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BOULT    

ENGLISH MUSIC    

ARNOLD 

Eight English Dances  

BAX 

Tintagel 

ELGAR 

Three Bavarian Dances

Chansons de Nuit & Matin

HOLST 

The Perfect Fool 

BUTTERWORTH 

A Shropshire Lad

WALTON 

Siesta

 London Philharmonic Orchestra

conducted by

Sir Adrian Boult 

Recorded in 1954 

"Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) had a long and productive recording career which included the acoustic and digital eras and a very wide range of repertoire not restricted by any means to the music of Great Britain. However, much of reputation for his interpretations of English music is due in part to these fine Decca recordings from 1954 which have pleased so many music lovers since their first release."

Peter Joelson,  

Audiophile Audition,  

February 2010 

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PASC 193 - Boult 

The third installment of discs devoted to Howard Hanson's readings of American music includes the 1947 ballet Elliott Carter (b. 1908) composed for Lincoln Kirsten's Ballet Society, here (rec. 10 May 1955) a twelve-movement work in neo-Classical style that follows the Greek legend of Theseus, Ariadne, and the birth and slaying of the Minotaur on the island of Crete. Carter had been associated with a group of composers known as the Boston neo-classicists: Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, and Lukas Foss. They all followed Stravinsky's music closely. When Carter's previous The Minotaur--like balletic effort Pocahontas (1939)--did poorly with critics and audiences, Carter turned to a more radical style. Surprisingly, there are several lyrical moments in the score worth hearing, like Scene 2, Ariadne's dance with Theseus, rife with cross-rhythms and some striking counterpoint. The darker passages, like Theseus' Farewell to Ariadne and A Thread Breaks, easily suggest Stravinsky of Apollo, Barber of the Essays for Orchestra, or any of the American scores influenced by the Nadia Boulanger aesthetic. After Theseus and some Greeks emerge from the labyrinth, they soon forget any debt to Ariadne and depart from Crete without her. In the midst of Theseus' leave taking, only the clashing harmonies indicate Ariadne's personal doom at the ingratitude of her beloved.

Wallingford Riegger's 1935 New Dance, along with his Dance Rhythms, remains his one claim to popularity. Asymmetrical metrics from conga and rumba combine in obsessive ostinato, in Latin colorations that prove compelling and energetically visceral. Hanson's recording from 11 May 1953 has a crisp, elemental force that the Mercury engineers captured nicely and which Andrew Rose has improved to potent clarity. That Riegger composed for the likes of Martha Graham should surprise few who enjoy the elemental power in his dance forms, often reminiscent of the same energies we hear in the music of Silvestre Revueltas.

Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) composed his Second Suite in 1892, ostensibly borrowing from a collection by musicologist Theodore Baker of collected Indian tunes, but amended by MacDowell "in the direction of musical beauty, [but] enough of the original tune[s) have] been retained to leave no doubt as to [their] barbaric flavor." The opening movement, Legend, builds on two themes for horns, strings, and woodwinds. The conservative harmonic elements have refined away any of the "primitive" that we associate with Bartok and Kodaly's notion of ethnic music, but the orchestration is effective. Hanson's forces (19 November 1953), culled from the Rochester Philharmonic and Eastman School top players, achieve an ample sound-vital and masculine. Love Song supposedly derives from MacDowell's musings on an Iowa tribe motif. War Times proves colorful for the flutes and brass, but it lacks real martial conviction. MacDowell himself remained fond of the Dirge movement, stating that the music described an Indian mother's lament for her dead son, but that the music transcended any particular moment of grieving. Village, the fifth movement, takes its cue from two Iroquois melodies, alternately for plucked strings and for flute-piccolo combination with winds and strings. Even at its best, the music sounds like a slightly insipid version of Dvorak's style in his American Suite, but Hanson's forces never relent in their spirited enthusiasm.  

PASC 302 - Hanson

Listening to the 22 November 1947 inscription of the Peer Gynt Suite as edited and transferred by Mark Obert-Thorn, we must find it hard to believe the recording was first issued on Columbia 78 rpm shellacs as part of set X-291 and later transferred to LP (ML 5181). Though Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) rarely moves me intellectually, his Philadelphia Orchestra sound--inherited from and refined beyond the work of Leopold Stokowski--never fails to astonish in its vivid definition of string and woodwind choirs.  Scandinavian music generally brought out urgent sympathies from Ormandy, and his readings of the music by Alfven, Sibelius, Grieg, and Nielsen remain strong examples of the degree of response he could elicit from his top-flight musicians.

Having first recorded The Swan of Tuonela (2 April 1950), Ormandy decided to fill out the entire 1895 Op. 22 Kalevala Legends cycle the next year (16 December 1951), and CBS released the amalgam as ML 4672. The opening of the four symphonic poems in a bold E-flat Major depicts a rather picaresque hero in Lemminkainen, here invested in the art of seduction of maidens-100 widows and 1000 virgins-on an island (Pohjoland), and his conquests inflame the local male populace to wrath. The slow evolutionary character of the main theme adumbrates the kind of writing we will hear much later in Sibelius, as in his Seventh Symphony. A swan in the Aeolian mode, played on the English horn of John Minsker, intones the lovely Swan of Tuonela, the Finnish land of death and black water, surrounded by a rapid current. Ormandy maintains a tense but lyrically engaged line whose tonal purity and breathed pace insure its immortality; and we know that Sibelius several times lauded Ormandy's efforts on behalf of his music.

In the third legend, Louhi, the trickster-mistress of Pohjola, convinces the Achilles-like Lemminkainen to kill the swan of Tuonela in order to be worthy of a daughter's hand. Amidst these dark currents of intention, a blind cowherd anticipates Lemminkainen's mission and fashions a poison serpent from a river reed that kills the hero. Having tossed the dead Lemminkainen into the frantic currents of the river, the cowherd invokes a river deity to revenge himself on Lemminkainen, and so he hacks the body into forty pieces. Lemminkainen's mother Lempi, the goddess of erotic love, retrieves the pieces and reassembles them--much as Isis restored Osiris--so that Lemminkainen may return in triumphant E-flat Major in the fourth symphonic poem, Lemminkainen's Homecoming. The vivid chromaticism of the third legend emerges in thrilling colors under Ormandy, with each of the Philadelphia's choirs-especially the strings and brass-in high relief, the brass chords' adumbrating the heroic riffs in the D Major Symphony. The feeling of sunrise or awakening dominates the Homecoming sequence for Lemminkainen, a galloping energy-with friend and comrade Tiera-that invigorates a score rife with color elements in winds, brass, strings, and battery. If "jubilant abandon" describes this incarnation of the music, then Ormandy has well realized Sibelius' mythic intentions.  Much in the spirit of Wagner's national operas, the Four Legends exhibits a wealthy grandiosity of vision that transcends its parochial or local roots.  

PASC 299 - Ormandy