This CD has already
been reviewed by my colleague, Patrick
Gary, and I can do no better than refer
readers to his detailed comments on
the plot of Fall River Legend..
Link
I had come across some
of this music before. In 1952, four
years after the première of the
full ballet, Gould made a six-movement
suite, lasting just over twenty minutes
in performance. The music that he included
in the suite includes a conflation of
the first two numbers from the ballet,
‘Prelude’ and ‘Waltzes’ (mainly from
the latter). ‘Elegy’ is the next movement
in both the ballet and the suite (track
17 on this Naxos CD), but then in the
suite Gould jumps to ‘Church Social’
(Naxos track 24), then ‘Hymnal Variations’
(track 25) followed by ‘Cotillion’ (track
26). The suite concludes with the final
section of the ballet, ‘Epilogue’ (track
30). I mention all this because it gives
some indication of how much music –
and narrative – is excised from the
ballet, which Gould cut down by more
than half to form his suite.
I have two versions
of the Suite in my collection. One is
a 1982 recording by the New Zealand
Symphony Orchestra under James Sedares
(Koch International Classics) and the
other, dating from 1960, is by the composer
himself and "his" Orchestra
(RCA Gold Seal), I suspect both recordings
are long deleted. It was only when I
heard the complete ballet for the first
time in this recording that I realised
just how much of the ballet is missing
in the suite – far more than is the
case, for example, in the case of Copland’s
Appalachian Spring. In fact,
to be truthful, the suite gives a rather
lopsided view of the ballet. It was
only after I’d listened to this new
recording that I turned to the recordings
of the suite and read, in the liner
notes accompanying the Sedares performance,
a quote from Gould himself, in which
he commented that in compiling the suite
he "selected sequences that I felt
had the most presence as pure music."
Arguably the suite
contains the plums from the full score
but there’s much in the remainder of
the ballet score that’s of great interest.
The quirky, attractive ‘Waltzes’ are
common to both, as is the wistful ‘Elegy’.
However, I think it would be a pity
not to hear the somewhat spiky ‘Lullaby’,
which is more restless than I’d normally
expect a lullaby to be; that’s not included
in the suite. Even more tellingly, the
sinister and atmospheric ‘Death Dance’,
which precedes the discovery of the
corpses of Lizzie’s slaughtered parents,
can only be heard in the full ballet
and the frenzied ‘Mob Scene’ is also
absent from the suite. On the other
hand, Gould was surely right to include
in the suite the sequence of three numbers
mentioned above that begins with ‘Church
Social’ for these are three most attractive
items, which very neatly suggest the
atmosphere of a small town social gathering,
especially when heard as a sequence.
In fact this is a most
engaging and illustrative score and
it’s well worth hearing in its entirety,
especially in a fine and colourful performance
such as this present one from Nashville.
In any event, I’m not sure if any of
the Fall River music is otherwise
represented in the catalogue.
The coupling is equally
enterprising, not least because it offers
a very sharp contrast to the essentially
accessible and outgoing ballet. The
Jekyll and Hyde Variations were
commissioned by Dimitri Mitropoulos,
who gave the first performance with
the New York Philharmonic in February
1957. Steven Ledbetter, the author of
the liner notes, is surely right to
contend that the work owes its subsequent
relative neglect partly to the fact
that Mitropoulos quit the NYPO only
a few months later and so was unavailable
to champion the work further. Even more
importantly, I think, Gould, hitherto
known as a composer of less "demanding"
music, had composed on this occasion
a much more gritty and serious piece,
which must have perplexed many listeners.
The work comprises
a theme and thirteen variations, most
of them short and pithy. Though one
or two of the early variants are fairly
nimble, especially number two, the prevailing
mood is dark and quite intense. From
the tenth variation onwards the music
becomes particularly fierce, even forbidding,
and there’s a quite high quotient of
dissonance throughout Eventually the
thirteenth and final variation is more
reflective but even here the music is
still troubled and the ending seems
to me to be deliberately inconclusive.
It’s not an easy listen, certainly in
comparison with Fall River
Legend but it’s a most interesting
score and Kenneth Schermerhorn and his
orchestra give a very strong and committed
account of it.
In fact throughout
this disc the commitment and skill of
the musicians cannot be faulted and
all the music is presented most convincingly.
The recorded sound is very good. These
must have been two of Kenneth Schermerhorn’s
last recordings and they stand as a
fine testimony to his work in Nashville.
The music on this CD is well worth investigation
and should most certainly be sought
out by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century
American orchestral music.
John Quinn
See also review by Patrick
Gary and Jonathan
Woolf
Nashville Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Schermerhorn
