Eugene Ormandy
    American Orchestral Music

* Schuman: Credendum (Article of Faith)
* Gesensway: Four Squares of Philadelphia*
* Persichetti: Symphony No. 4

Oscar Treadwell (narrator)*, The Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy
Albany TROY276 (MONO) Total time: 68:14

Summary for the Busy Executive: Those Fabulous Fifties Philadelphians.

Ormandy's star seems to have faded a bit, which I think a shame.  My
father never particularly liked his music-making - he called it schmalz
- and he had a point.  Ormandy sang, rather than danced, as a conductor,
and he was a wizard at "telling the story" of a piece of music.  He usually
had trouble with highly contrapuntal works, but he could get an orchestra
to sing.  In "his" repertoire - the Russians, the Impressionists, the
Berlioz Symphonie fantastique (a piece he just about "owned"), and the late
Romantic era - one met few better, other than specialists.  He could also
surprise you.  To this day, I consider his account (with Serkin) of the
Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto (my favorite of the five, incidentally - if
you care) the best around, and I say this as someone supremely uninterested
in all his other Beethoven recordings.  His Mahler Tenth is still viable as
a recommendable choice, as are his accounts of Shostakovich symphonies.  He
also did his fair share of modern American music, although he got little
credit for it.  Aside from Copland, he also performed such dimmer lights as
Creston, Cowell, MacDowell, Sessions, Dello Joio, John Vincent, Yardumian,
and the two here - Persichetti and Schuman.

This CD takes a snapshot of an era - the years following World War II.
We think of the times as foolishly confident, but, as one who lived
through them, I can tell you it never was that confident, any more than
the American Reagan years were.  A bunker mentality ran through both.  The
barbarians were at the gates.  I'm not about to debate the appropriateness
of the attitude.  I can think of circumstances where one might need a
bunker, as well as those when it seems a bit hysterical.

In music, the full nationalistic neoclassical flowering of the Forties
began to give way to the internationalism of Webern's brand of dodecaphony.
Composers at the front of one movement "switched sides": Stravinsky
himself, Copland, and such lesser luminaries as Irving Fine and Lukas Foss.
A line one often encounters is that they were fearful of being left behind.
Some of that may have entered into it, but such a reaction shows more than
a little naivete about how composers work.  People think of style as
something one puts on, like a suit.  With some composers, perhaps it is,
but they're not, generally speaking, great composers.  Genuine style (as
opposed to, say, pastiche) is a process of self-discovery, finding what
you really want to say and finding your way of saying it.  Stravinsky's
music didn't spring from him fully-formed right away.  Neither did Webern's
nor Copland's, as one can tell by listening to their very early works.
Changing one's vocabulary is consequently a fairly serious matter.  Copland
talks about having reached what he felt as a dead end.  He had begun major
works in his Appalachian Spring style that never got beyond a few measures.
Much of Stravinsky's neoclassical work from the mid-Forties on, excepting
The Rake's Progress, comes across with less vigor than his masterpieces
of the Twenties and Thirties.  In short, both composers seemed to need
renewal, and they didn't find it in composers on their own side of the
fence.  In the U.  S., outside of the dodecaphonists and the third-stream,
composers emphasized less innovation and more an individual slant on
victories already won.  There's some wonderful music from this period, but
its excitement is rather confined.  No one, not even Walter Piston, wanted
to reproduce the Piston of the Forties, as marvelous as it was, and no one
but Walter Piston could extend the idiom.

The composers here are, above all, individuals.  Just as dodecaphony
never followed a monolithic party line, neither did neoclassicism.
William Schuman, for example, continued and put a twist on the line of
Americana - deriving from both Harris and the "urban" Copland.  Gesensway
is a "maverick." He studied with Kodaly, but seems to have picked up
something from the music of Piston as well.  Persichetti, like Fine,
Shapero, and Foss, had a more "international" viewpoint.  He looked long
and hard at the Stravinsky of the Thirties and Forties, particularly at the
abstract works like the Symphony in C and the Concerto for 2 solo pianos.

A major modern symphonist, Schuman actually studied with Roy Harris but
by the time of his Third Symphony (1941) had broken away and come up with
a significant voice of his own.  The ties to Harris persist in an art that
celebrates American populist optimism and, musically, in a similar approach
to form.  Credendum (Article of Faith) - which, incidentally, I've never
seen referred to without the parenthetical subtitle, leading me to suspect
that Schuman was uncomfortable with the Latin - is very Harris in its
one-movement symphonic construction.  Yet Schuman's music shows more nerves
than Harris's.  It's moody, explosive, and rhythmically asymmetrical,
as opposed to Harris, who strives for emotional balance.  Harris is
contrapuntal, but in a traditional way that stems from Franck and the
Schola Cantorum.  In Schuman, you hear a lot going on, but it's often
homophonic - all the parts moving together - as opposed to contrapuntal.
Usually, the counterpoint is implied, frequently through implied jazzy
syncopations.  Credendum's title sounds as if Schuman will provide a hymn.
There's a contemplative middle, but for the most part the piece consists
of roars and fireworks.  Even so, I think it succeeds best as an abstract
construction.  The final section - a presto - contains some of Schuman's
most powerful and most characteristic writing.

I listen to Louis Gesensway's Four Squares of Philadelphia, and I
immediately think of a big ol' Fifties Buick - bulky and comfortable.
It's an amiable work, if not exactly a world-beater.  The liner notes (by
American-music champion John Proffitt) refer to Respighi's Roman trilogy,
and one can see certain resemblances in compositional outlook: the
emphasis on landscape and on the different times of day.  The idiom,
however, is more modern than the Respighi tone poems.  On the other hand,
it takes a certain amount of talent to do Respighi, and in a certain sense,
Gesensway shows us how tough the job is.  The four squares are, of course,
Washington, Rittenhouse, Logan, and Franklin.  Each gets its own movement
(although all the movements play without a break), and Gesensway (for many
years, a string player in the Philadelphia Orchestra) also provides a
prologue and epilogue.  I can imagine Philadelphians enjoying it at an
Ormandy concert.  It calls for a narrator - in my opinion, almost never
a successful device, and certainly not here - as well as vocal soloists,
in a brief passage of colonial street cries.  The prologue depicts the
Indians.  A motto theme for William Penn is heard and the narrator intones
Penn's prayer for Philadelphia.  The theme provides many of the take-off
points of the work, but as a theme it's not particularly notable.
"Washington Square (Early Morning)" depicts the colonial life of the city.
We hear birds twittering in the dawn and the aforementioned street cries.
What we don't get much of is close musical argument.  It's a loose-limbed
excuse to show off the orchestra at its most attractive.  "Rittenhouse
Square (Afternoon)" is a cheery more of the same.  What makes or breaks the
piece is the arresting quality (or not) of the individual episodes, and
there's a lot of stuffing here.  The last two movements strike me as the
most substantial, where the work rises to the argumentative level of, say,
Ray Green's Sunday Sing Symphony.  "Logan Square (Dusk)" depicts the place
of museums, institutes, and churches.  "Franklin Square (Night)" jumps
with the noise of traffic, Chinatown, and, in a particularly imaginative
passage, music clubs.  Respighi has an advantage here, since Rome is, after
all, the "Eternal City," and American cities change all the time.  I start
wondering whether these places have kept their character, or whether we
should label the snapshot "1951." An "Epilogue" on the Penn theme closes
the work with vigor.  Again, I suspect real Philadelphians will find more
to warm to in the piece than I do.

On the other hand, Persichetti to me is pure composer: no myth-making
agenda a la Copland, Schuman, and Harris, no painterly inclinations like
Gesensway.  Persichetti was born and raised in Philadelphia.  He lived in
the city almost all his life (he used to commute to New York by train a
few times weekly to teach composition at Juilliard).  Of all the composers
here, however, his art seems the least tied to place.  In a way, the lack
of extraneous baggage probably works against him, as far as the general
classical-music public is concerned.  There's nothing other than the music
to fall in love with.  I've been a Persichetti fan since high school.  I
was introduced to his music by something he probably considered rather
minor: a little book of hymns and responsories for the church year.  As
modern music goes, they were fairly simple to sing, but they also had a
lot of interest.  As someone who wanted to compose myself, I studied the
elegant part writing and expressive word-setting.  It was kind of like
looking at Praetorius updated.  I then borrowed his book on harmony (title
escapes me now) from the public library, back when public libraries
contained something more than self-help and popular fiction.  Some friends
of mine in band extolled his Psalm for wind ensemble, and I've followed
his career ever since, picking up his Concerto for Piano 4-hands, various
serenades, divertimenti, symphonies, songs, concerti, and choral music
along the way.  For me, Persichetti is Haydn reborn: witty, imaginative,
full of high spirits and, when called for, depth without pretension.
There's not a wasted note, and he's a contrapuntal master (though not,
like Schuman, a contrapuntal innovator).  The Fourth Symphony is one of
my favorites.  Ormandy led the premiere in 1954 and recorded it almost
immediately thereafter.  Persichetti writes with his characteristic
elegance and horror of the wasted note.  Structurally, the whole is readily
apparent.  The composer has enough confidence in the strength of his ideas
that he has no need to resort to deliberate obscurity.  He puts his
considerable skill in the service of clarity.  The music is lean and, in
Persichetti's own phrase, "gracious" at the same time.  The first movement
plays with two themes, both stated in a slow intro.  He then effortlessly
puts them through a springy, bountifully inventive allegro.  An andante
movement, leaning toward allegretto, follows, delicate and as deceptively
casual as an Astaire soft shoe.  The brief Allegretto is even lighter,
positively buoyant even.  The finale presto becomes almost a topos to the
Persichetti aficionado.  It contrasts noble chorales with sparks-flying
perpetua mobiles.  Persichetti made a joke at his own expense.  Asked about
the presence of so many of these prestos in his output, he replied that
because he commuted several times a week Philadelphia to New York and back
by train, composing most of the time, his sense of the speed and motion
of the train must have somehow seeped into these compositions.  My only
complaint with the finale is that I want it to continue.

Most would consider neither the Schuman nor the Persichetti Ormandy's
normal bailiwick, if only because they depend so much on sharp attack and
precise rhythm, rather than on the long singing line.  But Ormandy and the
Philadelphia come up with a Szell-tight ensemble.  The old boy surprised me
again.  The recordings, though mono, are quite fine.  The transfers sound
better to me than the original LPs, although it's been a while since my
vinyl was pristine.  The notes, by producer John Proffitt, are quite fine.
I would have preferred the Vincent symphony to the Gesensway, but overall
this CD has become a highlight of the old year for me.

Steve Schwartz