Eugene Ormandy
American Symphonies
* Piston: Symphony No. 4
* Harris: Symphony No. 7
* Schuman: Symphony No. 6
Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy
Albany TROY256 MONO Total time: 72:02
Summary for the Busy Executive: Classic accounts from The Other Ormandy.
Ormandy's image as a high-class purveyor of schmaltz has overtaken his
actual work. Among other things, he early on championed the symphonies
of Mahler, when Leonard Bernstein was a teenager. He also did quite a
bit of modern music. In fact, I first became aware of American music
as such through an Ormandy concert: MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 2,
Cowell's Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2, excerpts from Copland's Tender
Land Suite and Sessions's Black Maskers Suite, and the finale of Creston's
Symphony No. 2 - not only for the time, but even now not the usual
suspects.
Like any conductor, Ormandy had his strengths and weaknesses. He was a
superb colorist. A violinist himself, he got wonderful sounds from his
strings, and he made sure that the winds and brass of the Philadelphia
were as good as any. He also had a great sense of musical "narrative"
and rhetoric. He could "tell the tale" of a piece better than most. His
rhythm, on the other hand, was notoriously slack. The precision of the
Cleveland, the Berlin Philharmonic (under someone other than Karajan),
and the Chicago eluded him. He had trouble with highly contrapuntal
music. His recording of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony, although
immensely popular, turned Hindemith's precisely-judged textures and
counterpoint to tapioca. On the other hand, there were pieces he just
about owned - the popular Tchaikovsky and the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique,
for example. Furthermore, every now and again he would surprise you with
wonderful accounts of scores you'd have thought outside his purview. I
think especially of his strong Shostakovich Symphony No. 13, a blistering
Orff Catulli Carmina, and his performance with Serkin of the Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 4, the latter unsurpassed (even by those with bigger
Beethoven reputations) in its communication of architectural detail and
great poetry.
American-music freaks like me have long treasured Ormandy's Piston and
Schuman recordings, released (and even re-released) on the same Columbia
LP, not least because these were the only recordings of some wonderful
music. I've not heard the Harris before, although Ormandy recorded it
in 1955. The fourth is one of Piston's finest, managing to combine passion
and elegance. The opening "Piacevole" movement never fails to rapture
me out. Ormandy and the Philadelphia perform at their typical rhythmically
loose, but this is a noble sweeping, powerful account and, in the long
view, beautifully shaped and singing.
At one point, Roy Harris enjoyed an enviable reputation as a leading
American composer, right up there with Copland, Sessions, Barber, and
Piston. Since then, his work has suffered from critical eclipse, in part
due to the disdain of the post-Webernian serialists so dominant in the
Sixties and Seventies, in part because he doesn't fit the music historian's
"main line" of Modern American music, seen as stemming from Boulanger
and Stravinsky. Harris did study with Boulanger, but in many ways his
music bore the mark more of the Schola Cantorum - Franck and Dukas,
rather than Stravinsky and Les Six. Harris's fellow composers didn't
help. His Whitmanesque vision of the United States became unfashionable
during the Fifties, and he turned into the punch line to jokes about the
cluelessness of an outsized ego. About the only thing that has stayed
in the repertory is his third symphony - a shame, since almost everything
else I've heard by him shows at least a very interesting musical mind
indeed. His music is defined by how it expands, rather than by the limits
set on it. Harris has written of the great hold on him of the idea of
"organic growth." His music typically takes a germinating idea and from
it draws out a set of continuous variations. The variations tend to blend
into one another, rather than stand apart, leading to a sensation of
great intellectual power. Often Harris will group variations into large
subsections, leading to a kind of trompe d'oreille. The listener can
make analogies to classical forms like sonata, rondo, scherzo and trio,
and so on, but the driving engine of the music remains almost always
continuous variation. The excellent liner notes by John Proffitt mention
that the seventh symphony is based on passacaglia (essentially, variations
on a ground, strictly repeated). One immediately notes the analogy between
passacaglia and continuous variation. Damned if I can hear what the
ground of Harris's passacaglia is, but I'll take Proffitt at his word.
Again, far more important (and audible) to me is the continual transformation
of the initial idea.
William Schuman studied with Harris. One normally talks of Schuman's
break from Harris with Schuman's third symphony, but to me the influence
of the older composer never left his student entirely. Schuman's idiom
may be more astringent, the rhythms jazzier, the colors brighter (even
glitzy - I think of a remarkable timpani solo seven or eight minutes
in), and the ideas more directly and concisely presented (Harris is
usually far more contrapuntal), but the deeper structural principles
remain. Schuman's sixth also unfolds in one movement from a germinating
idea and one thing seems to lead inexorably to another. However, the
relations to classical structure lie much more in the open, and Schuman
strikes me as more formally versatile and innovative, particularly in
his late period. One notes things like his Concerto on Old English Rounds
for viola and women's chorus, To Thee, Old Cause for english horn and
orchestra, and some strikingly individual choral music. The composer
bases his sixth on passacaglia, although not a strict one, and this
time you can hear it. Not content with that, however, he organizes his
passacaglia into a four-movement symphonic structure - allegro, scherzo,
adagio, allegro, with extended introduction and coda. He also tends to
emphasize and worry a few intervals as he constructs themes - in this
case, a major second and a minor third. Contrasts of tempo and character
are starker, more dramatic than in Harris, where you can often find
yourself in the middle of a climax without quite knowing the details of
how you got there. With Schuman, everything appears clearly, even austerely
clear.
As I've said, Ormandy captures the nobility of the Piston, even though
the details blur a bit. He also gets the power of the Harris (probably
the most congenial to Ormandy's kind of music-making) and the grim
moodiness and savage aggression of the Schuman. The Schuman, in particular,
is one of those things you don't expect from Ormandy's Philadelphia. It
requires a sharp, precise attack (not Ormandy's strong suit), but Ormandy
comes close enough and puts out a lot of watts besides. Koch has a good
version in stereo with the New Zealand Symphony, but Ormandy's still the
guy to beat.
The sound is the dry, boxy one favored by Columbia throughout much of
its history. However, the performers (and the music) win through, and
the notorious tape squeal from the Schuman LP seems to have been eliminated
in this transfer.
Steve Schwartz
|
