Piston: Symphonies Nos 2 and 6 – Seattle Symphony Orchestra – Gerard Schwarz – NAXOS 8.559161 (51 mins)
Born in 1894 of English and Italian ancestry, Walter Piston remains one of America’s greatest yet one of the most reviled 20th century composers. His paternal grandfather, Antonio Pistone, was a Genoan seaman, hence the surname was changed to Piston to accommodate his adopted country.
The young Walter was raised in Boston, but in 1916 he enlisted and spent three years in the Navy, where he played saxophone in the Navy Band. After furthering his education at Harvard, he went to Paris for lessons with Paul Dukas and the legendary Nadia Boulanger. In 1926 he joined the faculty and remained at Harvard until 1960, when he was named professor emeritus.
Piston was renowned as an excellent teacher, and his pupils included eminent composers Elliot Carter and Leonard Bernstein, among other prominent musicians.
During his long career he was the recipient of many accolades and honours, and was held in high esteem by his fellow composers, but by the time of his death in 1976, his music, strangely enough, just could not find a place in people’s tastes.
It is only in the past two decades that Piston’s stock has started to rise. The Second Symphony dates from 1943, when the tide of the Second World War was turning in favour of the Allies. The three-movement work evades the patriotic war fever that pervaded this particular period of American history, but with a darkly-hued and often animated ‘moderato’, a quiet and bitterly nostalgic ‘adagio’ and a spirited ‘rondo allegro’, the symphony has a thoroughly ‘New World’ feeling.
At first the work was well received and also won the ‘New York Music Critics’ Award’, but soon after, it fell into relative obscurity. It was revived in 1970, when Michael Tilson-Thomas gave it its first commercial recording.
The Sixth Symphony was composed in 1955 to celebrate the 75th season of the Boston Symphony, an orchestra with which Piston had a long and intimate association.
Dedicated to the great music director Serge Koussevitzky and premiered by the famous Charles Munch, the piece abounds in luscious contrasts of timbre and explosive bursts of colour, and in each of the four movements Piston’s imaginative and innovative ideas shine through the brilliant orchestration and daring harmonies.
Gerard Schwarz, who has unstintingly championed Piston’s music for the best part of his career, marshals his Seattle forces with assurance, and his unerringly paced accounts are full of supreme composure and expressive ardour that serve the composer’s cause to the hilt.
An excellent introduction for those who are still alien to Piston’s wonderfully exciting world and would like to discover some of the hidden byways of 20th century American music. The lean playing time and annotations are more than compensated by a top-quality recording.
Arensky: Six Pieces, op. 53 – 4 Etudes, op. 41 – 12 Etudes, op. 74 – Six Exercises (By the Sea), op. 52 – Adam Neiman (Piano) – NAXOS 8.572233 (64 mins)
Born in Novgorod on July 12, 1861, Anton Arensky was part of a group of Russian composers, which included Glazunov, Gretchaninov and Lyadov, who came to prominence during the last decade of the 19th century.
The young Anton was blessed with musical parents who guided his first steps in a composing career that took off as early as when he was aged nine. Indeed, by the time he was 10 he had already a number of songs and piano pieces to his name.
Between 1879 and 1882 he benefited immensely from tuition with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St Petersburg Conservatory.
After winning a gold medal for his pains, Arensky was appointed professor at the Moscow Conservatory where his pupils included none other than Rachmaninov and Scriabin. It was during the 1880s that he wrote his two symphonies, a number of chamber and choral works, and his first and most successful opera A Dream on the Volga, which was premiered in 1891, a year in which he also composed his Violin Concerto.
In 1895 Arensky returned to St Petersburg where he succeeded Balakirev as director of the Imperial Chapel. But it was also at this time that his life started to take a downward trend. Falling victim to drink and gambling he resigned from this post six years later. The last five years of his life (1901-06) were spent in misery and depravation which were mostly self-inflicted. He died of tuberculosis in 1906 aged only 45.
Arensky was a gifted pianist who wrote nearly a hundred works for the instrument he loved over a composing span of nearly 25 years, and this disc includes groups of works that were written during the last 15 years of his life. The Six Pieces, op. 53 (1901) reveal the composer’s wide-ranging predilection for different styles, while both sets of the Etudes, which date from 1896 and 1905 respectively, are prime examples of Arensky’s great gifts for melody and inventiveness.
As expected, these pieces have a strong inclination for Chopin’s creations, which combine technical challenges with lyricism and daring harmonies. The 1891 Six Exercises entitled ‘By the Sea’ harbour the disturbing spirits of Liszt and Schumann, but Arensky’s personal timbre is nonetheless extremely pervasive. Adam Nieman gives idiomatic performances that penetrate to the heart of the matter, and his pianism is consistently sharp-focused and enthrallingly fresh.
A fine and invaluable addition to the Arensky discography in excellent sound but rather lean annotations.
Herrmann: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Five Fingers (Soundtracks) – Moscow Sym. Orch. – William Stromberg – NAXOS 8.570186 (66 mins)
Born in 1911, Bernard Herrmann spent the first half of his musical career in the concert hall, but during the 1940s his popularity started to wane, and it was only after the CBS Symphony was disbanded in October 1950 that Herrmann turned to the film industry in an attempt to revive his concert career.
He settled in Los Angeles with the hope of a renewed stability in his artistic life, and by the second half of 1950 the composer managed to establish a solid foothold with 20th Century Fox, an association that was to bear fruit aplenty. Two of his first series were On Dangerous Ground and The Day the Earth Stood Still, which kept him busy till mid-August 1951.
On October 23 he began writing the music for Five Fingers, a film that had both the exoticism of Turkey and the perilously unstable emotionalism of film noir.
The semi-documentary style in which the narrative is laid out and the superb performances of James Mason and Danielle Darrieux created the perfect dynamics for a cliffhanger of a film to which Herrmann responded with a score that is both dramatically tense and romantically beguiling.
The composer produced a staggering 84 pages of music of which this recording only includes some 30 minutes; enough to give us a clear picture of Herrmann’s natural abilities to paint characters and situations economically yet effectively.
In May 1952 Herrmann started composition on The Snows of Kilimanjaro, a film that had the perfect mixture of sex, showmanship and adventure; a recipe that was popular with audiences and critics alike. The film was a huge success, and so was the music.
Ninety-two pages of sketches full of fabulous orchestration and superbly etched vignettes that capture all the supercharged emotions and torrid passions of Hemingway’s story with unique imagery. The 37-minute suite gives a detailed panorama of the scope of Herrmann’s creation, and the listener will certainly understand why this film was such a hit some 60 years ago.
John Morgan’s restoration of the score is indeed a marvellous achievement and his choice from this vast Herrmann canvas is both astute and insightful. A truly exciting disc in state-of-the-art sound and detailed annotations that should be snapped up without hesitation, by film buffs in particular.
These CDs were made available for review by D’Amato record shop of 98/99, St John’s Street, Valletta.