"William F. Dishman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>If the Hot Springs recording is the original scoring, which is the Utah
>Symphony recording? I have both recordings of Night in the Tropics and
>find the performance better on the Utah Symphony.  Not being an expert
>on various editions, please educate me.

Almost none of Gottschalk's orchestral scores survive intact (& that
includes the composer's masterpiece, A Night in the Tropics); & many
others exist only as popular piano reductions or shortscores annotated
for orchestral arrangement (the Dover publication of The Union shows these
annotations quite clearly, as i recall).  The Hot Springs versions are
misrepresented as original versions; but are actually fairly spineless (to
my ears) attempts to rereconstruct scores better known in versions by Kay
et al.  A quick cf between the new reconstructions & the four contemporary
arrangers on the Naxos disc shows...  well - it shows that there really is
no cf:  Gottschalk's contemporaries - good; bad & very indifferent - knew
the man's idiom...  Rosenberg by contrast has plenty of ideas; but no
insight.

All the best,
Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>