Robert Russell Bennett
        Symphonic Works

* Abraham Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form
* Sights and Sounds (An Orchestral Entertainment)

Moscow Symphony Orchestra/William T. Stromberg
Naxos 8.559004 Total time: 53:27

Summary for the Busy Executive: Great (Irving) Caesar's ghost!

Like most Americans, I first knew of Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981)
as Broadway's premier orchestrator.  The sound of Rodgers and Hammerstein,
for example, is largely the sound of Robert Russell Bennett.  Indeed,
people prized Bennett more for his orchestration skills than for his
original music.  He studied with Nadia Boulanger but was canny enough to
realize that symphonies and string quartets wouldn't allow him a family.
Much of his concert work is slight, mainly because that's all the time he
felt he could give.  Nevertheless, even the light stuff shows a very
fanciful mind. His Rondo Capriccioso for flute quartet (1918), for example,
has the chiasmic rondo structure A-B-A-C-A-B-A, but the C section is a
theme with variations.  Heifetz recorded a Song Sonata and Hexapoda: 5
Studies in Jitteroptera (at least the title wins a prize).  Nevertheless,
Bennett also produced a few ambitious things. I have a recording of a very
attractive violin concerto with fiddler Louis Kaufman and Bernard Herrmann
conducting.  The Abraham Lincoln symphony (1929) is probably his most
ambitious work.

The symphony had a vogue. My mother's Thirties college textbook, listing
the themes of 100 symphonies - including Beethoven and Brahms, but not all
the Mahlers - deals with this one. It lists nothing by Piston or Diamond
or Sessions. By the Forties, however, Bennett's homage to Lincoln had
disappeared from serious discussions of American concert music. But all
was not necessarily well beforehand. In his Memoirs of an Amnesiac, Oscar
Levant relates the following:

   Russell Bennett wrote a piece for symphony orchestra about Abe Lincoln
   at this time. When Irving Caesar [the lyricist of George Gershwin's
   "Swanee"] heard it, he commented that he'd come to the conclusion
   that John Wilkes Booth didn't kill Lincoln - Robert Russell Bennett
   did.

Nevertheless, the themes in my mother's textbook intrigued me. They didn't
look like any other music I knew. I plunked them out on the piano keys, and
they still hadn't lost my interest. Consequently, I was pretty excited at
the release of this recording.

My enthusiasm dimmed a bit, however, once I actually listened to it. A major
pleasure of symphonic music lies in a feeling of inexorable transformation
- following a close argument or listening to a tale well-told. Although one
notices themes, connections among movements, a somewhat cyclical construction,
there really is an awful lot of note-spinning and no symphonic argument to
speak of. It all *sounds* gorgeous, and I'd lie if I didn't admit I heard
some arresting moments - the beginning of the second movement, for example,
which put me in mind of the opening of Virgil Thomson's (later) suite from
Louisiana Story.

Yet I can't call any movement a success or Bennett's musical language all
that interesting in itself. The work suffers from emotional inflation, much
like the purple-poetic titles Bennett gives to each of the four movements:
"His Simplicity and His Sadness," "His Affection and His Faith," "His Humor
and His Weakness," and "His Greatness and His Sacrifice." The first movement
wins the Worst of Four prize. Bennett begins an interesting idea and can't
sustain it or gets distracted by a bright, shiny something else. It comes
across as eight minutes of noodling around. Bloch's America, admittedly one
of his weaker pieces, written around the same time, is certainly episodic,
but beneath each episode runs a complex symphonic argument. It coheres far
better and speaks more compellingly. Bennett's second movement begins
beautifully, but the major contrast ("His Faith") is again filled with hot
air. Lincoln's a tricky figure to write about. The artist always runs the
risk of bombast and bathos - traps not even Copland managed to evade entirely
in his Lincoln Portrait. Copland, however, knew enough to realize that
eloquence is often achieved through spare means. For Bennett, eloquence
usually means throwing in more instruments. The movement that succeeds best
for me is the scherzo. It's the most coherent and focused and the least
diluted with notes that merely take up time. For me, the symphony serves
mainly as a lesson on the difference between the good and the third-rate.
I find very little mystery in why the symphony hasn't been played for at
least fifty years.

Bennett wrote Sights and Sounds about the same time as the symphony and
submitted both works to a competition bankrolled by RCA Victor. Bennett won
for both works, as did Copland for his Dance Symphony, Bloch for Helvetia,
and Gruenberg for *his* symphony. Bennett aimed lower than in the symphony
and achieved far more. Indeed, despite a somewhat "faceless" idiom (I doubt
anybody would guess a Bennett piece in a blind test), the suite nevertheless
wins with wit, charm, and (this time) genuine poetry. The success of this
suite and of other Bennett works I've enjoyed suggests to me that Bennett
is primarily a miniaturist, a lyric (as opposed to epic or tragic) poet of
a very high order. Bennett does have a fine violin concerto, but it seems
a sport, much like the piano concerto of Grieg. Bennett comes up with a
structure similar to Mussorgsky's Pictures: movements linked by a "regular"
interlude.  At the end of most of the movements, a solo trumpet with a
plunger mute launches into a brief commentary foreshadowing the material
of the next movement and a xylophone and snare drum "count down" the number
of the next movement. Just about every movement's a winner, and each portrays
some aspect of life in the big city: "Union Station," "Highbrows" (full of
Angst), "Lowbrows," "Electric Signs," "Night Club," "Skyscraper," and
"Speed." Bennett shares some ideas among movements. The lowbrows, for
example, turn up at the night club. For me, the most evocative movement was
"Skyscrapers (Adagio religioso)." It's the briefest one, but it conjures
up those silent newsreel aerial shots of the New York skyline in mist. The
details recede into an abstract vision of great size and power.

Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony do well enough in Sight and Sounds,
although the orchestra plays a bit haphazard and raw. The Lincoln likeness
is pretty much of a loss, but I'm not sure anyone could save it.

Steve Schwartz