Walter Piston
Works for Violin and Orchestra

* Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1939)
* Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra (1970)
* Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra (1960)

James Buswell (violin),
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine/Theodore Kuchar
Naxos 8.559003 Total time: 60:49

Summary for the Busy Executive:  Outstanding at any price.  Because it's
Naxos, an incredible bargain.

Against my expectation, Piston's music has always held an element
of controversy, and not merely the standard one of 12-tone serialism
versus tonality.  Firmly tonal and no more serial than Mozart, it has
nevertheless drawn the fire of other tonal composers and the praise of
committed serialists and other wildebeests.  Much of the argument has
to do with, I think, Piston's emotional elusiveness as a composer.  Even
a very perceptive writer like Wilfrid Mellers gets Piston's artistic
character wrong in his classic study of American music, Music in a New
Found Land.  Mellers and others fall back on terms like "academic" and
"genteel." Piston, of course, was an outstanding academic, the author of
three standard textbooks (Harmony, Orchestration, and Counterpoint).  I'd
be willing to bet that most American composers own and consult at least one
of those texts.  He taught at Harvard, that bastion of the academy, for
over thirty years.  However, "academic" and "boring" don't mean the same
thing.  Many bores don't belong to the academy, and the academy has housed
some very lively folks indeed.

As for "gentility," I echo Marianne Moore:  "I, too, dislike it." Again,
however, "genteel" and "reserved" aren't the same.  In general, the
aesthetic biases of Romanticism - and we've not really left Romantic
notions of art and artists - work against a composer like Piston.  With a
decline in religion among the intelligentsia, the artist becomes the new
priest:  a conduit for divine truth.  Such truth overwhelms, bursts out of
decorous paths, like an overwhelming flood.  Perhaps it's even ugly.  We
distrust the artist who keeps his head, his psychic balance, because the
truth we seek is so potent.  Gentility implies that the artist substitutes
a comforting bromide for The Awful Truth.  It might be, however, that the
one who finds his feet in the tornado is the more powerful wizard.  A poet
like Sophocles - supremely sane - doesn't necessarily give you less truth
than Celine.  Die Meistersinger isn't necessarily a worse work than
Tristan, although Parsifal might well be.

Piston's music has this sanity.  At its best, it leaves the listener
with the sense of a dynamo - great power under great control.  Piston,
a superb craftsman in an era which distrusts craftsmanship, nevertheless
almost never allows craft to become the point.  Craft almost always serves
expression.  His compositional smarts usually sharpen the expressive point,
rather than merely complicate it.  Piston was born in Rockland, Maine -
a fact I find poetically significant as it concerns his music.  His work
shows indeed a New England reserve, but also the granitic strength of the
Maine coast and the contemplative nature of the snow-bound New England
intellectual.  Once you get to know it, you can also hear its high spirits.
If Ives and Ruggles tell of the hard, grand vistas of the New Englander's
spiritual pilgrimage, Piston paints for me the New England landscape - only
slightly less hard, more outwardly beautiful, and at times even serene, but
always with a large-charge undercurrent.

Piston wrote only two vocal works.  He felt he didn't really understand
the medium.  One story goes that when a student came to him with a little
choral anthem, he walked away shouting, "No!  No!  Bring me anything but
that!" His genius is instrumental and orchestral, which probably makes it
seem to some more emotionally abstract than it really is.  At its best, the
word "ineffable" fits very well.  With at least two of the violin works, we
have him at his best.  The first violin concerto comes from a period when
he has hit his stride - after his search for his own voice in the Twenties
and during the rush of spiritual optimism of American composers in the
Thirties and Forties.  The last two works come from Piston's late period -
more complicated, more dark.  All are well-written for the violin, and all
show superb structural thinking.

I might as well deal with the last work, the Fantasia, first, since it's
my least favorite.  If I had my way, Piston would have continued in his
Forties manner until he died.  But no real artist can stand still, if only
because writing the same sort of piece again and again eventually palls
on a mind of real quality.  Even Bach changes, even Bruckner, despite
the completeness of artistic realization each may have already achieved.
Piston's music becomes less quartally-based and more chromatic, which
translates into emotional shadows.  The one-movement work exhibits an
unusual structure - a slow, meditative frame surrounding three large
sections, fast-slow-fast.  The frame turns the entire work into
slow-fast-slow-fast-slow - an arch, where we expect the emotional weight in
the central slow movement (and that's what we get).  Piston wrote the work
for Salvatore Accardo, a violinist known for his fast fingers, his in-tune
double- and triple-stopping, and his performance of the Paganini etudes.
The soloist gets plenty of chances to call on technique, but the piece
doesn't really highlight virtuosity.  It's a complex narrative, and the
violinist must be able to follow the thread.  That doesn't happen here,
and I can't tell whether that's the performers' or the composer's fault.
The work seems "cramp'd and crabb'd," arthritic as opposed to the sense of
bounding freedom in the two concerti - as if Piston simply couldn't get the
ideas to flow.  However, I've heard only this one performance and admit the
possibility that another could change my mind about the work.  On the other
hand, I've heard Buswell and Kuchar triumph in even more complex music, so
I hesitate to lay the blame at their feet.

No misgivings at all about the first violin concerto - to my mind, one of
the best of its century.  Howard Pollack, Piston's biographer, asserts that
Piston modeled the work on the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, something that
hadn't occurred to me in all the thirty years I've known the work but, once
pointed out, something that seems dead on.  It's a bit like seeing the face
of the girlfriend you just split up with on other women.  Piston doesn't
simply reproduce the character of each movement; after all, such a general
scheme fits many other concerti.  The resemblances come down to rather
specific elements - most notably, the glorious, blazing restatement of the
main theme and the violin passage work at the end of the first movement.
The concerto is heroic and fun at the same time, just like the Tchaikovsky.
It deserves a bigger audience.

The second concerto is a product of Piston's final compositional phase.
The big-hearted innocence of the first concerto has been tempered by
experience and reflection.  Emotionally, it's more knowing and more mature
- Humphrey Bogart rather than Errol Flynn - and less immediately winning.
However, it does deliver its matter clearly and without stumbling, and
Piston builds a narrative that moves.  The issue of clarity is, I believe,
important, because saying what one means is generally the hardest thing
to do.  Profundity is less clear-cut.  One can claim profundity and then
argue about it, but, by its very nature, one can't claim clarity with the
possibility of disagreement.  Generally, Piston works the drama inherent
in the contrasts of classical forms like sonata-allegro.  However, the
contrasts spring not so much from key as from rhythm.  Nevertheless, Piston
scores on the important point that the various ideas do indeed contrast.
The most compelling movement to me is the slow second movement.  Many
writers, including Pollack and Jim Svejda, have related Piston's lyricism
to his Italian ancestors (the family name was originally Pistone), but I
find very little similarity among Piston, Verdi, and Puccini.  Rather than
putting all the emotion out there, Piston holds something back - much as
Hindemith does in his slow movements - and thus draws the listener in.  The
finale hearkens back to other Piston endings, notably that of the second
symphony - foot-stomping exuberance emphasizing the tonic pitch.

Buswell plays as though he enjoys it.  Kuchar and the Ukrainians not only
keep things moving, but now and then get the music to dance.  Sound is
fine.

Steve Schwartz