Sunday Classics: Just for fun -- American treasures

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was always a Leonard Bernstein specialty. This is Part 1 of a 1976 performance in which he plays and conducts the London Symphony; Part 2 is here. (The luscious "big tune" finally emerges at 3:03 of Part 2.) CORRECTION: That's not the London Symphony, it's the New York Philharmonic, though in London's Royal Albert Hall. The clarinet soloist is of course our own just-retired Stanley Drucker, already approaching 30 years' service with the Philharmonic back then, with another 33 years ahead of him (to the end of the 2008-09 season). Sorry, can't imagine what I was thinking!

by Ken

No grand propositions to prove this week. Just some deliciously wonderful music, in the Thanksgiving spirit.


GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

George and Ira Gershwin (center and right)

at the keyboard with Fred Astaire

When I first "finished" last night's preview piece, it seemed kind of meager music-wise. By the time I finished filling it out a bit, it had grown into something close to a full-fledged Gershwin post, the notable exception being the way it tiptoed discreetly around the music I expected to include in today's post, either the Rhapsody in Blue (1924) or An American in Paris (1928). We've already got the Rhapsody accounted for, so why don't we just throw in American in Paris? I'm especially fond of two recordings, made at opposite ends of Pennsylvania, the Command recording by William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony, and Eugene Ormandy's Columbia recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra. I don't have the Steinberg version on CD, so here's the Ormandy.

GERSHWIN: An American in Paris

Philadephia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Jan. 5, 1967

By the time Gershwin composed An American in Paris, he was confident enough to do his own orchestration, and I think one and all will concede that it's a bang-up job. Both the 1924 jazz-band arrangement of Gershwin's two-piano original of the Rhapsody in Blue -- which was commissioned by Paul Whiteman for his band -- and the now-standard 1942 full orchestration were done by a longtime Whiteman associate, an expert arranger and a composer of some note in his own right: Ferde Grofé, whose Mississippi Suite was first performed in 1925, with the Grand Canyon Suite following in 1931. Which provides us a natural segue to --


FERDE GROFÉ (1892-1972)

In writing about Sibelius, I mentioned that my very first three stereo LPs, all featuring Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra included two with works by Sibelius plus the Grand Canyon Suite. I loved that Grand Canyon Suite then, both the work and the performance, and I still do. I don't have that Ormandy Grand Canyon on CD, but I do have his 1967 remake, which is almost as good. And we're going to here it complete, after a bit of "tease," or preview.

We're going to hear two of the five movements separately, starting with the atmospheric opening movement, "Sunrise," and then the movement that might function as a scherzo if this were a symphony, the third, the rhythmically irrepressible "On the Trail" (by donkey or mule, of course). Then we'll hear the whole suite; between "Sunrise" and "On the Trail" comes a beautiful slow movement, "The Painted Desert," and the general plan of the final movementsn is well suggested by their titles, "Sunset" and "Cloudburst."

GROFÉ: Grand Canyon Suite

i. Sunrise

Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, Howard Hanson, cond. Mercury, recorded May 1958

iii. On the Trail

John Corigliano, violin; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded May 20, 1963

i. Sunrise
ii. The Painted Desert
iii. On the Trail
iv. Sunset
v. Cloudburst

Norman Carol, violin; William Smith, celesta and piano; Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Dec. 12 and 20, 1967

AARON COPLAND (1900-1990)

"Hoe-Down,"

No. 4 of Four Dance Episodes from "Rodeo"

Utah Symphony Orchestra, Maurice Abravanel, cond. Westminster, recorded December 1958

[note: volume level considerably lower than the above] St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, cond. EMI, recorded c 1985

We already had our Copland preview Friday night. While Copland wrote a generous amount of interesting music, like a lot of music-lovers I find I listen mostly to the "Americana" works, which represent a small portion of his output. We've already heard the Fanfare for the Common Man, and two of the Copland-arranged Old American Songs. The great ballet Appalachian Spring, one of my very favorite pieces of music, I want to reserve for consideration on its own -- beyond the "Simple Gifts" finale, that is, which we've already heard. This is how we wound up at the Four Dance Episodes from "Rodeo." "Hoe-Down," the last of the four episodes, has been absorbed into the American musical vocabulary; is there anyone who didn't recognize it?

Here's the complete Rodeo suite, conducted first by -- who else? -- Leonard Bernstein. As we noted back when we heard Aaron Copland conduct Lenny's Candide Overture in Prague, the two had a close relationship, and there was no more effective champion of Copland's music than LB. Eventually, of course, the composer himself developed into one of his own most effective champions, and so we're going to hear his version too.

COPLAND: Four Dance Episodes from "Rodeo"

i. Buckaroo Holiday
ii. Corral Nocturne
iii. Saturday Night Waltz
iv. Hoe-Down


New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded 1960


London Symphony Orchestra, Aaron Copland, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 26, 1968


CHARLES IVES (1874-1954)

Symphony No. 2:
i. Andante moderato

Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. Chandos, recorded Apr. 29 and May 1, 1995

After hurling Ives's Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day at you on Thursday (even in David Zinman's remarkably sympathetic performance, it doesn't seem to me one of his more approachable works, but heck, what are you going to do on Thanksgiving Day?), I wanted to plunge you into the composer's sound at what seems to me its most "grabbingly" appealing. Unfortunately, I've never heard anybody but Leonard Bernstein really "get" this potentially haunting opening movement of his Second Symphony, which adds the usual Ives mélange on top of that bedrock of full-throated New England hymn-singing.

I don't doubt that that wonderfully musical Estonian-born conductor Neeme Järvi understands the music, but like so many conductors, he seems afraid to really dig in and make those broad singing lines really sing. Lenny B made it sound like the easiest, most obvious thing in the world, and I won't mind if you cheat and sneak down to his complete 1958 recording of the Ives Second, to my hearing one of the loveliest things he ever did, and listen to just the first movement.

Hey, I'm not the audio-file police. If you want to listen to more than the first movement, who's going to stop you? Especially since Ives meant the broad opening Andante moderato to proceed without interruption into the spirited second-movement Allegro. As it happens, the Allegro had an extra frisson for me, as I got to know the piece amid the granite of New Hampshire as a Dartmouth student. I expect you noticed in the first movement that Ives was very free about incorporating tunes from various walks of American (and sometimes non-American) life. The lovely second theme of the Allegro, played so caressingly by the pair of flutes [first heard at 1:58 of the Andrew Litton performance below], is the old Dartmouth song "Where oh where are the pea-green freshmen?"

SIDEBAR: THE DOPIEST COLLEGE SONGS IN ACADEME

At least in my time, Dartmouth was known, at least to its students, for having the dopiest songs in North American academe. The worst example, in those pre-coeducation days, was the first stanza of our "school song," "Men of Dartmouth," which drew to an, er, rousing close with the lines:

They have the still North in their hearts,
The hlll winds in their veins,
And the GRANITE of New Hampshire
[yes, the music actually spat out the word "granite"]
In their muscles and their brains,
And the GRANITE of New Hampshire
In their muscles and their brains.

Is it any wonder there was so much alumni resistance to going coed? What prideful alum would want to give all that up?

But we digress. Um, maybe this would be a good time to continue on to the Allegro of the Second Symphony.

IVES: Symphony No. 2:
ii. Allegro

Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton, cond. Hyperion, recorded Jan. 6-9, 2005

One curiosity: The Litton recording has the movement marking, normally just "Allegro," as "Allegro molto (con spirito)." It's an odd irony that LItton's performance is one of the less spirited I know.

[Parenthetical note: Did you notice that that's two cases in a row of British record companies recording American music with American orchestras; Hyperion in fact recorded all four Ives symphonies with Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony. (The Fourth Symphony, which was finally given its world premiere in 1965 by Leopold Stokowski with the orchestra he'd founded in 1962, the American Symphony, is quite a production -- I hope we'll have a chance to come back to it someday -- and if there's one thing Stoky knew, it was how to put on a show. Happily, Columbia made a recording at the time.) In addition, the Zinman-Baltimore Symphony Ives CD featuring the Holidays Symphony and Three Places in New England from which I extracted Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day was recorded by yet another British company. I guess this is good, unless it means that American companies aren't doing the job.]

It's a wonder that Ives himself got to hear the Second Symphony. Indeed, it's lucky that, despite a lifelong litany of health problerms, he survived to surprisingly near his 80th birthday, because the symphony, written in 1902-10, wasn't performed until 1951, when it was conducted by a brash young conductor then making a name for himself, that name being Leonard Bernstein! By then Ives's Third Symphony (1910) had already been performed, way back in 1946, after a mere 36-year wait, and won the Pulitzer Prize.

So what was Ives doing all that time when his music was busy being unheard? Selling insurance, or rather overseeing the selling of same, having cofounded his own firm, with considerable success. He was by general consent a visionary in the field. He trained seriously in music (he had worked first with his father, a band leader, then studied with Horatio Parker at Yale, producing his (fairly conventional) First Symphony as a senior thesis, but nobody was clamoring to hear his music, and he had to make a living, and he drifted into insurance and discovered he was good at it. Remarkably, he seems to have though of insurance in terms of how it could help the buyer; interestingly, he wound up making a very good living at it. (Hmm.)

Even as his career flourished (with the occasional bump), Ives continued composing well into the '20s, and then found himself unable to continue. We don't know why, but then, it can't be easy to maintain life as a composer when you never get to hear your music performed, and never get to experience other people experiencing it. At the same time, it can't be fun to find yourself unable to continue creating -- and we may guess at Ives's state of mind relative to composition by the fact that he declined to attend that much-belated 1946 premiere of his Third Symphony.

If you look up "labor of love" in the dictionary, or at any rate a dictionary with sound files, you'll hear Lenny B's 1958 recording of the Ives Second Symphony. Columbia Masterworks seems to have been dubious enough about its commercial prospects that it put the record in the "KS" rather than "MS" series, charging an extra buck, which was pretty chintzy for 40 minutes' worth of music. In compensation, they offered a little bonus record with a Lenny talk about Ives, but at some point -- before I bought my copy -- they seem to have stopped packing the bonus record, but not stopped charging the extra buck. Of course at standard discount prices of the era it was more like half a buck, but remember, the buck of those days was worth a lot closer to a dollar.

I don't think digital sound does justice to the tonal intensity of the orchestral playing as heard on the LP. The New York Philharmonic strings were never what you'd call a lustrous group, but on that day in October 1958 they played with a vibrancy that was something to behold. Anyway, here's the complete symphony.

IVES: Symphony No. 2

i. Andante moderato
ii. Allegro
iii. Adagio cantabile
iv. Lento maestoso
v. Allegro molto vivace


New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Oct. 6, 1958

LOUIS MOREAU GOTTSCHALK (1829-1869)

For a virtuoso finish, we jump back now to the 19th century, to the days of barnstorming composer-performers, and the home-grown pianist-composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk -- "America's first great musician" to pianist Eugene List, one of his more persistent champions in the later 20th century. By profession if not talent level Gottschalk was a sort of American Liszt, an outsize personality (for all his slender stature) whose brief but adventure-packed life was almost as much a work of art as his music.

Gottschalk was born in New Orleans when the city was still mostly Spanish and French, within living memory of the Louisiana Purchase, which had made this vast swath of central North America the property of the young United States. He functioned as a sort of American good-will ambassador in his tours of Europe and especially South America. For his performing use, he wrote a large quantity of solo piano music as well as music for multiple pianos and assorted other piano-plus combinations. Naturally he was a great connoisseur of dance rhythms from around the world, as he demonstrates in this infectious four-hand "Cuban dance."

GOTTSCHALK: La Gallina (The Hen), Danse cubaine

for piano four hands

Eugene List and Cary Lewis or Brady Millican, piano. Vox, recorded c 1972
[Note: The packaging for the Vox set from which all our Gottschalk musical selections come, while it generously includes both an essay by Mr. List on Gottschalk and program notes by Richard Freed, is skimpy on other information, such as who among Mr. List's supporting artists plays what, or the recording dates. Where I could, I've gleaned (or guessed) such info, drawing on other sources.]

Between 1860, when he first composed the Grande Tarantelle, and his death (at 40) in 1869, Gottschalk seems to have arranged the thing for just about every piano-plus instrumental combination imaginable, but when Eugene List went searching for the piano-and-orchestra version in the '50s, the best he could do was a two-piano version in the British Museum. He persuaded the composer Hershy Kay to produce this 1957 reconstruction.

GOTTSCHALK-KAY: Grande Tarantelle for Piano

and Orchestra

Eugene List, piano; one of two orchestras, either Igor Buketoff or Samuel Adler, cond. Vox, recorded c 1972

Gottschalk wasn't all flash, though. Here is an orchestral piece that has won favorable attention even from some of his detractors, the two movement La Nuit des tropiques (Night in the Tropics), which the composer gave the rather highfalutin designation "Symphony No. 1." On its own terms, though, the piece is a beauty. Annotator Freed evokes Berlioz, and in the sinuous, long-breathed melodic lines of the Andante in particular, I hear what he means.

GOTTSCHALK: Symphony No. 1, La Nuit des tropiques
(Night in the Tropics)

i. Andante ("Nuit dans les tropiques")


ii. Allegro moderato ("Une fête sous les tropiques")
("A Festival Under the Tropics")

Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Igor Buketoff, cond. Vox, recorded c 1972


APPENDIX: OOPS, AN AMERICAN TREASURE LOST,
OR AT LEAST SOMEHOW MISPLACED

I can't believe I did a grabbag of American musical treasures, with Leonard Bernstein's name plastered all over the damned place, and even mentioning the Overture to LB's Candide, without including it -- me of all people, having gone on record as admitting it's a piece I can listen to dozens of times in succession.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)

"Once one dismisses the rest of all possible worlds,
One finds that this is the best of all possible worlds."

-- Dr. Pangloss, in Leonard Bernstein's Candide
(lyrics for "The Best of All Possible Worlds" by John LaTouche)

In my mind, of course, we've "done" Candide, and done it. Oh, I know we've barely scratched the surface, but what was this post about but scratching surfaces? And of course many of you have never read those posts.

So herewith, a little Candide suite: the Overture and the great philosopher Dr. Pangloss (in the person of the late Adolph Green, the distinguished lyricist) teaching his charges that this is "The Best of All Possible Worlds" from the studio recording of the complete Candide that Lenny made at the time of his happily televised (and therefore now-on-DVD)concert performance; and the Candide-Cunegonde duet "Oh Happy We!" and Cunegonde's great aria "Glitter and Be Gay" from the Original Broadway Cast recording, featuring the great Barbara Cook.

BERNSTEIN et al.: Candide

Overture

London Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG,recorded December 1989

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" (lyrics by John LaTouche)

Adolph Green (Dr. Pangloss), June Anderson (Cunegonde), Della Jones (Paquette), Jerry Hadley (Candide), Kurt Ollmann (Maximilian); from the DG recording (see above)

"Oh Happy We!" (lyrics by Richard Wilbur)

Richard Rounseville (Candide), Barbara Cook (Cunegonde), Samuel Krachmalnick, cond., from the Columbia/Sony Original Broadway Cast recording,Dec. 9, 1956

"Glitter and Be Gay" (lyrics by Richard Wilbur)

Barbara Cook (Cunegonde), from the OBC recording (see above)

SUNDAY CLASSICS

The current list is here.

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