Customer Reviews

Anthony Lous Scarmolin: Orchestral Works

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am generally curious about lesser known and obscure composers, though I will be the first to admit that it is generally far between the forgotten masterpieces - there is nevertheless much good and even excellent music to be found out there, and most of it is at least competent. Really bad composers are rare, but I suppose it is inevitable that some will pop up now and again. Anthony Louis Scarmolin (1890-1969) was an Italian-born, New Jersey-based composer and teacher who seems to have worked outside the major musical environments - little if any of his music was heard in his lifetime, though he appears to have composed a lot (apparently there are 1100 compositions in a Scarmolin trust). He also seems to have had some skills as a teacher. He should rather obviously have stuck with that. He had no skills whatsoever as a composer, and the works on the disc at hand are astonishingly bad - there is not a single interesting idea, and no trace of craftsmanship either. The idea of 1100 Scarmolin compositions is in fact mildly disconcerting.

The style, if it can be called a `style', straddles romanticism, impressionism and neo-classicism, and Scarmolin apparently toyed with atonality at some point in his career. Many of the works are melody based, so it is unfortunate that Scarmolin's short-breathed snippets of predictable tunes are as boring, flat, and uninspired as they are. It would perhaps have helped if he knew the first thing about development or harmony, but he clearly doesn't (his harmonic sequences and his counterpoint are as sophisticated as what you'd expect from a child improvising on his first guitar - which is really an apt image for Scarmolin's music in general).

I suppose the opening work, a dance from The Caliph, is the least objectionable work on the disc with its slightly nauseating fake orientalism - with castanets - but, oh, how boring it is. The Three Miniatures and Three Preludes, as well as the 1964 prelude that concludes the disc, were orchestrated by John Sichel, so at least the scoring is on a higher level than it is in the other works, but it doesn't really help. The Sunlit Pool is as hideously dusty, flat, brooding and boring, only longer, and the same goes for Invocation. The Variations on a Folk Song suggests that Scarmolin must have known about the existence of musical forms (or maybe he was just parroting titles). It is in any case a pity he didn't know how to employ them. If you have a particularly morbid interest in banality I suppose you could give it a try (and also the subsequent Arioso) but even in that case you would want to avoid the breathtakingly dreadful Concert Piece for trumpet and orchestra, which must surely be one of the most horrid sequences of sounds ever penned with the intention of being `music'.

There is nothing the Janacek PO under Joel Eric Suben can do. The playing sounds uninspired, rough and disinterested, but no one would be able to invoke any sense of commitment in music like this - though they could have turned up the speed (which would at least have made the recital shorter). The fault lies squarely with the composer. The engineering is decent but nothing to write home about, though the notes are fairly good. In the end, this is a disaster of a disc, not recommendable under any circumstance. Naxos has done an overall remarkable job with its American Classics series, but I am sad that we get issues like this - and Scarmolin is actually pretty well represented on disc - when there is so much unrecorded music by masterly composers like, say, Henry Kimball Hadley out there.

This album has peices that are both fun and thought provoking. He has a diversity of styles that remind one of Gershwin at his best and flute peices that are Debussy like. This was an incredible find to me and I am enthusiastic about the discovery of another American musical genius.