many will
prefer it. The major difference is that Reiner achieves greater
dynamics, possibly exceeding those written in the score since
all other recordings remain within this smaller dynamic range.
I remember once when I was on a two week pack
trip in the Arizona desert our guide, a man who spent his whole
life outdoors and formally knew nothing about music confided to
me that the Mysterious Mountain Symphony said everything
he felt could be said about his religion and his love of the natural
world—amazing that a person unschooled in music could relate so
immediately to a work which consists entirely of learned forms,
which builds an arch of chorales and canons with a double fugue
as its keystone.
Symphony #66, ‘Hymn to glacier Peak’ is
good Hovhaness; if it were the only work he ever wrote, we would
revere it as a masterpiece. It fades only by comparison with its
diskmates. The slow movement of this three movement work is entitled
‘love song to Hinako’, after Hinako Fujihara, Hovhaness’s wife
of 24 years. It is brief, features the flute, and not overly sentimentalised.
It is not by any means the most Japanese sounding music on the
disk. Likewise ‘Storm on Mount Wildcat’ Op 2, which is
an impression of a mountain storm in Massachusetts where the composer
grew up. The mountains are smaller there and so is the height
of the music.
The Mount St. Helens Symphony, commissioned
by Peters International publishers, is one of the composer’s finest
works, but faces one impossible challenge: no matter how hard
you hit a bass drum on stage it’s still going to be hundreds of
orders of magnitude quieter than a volcanic explosion. The conductor’s
job is to make of it a gesture that accomplishes its symbolic
goal without amusing the audience. No attempt was made in either
of Schwarz’s recordings to amplify the sound by use of an anvil
or sounding box as might be employed in the Mahler Sixth Symphony,
and neither recording actually accomplishes the required gesture
(although the Seattle SO recording comes much closer), and one
must just discipline oneself and not to snicker and agree to accept
the gesture as sufficient. Certainly the savagery of the ensuing
music with its trombone glissandi and intricate timpani solo quickly
draws one’s attention away and brilliantly depicts the chaotic
violence of the rampaging fiery cloud.
However to me the high point of this work is
the ‘Spirit Lake’ movement, one of the composer’s very finest,
making effective use of a little trick of string writing he learned
from a Shostakovich string quartet. Never let it be said Hovhaness
didn’t listen to other people’s music.
Of the St. Helens Symphony I played first
the Seattle SO CD, then the Telarc CD tracks, both with virtual
surround sound, and finally the Telarc SACD surround sound tracks
of this work, and I observed that the best performance by far
is the Seattle version, perhaps for a number of obvious reasons:
The composer was present in the hall. Every one of these musicians
heard the boom when that mountain blew. Their children in the
suburbs of Seattle at the base of Mt. Rainier (generally expected
to be the next one to go off) have regular volcano escape drills.
The poisonous fiery clouds can travel a kilometre in about 40
seconds which means it would take them about five minutes after
the initial explosion to reach the schools. On a surprise signal,
the children are alerted and their teachers hurriedly lead them
out of the building and assemble them in the school yard while
the schoolbusses are driven onto the grounds. The children get
onto the buses which depart one by one when full, get up onto
the expressway, then accelerate to 90 kilometres an hour, while
the preparedness officials click their stopwatches. Presumably
the teachers and school employees are permitted to board the last
bus. If they can get everyone out and up to 90 kilometres an hour
in five minutes, they’re safe. And they rehearse this at regular
intervals. The surrounding residents, of course, are on their
own.
The Telarc CD tracks have lower dynamic range
than the Seattle SO CD, but by comparison with the SACD have the
same artefacts of compression into 44/16 format: general cloudiness,
raspy violins, muddy bass, and odd clicking sounds in the high
percussion. The SACD tracks have no greater dynamic range, but
the bass range and definition are markedly superior, and all the
cloudiness, harshness, and artefacts in the midrange and high
ranges disappear. The genuine surround sound is less obvious than
this particular player’s (Sony DVP-NS755V) virtual rear channel
surround sound. And, even though I already knew this music pretty
well and I’d just heard it two times on the CD tracks with no
significant loss of dignity, when the SACD tracks finished playing
I was sobbing.
For the Mt. St. Helens Symphony, ask Santa
Claus to ask Naxos to re-release the Seattle SO performance in
DVD-Audio format. In the meantime, if you’re a Hovhaness fan you
already have the Delos version and can be happy that it has not
been superseded. Buy the Telarc version for the Mysterious
Mountain and the two other works. If you don't own this music,
then by all means buy the Telarc disk, and ask Santa Claus, &c.
&c.
Paul Shoemaker
see
also review by Rob Barnett
Royal Liverpool
PO/Gerard Schwarz