Leo Sowerby
Works for Organ & Orchestra

* Classic Concerto
* Medieval Poem**
* Pageant*
* Festival Musick

David Mulbury (organ), David Craighead (organ)*, Rita Lilly (soprano)**
The Fairfield Orchestra/John Welsh
Marco Polo 8.223725 (also available on Naxos 8.559028) Total time: 70:29

Summary for the Busy Executive: Interesting and attractive.

Most of the American national media focuses on the two coasts, left and
right, but an awful lot of art - and arguably some of the best art - gets
created in the middle of the country.  Chicago has had its fair share of
great writers, artists, and composers, many of whom had to leave for New
York in order to get their work noticed.  The list includes people like
Nelson Algren, Carl Sandburg, James T.  Farrell, Ruth Crawford (before she
met and married Charles Seeger), Easley Blackwood, Ned Rorem (by now, I
suppose, a New Yorker by adoption), and Leo Sowerby.

Sowerby had a prominent and successful career.  If you were to ask
a classical-loving Midwesterner of a certain age to name an American
composer, hearing Sowerby's name wouldn't surprise you.  But his work
hasn't really lasted, although it's all very well made.  One can find
many reasons for the neglect (more later).  Although he wrote in many
genres, it's his organ music that has mostly stuck.  Even in my little
Ohio town, the local Protestant church organists regularly played Sowerby
(and Healy Willan).

Sowerby's music is mainly comfortable, a word I use without
disparagement.  It's comfortable like the front porch of a big old
Midwestern double-decker.  It reminds me a bit of the Wright prairie
houses or the novels of James Branch Cabell - an intellectually awkward
combination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though
the workmanship is very high indeed.  One gets an inkling of this in
the Classic Concerto for organ and strings.  It begins with open-fifth
harmonies and aggressive rhythms, much like the openings to the Hindemith
organ sonatas, but the lyric subject reveals Sowerby's artistic heart
firmly beating with the French Wagneristes and Franckians of the previous
century, one possible reason why it leaves me a bit cold.  Franck and his
school in general fail to move me.  In a way, Sowerby's music resembles
Howard Hanson's.  But Hanson, unlike Sowerby, has an individual, instantly
recognizable voice.  I would find a comparison of the Hanson organ concerto
to this Sowerby one very instructive.  In broad outline, both concerti show
similar habits of structural thinking, the same kinds of harmonies, and the
same Romantic traditionalism.  But the Hanson, for me, bleaches out the
Sowerby, despite many fine moments in the latter.

Yet it's a mistake to dismiss Sowerby.  He wrote over five hundred works,
ninety before he reached 19, and he lived a long time.  One keeps coming
across gems in his output, like the Mediaeval Poem for organ, orchestra,
and soprano.  It comes across as beautifully felt, an avowed meditation
ON religious awe.  The organ seamlessly integrates with the orchestra.
The orchestration in general is quietly stunning - not only supremely
competent, but genuinely poetic as well.  The soprano declaims two vocalise
phrases toward the end and provides yet another sound-color.  I can think
of no work, other than by Sowerby where the organ works so well with the
orchestra.

Sowerby wrote Pageant as a virtuoso vehicle for the Vatican organist
Fernando Germani, known for his stupendous pedal technique.  It helps a lot
that Sowerby was a fine organist himself.  The writing is fiendish, but not
outlandish, and the work opens with a tootsie-tappin' cadenza, mainly (if
not entirely) for the feet.  Germani supposedly responded, "Now write me
something hard." Sowerby designed the piece to amaze the listener, and it
does its job, although it doesn't do much, if anything, more than that.

E.  Power Biggs inspired Festival Music and premiered it on his radio
program in the early Fifties (as he did the Classic Concerto).  Written
for organ, brass, and timpani, the work falls into three movements, with
Sowerby at the top of his game.  The main themes all share a family look -
dorian or mixolydian mode emphasizing the fourth and fifth scale degrees.
The opening movement combines a brass fanfare with a Widorian toccata
figure for its music argument.  The second movement varies a chorale idea.
The final movement incorporates a musical joke, suggested by Biggs:  three
similar themes - A-G-O (American Guild of Organists), A-A-G-O (Associate of
the American Guild of Organists), and F-A-G-O (Fellow of the American Guild
of Organists), the latter two certificates awarded by the A.G.O.  on the
basis of examination.  F, A, and G, of course, all belong to the scale.
It's Sowerby's solution of the "O" (which he achieves through a kind of
punning) that initially sets up the suspense.  Afterwards, however, it's
Sowerby's treatment that keeps the movement's considerable interest.

Other than hitting a lot of clams or failing to shape a piece or really
screwing up registrations, I have a great deal of trouble telling organists
apart.  Certainly, I haven't the expertise to distinguish Craighead from
Mulbury.  Craighead I know as an eminence among American organists.  He's
also recorded the Harrison and Hanson concerti.  Both performers do well by
the music.  The recorded sound is fine.

Steve Schwartz