Give or take a decade,
this group of four North American composers
belongs to the same generation as Vaughan
Williams. They were pretty much unheard
of apart from the odd ecclesiastical,
song or salon piece until Karl Krueger
and the Society for the Promotion of
the American Musical Heritage (SPAMH)
appeared on the scene. Krueger and the
RPO, recording in London during the
period from 1966 to maybe 1972, began
to make real inroads into the major
works of a forgotten American generation.
The resulting LPs were issued to libraries
world-wide and until the end of the
SPAMH were not available retail. Quite
apart from the four composers represented
here the series excavated works by Farwell,
Chadwick, Hadley, Macdowell, Paine,
Antes and many other Americans from
the three centuries to 1950.
The tone poem Excalibur
is the only piece I have ever
heard by Louis Coerne. Malcolm
Macdonald’s extensive and agreeably
full notes span twelve pages. They tell
us that Coerne, over his 52 years, wrote
some 500 works. His musical education
was received in France and Germany.
He became a close friend of Rheinberger
whose Mass in A minor he completed.
The ultra-romantic music of Excalibur
sounds sumptuous if not ideally
transparent in this forty plus year
old recording. I am not sure about Liszt
and Wagner but certainly Tchaikovsky
and even Debussy must have been influences.
The serenity of the music at 09:00 contrasts
with the elfin Baxianisms (Spring
Fire) of 10:01. The plunging extravagances
of this score and its decorative pre-Raphaelite
panoply suggest Coerne was an American
counterpart to Bantock. Certainly if
you have taken to the Bantock-Hyperion
series or to the two Arthurian tone
poems of Macdowell (Lamia and
Lancelot and Elaine -
review)
you will not want to miss Coerne’s tone
poem.
Edward Burlingame
Hill’s music carries a light-suffused
Gallic atmosphere in the case of the
Stevensoniana Suite No. 1.
It is more of the twentieth century
than Coerne’s gorgeous canvas. The reference
points for this suite (the first of
two) about childhood can be found in
Debussy, Grieg, Fauré and the
lighter Delius. There is some passing
tape phase distortion in the scherzo
but nothing to take the charm out of
this work which I once wrongly thought
pretty poor stuff. This remastering
has really lifted the work for me. I
wonder if anyone will ever tackle the
Second Stevensoniana Suite. Indeed
after hearing Hill’s Prelude for
Orchestra as conducted by Bernstein
I hope that Naxos might revive the Violin
Concerto and symphonies. The Robert
Louis Stevenson poems that inspired
each of the four movements are reproduced
at the back of the booklet.
Two works by Horatio
Parker caught the eye of Karl Krueger
when deciding what to record. They were
tone poems: A Northern Ballad
(a title also adopted by Bax
for three of his works in the 1930s)
and the eastern fantasy Vathek recorded
on Bridge 9124A/C and reviewed
here
. If the triangulation
points for Vathek are Tchaikovsky's
Francesca da Rimini, Elgar's
Second Symphony, Franck's Psyché
and the early Miaskovsky symphonies
(1-4) then for A Northern Ballad
we must look to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo
and Juliet (strongly) and Serenade
for Strings,
Berlioz, Dvořák (9:12) and early
Delius. Typically the RPO brass are
splendidly forward - strong and steady
as can be and no doubt basking in the
collective strengths of the Civil family.
The strings are also excellent and if
the recording is not very sophisticated
it has forthright ‘honest John’ virtues.
Given London’s reputation for sight-reading
tough scores - not, I am sure, that
these sessions, were sight-read - it
is no wonder that Krueger forsook the
union-trammelled American orchestras
for those in the British capital. This
is a not specially grim ‘Northern Ballad’
but neither is it frivolous - more predominantly
thoughtful and fleetingly dramatic.
It ends amid the warm glow of the strings.
Carpenter came
from an affluent industrial factory
owner family. After years of self-tuition
he studied with John Knowles Paine.
He took a handful of lesson with Elgar
while in Rome. His first fame was found
with songs and his orchestral song-cycle
Gitanjali to words by Tagore
should be well worth reviving. Later
there were other fresh-faced and even
cheeky products including the Piano
Concertino (1915), Krazy Kat ballet
(1921), Skyscrapers ballet (1923-4)
and Adventures in a Perambulator,
two 1940s vintage symphonies review.
Sea-Drift is a tone poem
stylistically indebted to Debussy’s
La Mer and Prélude
à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune.
It also recalls in its mix of birdsong
and lush impressionism Bax’s Spring
Fire. Those lush harmonic progressions
and wave-crashing climaxes warm the
heart every time. Its inspiration is
the same as for Delius’s work of the
same name - Whitman’s sea-poems from
Leaves of Grass. There’s competition
for this work. Symposium 1295 has an
historic recording of Bernstein conducting
the NYPO in the early 1940s. Decca 4581572
has the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Raymond Leppard. I have
not heard these other two recordings
but I do know an off-air tape of Julius
Hegyi and the Albany Symphony in Sea-Drift.
Krueger’s meditative style suits the
work very well indeed and the recording
quality, though almost forty years old,
is unsurprisingly better than my broadcast
tape. Strange that the work is reflective
but lacks the potent melancholia of
Delius’s work.
As usual this Bridge
reissue is superbly packaged and documented.
The notes are by Malcolm Macdonald who
has done such an excellent job of championing
the British composers Havergal Brian
and John Foulds.
A nicely contrasted
selection of orchestral music ranging
from the reflective impressionism of
Carpenter to the playfulness of Hill
to the surging pre-Raphaelite romanticism
of Coerne and the Tchaikovskian melos
of Parker.
Rob Barnett
Bridge reissues of the Krueger SPAMH
recordings
Macdowell:
http://www.musicweb-international.com//classrev/2002/Oct02/Edward_MACDOWELLtone.htm
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/aug99/macdowell.htm
Farwell, Hadley etc:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2003/Nov03/American1890.htm
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Karl Krueger
for
details 
