The Naxos series of Roy Harris Symphonies has proved to be one
of their more stuttering projects, certainly in terms of the
discs’ appearance in the catalogue and the personnel involved.
The
original
release dated from the time Naxos were recording in the Ukraine
and featured the 7
th and 9
th Symphonies
in 2002. The
next
disc appeared in 2006 from the Colorado Symphony Orchestra
in the safe hands of Marin Alsop and contained his two most famous
Symphonies - the 3
rd and 4
th. So, after
another four year pause arrives volume three - also with Alsop
but this time featuring her Bournemouth orchestra. Given that
he wrote thirteen numbered symphonies which Naxos has promised
to record, it is to be hoped that the current rate of two per
four years will increase!
Intellectually even more than musically Harris is strikingly
individual. He grew up far away from the hub of American music
on the East Coast and was largely self-taught until, on the advice
of Aaron Copland, he became one of so many American composers
to make the pilgrimage to Paris to attend masterclasses from
Nadia Boulanger. However, unlike many of his fellow students
he rejected much of the neo-classical aesthetic she propounded
and, pardon the pun given his farming heritage, ploughed his
own furrow. On returning to the States his
Symphony 1933 (in
effect his first) became the first indigenous American symphony
to be commercially recorded. His breakthrough work was his
Symphony
No.3 of 1938 and it remains his best known work by some distance.
Certainly it is the work by which most collectors will know him.
Apart from the
4th Symphony the
other symphonies - and indeed any of his work - have been much
more sporadically recorded. Currently, there is another slowly
evolving Symphony cycle on Albany but how complete that intends
to be I do not know.
Harris is one of those artists I find very hard to place in the
pantheon of composers. Sometimes I find his music to be powerfully
uplifting and emotionally involving and at other times opaque
and dull. My instinct, and this really is born out of listening
to the music and reading the brief biographical details, is that
all too often he tries to impose rather grand extra-musical ideas
on his work that he does not have the technique to pull off.
To my mind the Third Symphony ‘works’ so well because
it is pure music and concentrated into a compressed single movement
form. Also, it is very clear that Harris was a man of considerable
political ideals. He headed up several cultural delegations to
the Soviet Union and was an admirer (as so many were at that
time) of the perceived pure ideal of a socialist state. My guess
is that he sought to copy the concept of the proletariat artist
producing music for the masses. This also links in with another
neat concept. Harris shared his birthday with Abraham Lincoln
and given that Lincoln features specifically in two of Harris’s
Symphonies (6 and 10) is it too much of a intuitive leap to suppose
that he took the president’s words from the Gettysburg
address which enshrines his socialist view that “all men
are created equal” to write “[music] of the people,
for the people, by the people”? He also wrote a work for
mezzo-soprano and piano trio
Abraham Lincoln walks at midnight (
also
recorded by Naxos).
So to the music presented here. Given the presence of a picture
of President Lincoln on the disc’s cover and the placing
of the
6th Symphony “Gettysburg” first
it is clear that this is the key work on the disc. This is not
a war symphony. Although the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 was
a turning point in the American Civil War, Harris’ focus
is on the famous address President Lincoln made when visiting
the battlefield some four months later. In one of the briefest
yet most famous speeches ever made in America, Lincoln coined
the phrase that still resonates in democratic countries to this
day; “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth
of freedom - and that government: of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. Written
in 1944 Harris heads each of the four movements of his symphony
with a title; in order
Awakening,
Conflict,
Dedication,
and
Affirmation. Curiously not one of those words appears
in the speech itself. So what we have is a distillation of the
varying moods of Lincoln’s speech overlaid onto a standard
four movement symphonic form. It’s a big idea, and one
that Harris brings off to powerful effect. To my mind there is
a potential danger in giving such bald titles to a movement.
The composer is committing himself to a kind of cinematic representation,
so
‘Awakening’ (you would suppose) roughly
moves from darkness to light - it does;
‘Conflict’ is,
well, aggressive and dramatic - it is - and so on. In performance
a lot will depend therefore on the players being able to engage
in a somewhat technicolour way with the intended emotional goal.
Marin Alsop and her excellent Bournemouth orchestra give it a
good shot but I am not wholly convinced. This symphony has also
been released as part of the above-mentioned Albany cycle played
by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra under Keith Clark (originally
released but differently coupled on Varèse Sarabande -
VCD 47245 and now on Albany TROY064) and I find that performance
to be significantly more successful than Alsop. Timings are remarkably
similar except in the last movement where Clark shaves a whole
minute off Alsop’s 7:03. The differences are in two key
areas; the engineering and the spirit of the performance. Engineer/producer
Tim Handley - who has been responsible for many excellent recordings
for Naxos - seems to have produced an acoustic which feels more
cavernous than others I have heard from the same venue. This
has two main effects - the lower frequencies are very noticeable
and upper detail is less distinct. At the very opening of the
symphony this has a striking effect on the emotional landscape
of the work. The Bournemouth bass drum and timps give a funereal
feel against which the shaft of light from the piano, vibraphone
and harp struggle to impact. The Clark recording imbues the opening
with a hushed expectation with the high chords brightly etched.
The solo strings in Bournemouth are quite forward in the mix
and rather literal in their approach. The Pacific Symphony Orchestra
players, much further back in the orchestral group are given
a wraith-like quality that works surprisingly well. Likewise
as the movement progresses Harris does not change the basic pulse;
instead he increases the number of notes per pulse played. The
effect is of an acceleration without accelerating! The Albany/Varèse
recording allows the inner detail to register with greater clarity
than the Naxos disc. The Pacific Symphony Orchestra seems more
convinced by the work and the movement builds to a (surely intended)
exultant climax. The Bournemouth playing, while technically beyond
reproach, never takes wing. Harris is a motivic rather than melodic
composer; there are not many opportunities for great arching
melodies to soar over an orchestra. Instead the focus has to
be on the cumulative power of the expanding and developing motifs
and to my ears this is achieved more fully by Clark than Alsop.
As a movement
Conflict is more problematic and probably
the least satisfying section of the work to my ears. It does
not seem to be representing either an inner or outer conflict.
This is exactly the kind of movement that needs one of Shostakovich’s
viscerally exciting nightmare scherzos. Harris opts for piercing
brass over a string drone which builds to the various orchestral
groups throwing fanfare-like figures at each other. In Bournemouth
the bass drum again rather dominates. Curiously, there are moments
very similar to Malcolm Arnold when the horns obsessively repeat
an upward whooping figure. Again, the forward momentum is built
by the same basic pulse being divided into ever smaller parts.
Clark and his engineers are much more successful at illuminating
detail. Most noteworthy is the extraordinarily abrupt end to
the movement. Although the final two movements are separate they
fulfil a single emotional span. Building from the rubble at the
end of
Conflict,
Dedication builds slowly and sparely.
A solo violin reappears much as in the first movement but the
effect here of its falling phrase is that of a benediction. This
movement is more lightly scored and indeed for much of the time
the strings alone carry the burden of the musical argument. In
its simple unwinding groping upwards this movement pre-echoes
the minimalist writing of Arvo Pärt certainly during the
first 3 - 4 minutes. The wind and brass appear after some five
and a half minutes and continue to support the music as it becomes
increasingly hymn-like and impassioned. The finale
Affirmation continues
in much the same vein although it uses one of the older compositional
devices Harris prefers - fugue. This is fugal writing very much
on his own terms but it does gives him the opportunity to demonstrate
one of his other preferred techniques - that where the germinal
seed-like motifs grow and expand as the work progresses. The
entwining brass lines (again better defined by Clark than Alsop)
take on a positive heroic tone interrupted by a curious bass
drum and cymbals “oom-pah” figure. There is as much
conflicting writing here as there was in the symphony’s
second movement but this is the chaos of an excited crowd with
material overlapping and interrupting in joyful abandon. It makes
for a powerful ending to an impressive piece.
The other main work here is the
Symphony No.5 which was
composed when the outcome of World War II was much more in the
balance in the Autumn of 1942. It has no title as such but instead
bears the rather unwieldy dedication to; “the heroic and
freedom-loving people of our great ally, the Union of Soviet
Republics”. This resulted in the February 1943 premiere
being simultaneously broadcast to the USSR. Never afraid to take
on big ideas, this time I feel Harris is less successful than
in the
Gettysburg Symphony. The work has been recorded
before - by the Louisville orchestra under Jorge Mester (see
First
Edition review but before that on Albany AR012) but this
is my first encounter with the work. Each of the three movements
is given a plain number (all movements are created equal perhaps?)
Again motivic development is the central compositional plank
on which the works rests. In the case of the symphony’s
first movement it is based on a rhythmic cell the same as the
three note figure that dominates the opening movement of Beethoven’s
Symphony
No.7. This Harris alternates with a militaristic marching
motif. Whereas elsewhere this technique builds to a satisfying
climax here there is a sense that after a suitable amount of ‘working
out’ the movement finishes in an almost arbitrary way.
Movement II is another funeral cortege, this time replete with
tolling bells and muffled drums. Perhaps I’m just thinking
about the dedication but it feels a little hollowly rhetorical
and square-jawed. It strikes me as the least original of the
symphonic movements on this disc and the one that could most
easily be fitted to a film. Movement III again comprises fragmentary
motifs thrown against and chasing each other. Again I feel the
resonant character of the recording works against multi-lined
and layered character of the work. The rhythm of the first movement
reappears and with the brass leads to another bold but abrupt
conclusion.
In the past I have found that Harris’s work has grown on
me considerably with repeated listenings. I’m loath to
be too hard on the
Symphony No.5 for the simple reason
I do not know the work well yet. As ever, how marvellous that
we can take advantage of such assured and authoritative performances
at such a low price. One rather glaring error in David Truslove’s
liner note that is repeated on the CD’s cover however.
He notes that the disc’s filler -
Acceleration -
from 1941 is reworked as the slow movement of the
Symphony
No.6. It’s not; it is the
Symphony No.5. Truslove
also omits to mention William Schuman in his pantheon of American
Symphonic composers which is surprising since Schuman and Harris
are most often linked. I would have to say I find Schuman the
greater, more consistent composer, and certainly the one whose
symphonies show a more cogent and logical progression both individually
and collectively. But that being said I will look forward to
further releases in this cycle.
Nick Barnard
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Marin
Alsop 
