Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Only available recording of Harris Sym. No. 6, July 30, 2000
This disc is a collection of recordings that were originally on the Varese Sarabande label back in 1980's. The performances by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra are great. If you haven't heard this orchestra before, this is a great place to start. This is the best recording of Barber's First Essay, and I have several recordings of that piece. This is the only recording of the Harris Symphony No. 6 and, though the sound is not quite as good here as it was on the old Varese Sarabande disc, this is still a mandatory disc for Harris fans and for anybody interested in this composer.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I think Harris needs to be reappraised - the 6th Symphony is a composition of confounding beauty (or am I mellowing?), December 18, 2007
I don't know why, but from hearing the music of Roy Harris these past few years or months (see my review of The Louisville Orchestra-First Edition Encores for instance) I had been left with the impression of tritely "western", pastoral music. But reviewing the recorded legacy of the Louisville Orchestra gave me a chance to return to Harris' Symphonies 1 & 5, and I found them to be fine works, very personal within the limits of the composer's traditional language, heroic without lapsing into bombast (see Roy Harris: Symphony 1933; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra; Symphony No. 5). So I pulled out of my shelves the original Varèse Sarabande CD release of Harris' Symphony No. 6 "Gettysburg", coupled there with Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickison (VCD 47245). I find it to be a stupendous composition.
Unbelievably for a work composed in 1943-4 by one of America's recognized major symphonists, the Varèse Sarabande recording, made in 1981, boasts being a premiere recording. In the late 1990s the Italian bootleg label AS Disc made available Koussevitsky's world premiere concert with the BSO from April 15, 1944 (AS 563), paired with the same forces' premiere of Barber's 2nd Symphony (which the labels attributes to April 4, 1944 - but according to the Koussevitsky website it was March 4) and Ernst Toch's Pinocchio's Overture - but those were concert recordings, and I am not aware that they were ever issued on disc before the AS Disc release. Anyway, whatever the merits of Koussevitky's readings - and they are obviously immense - sonics make a huge difference here, and those of Varèse Sarabande are exceptionally deep and vivid.
The music starts in a ghostly manner, with hushed strings playing sweet whiffs of a melody in their upper registers, as mermaids heard singing from under water. The mood is pastoral and nostalgic, rising in the course of the movement's 7 minutes to a climax of epic sweep. It could be (good) film music for any of the heroic fantasy blockbusters that have been successful in the recent years, except that no music written for those films have been even remotely that good. The language is traditional and tonal, but Harris has twists and turns in his melodic and harmonic writing and orchestration that make it uniquely his, and constantly ear-catching. Thus, the epic, I find, never turns into bombast. The second movement is another good example, starting with dramatic brass calls over an ominous string ostinato in the middle registers and again developping into a crescendo of brass belches of high dramatic impact. The effects are simple, but highly effective, bringing Shostakovich to mind (in the compositional method, not in the melodic turns), especially the 11th Symphony. Again I find the third movement very remarkable, with a weeping violin solo over long-lined, baritonal strings, a harbinger of the kind of "neo-simplicity" that we associate with composers such as Pärt, Gorecki and the American minimalists. I find it of breathtaking beauty - and I am otherwise rather demanding and very critical of the kind of heart-on-sleeve, mawkish lyricism one associates with American symphonies from the 1930s and `40s. But here Harris avoids all the pitfalls and manages to be movingly plangent without being maudlin. Or maybe I am mellowing. The finale is the summation of all the characteristics from the previous ones - it begins like the third movement ended, rises to irresistible, epic heights through a kind of orchestral bacchanale. Irresistible.
Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, the original companion of the Harris Symphony, are now on Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite. Well - too bad: though I am not very fond of Copland's more popular, "prairie" style, I find the Dickinson Songs so quintessentially American as to be endearing, and I wouldn't want to part with that original coupling (they would also make a perfect companion on disc to Barber's Knoxville - and have, as on Barber: Knoxville-Summer of 1915; Copland: Eight Poems of Emily Dickenson or So Much to Tell). In the present reissue Albany has chosen to mate Harris with the partial contents of another Varèse Sarabande CD, VCD47211 (I have it in the form of a Varèse-Sarabande manufactured Andante ACD 85705), which paired Barber's First Essay for Orchestra and Capricorn Concerto with Copland's Saga of the Prairies (all picked up here by Albany) and Outdoor Overture (now on the above-mentioned disc with the Dickinson songs), and with Ives' Overture from the Third Orchestral Set. Too bad also that Albany left out the 9-minute Outdoor Overture: it would have fitted.
I don't find these Barber and Copland compositions (recorded in 1982 and 1983) as original as the Harris Symphony. My favorite is Barber's Capricorn Concerto (for flute, oboe and trumpet) which begins with a strong, dramatic orchestral utterance, followed by a wistful and bitter-sweet theme first entoned by oboe and developped as a brooding fugue rising to an intense climax - very reminiscent of Harris, in fact. The Concerto then alternates between these wistful moods and Allegro or Scherzo episodes of Stravinskian perkiness. Barber's First Essay is written in his sweeping and intense Romantic vein with whiffs of the sardonic Shostakovich. As for Copland's Saga of the Prairie, it is an example of his popular, pastoral to epic style, not one I warm up to very easily.
Still, with the original Varese Sarabande CD with Harris' Symphony and Copland's Dickinson Songs not available here, and probably fetching ludicrous prices on other websites (I am potentially a rich man!), this is indispensable for anyone interested in the 20th Century American Symphony.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous Performances., April 1, 2005
The Capricorn Concerto, composed in 1944, has not been frequently recorded which is a shame as it is one of Samuel Barber's most engaging works. The concerto was inspired by Bach's Second Brandenburg as it has the same solo instruments: trumpet, oboe and flute, but the composition owes a larger debt to Igor Stravinsky. The name of the concerto derives from the house on Croton Lake at Mount Kisco, New York that the composer shared with Gian Carlo Menotti. The concerto reflects the idyllic atmosphere of life at Capricorn. The concerto is laid out like a Baroque concerto-grosso beginning with a vigorous allegro followed by a quiet and reflective allegretto. The final movement with its trumpet fanfare is especially memorable and concludes the concerto triumphantly. The performance recorded here is marvelously played and nicely recorded.
The First Essay, composed in 1938, also receives a nice performance, the brooding music at the start being particularly well played. The orchestra perfectly builds the tension of the music to the powerful climax that brings us back to the opening music. The Essay is followed by Aaron Copland's Saga of the Prairies, composed in 1937, which was originally titled Music for Radio since it was composed for the CBS Symphony Orchestra. The work marked a change in Copland's style toward a more simplified method of writing music and is in the same spirit as Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring.
The main work on this disc in the Sixth Symphony (Gettysburg) by Roy Harris (1943-44). This symphony is cast in four movements with program titles describing the music. Awakening (based on the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address) seems a visual representation of America, in general, and the battlefield prior to the battle that is to take place. It is a luminous and beautiful movement that slowly builds and takes shape weaving short melodies together. Conflict is a depiction of the three-day battle in July, 1863. The music progresses from a feeling of doom as the battle is about to begin to the fury of the battle itself. The music is some of the most dissonant that Harris wrote. The third movement, titled Dedication, describes the dedication of the battlefield, played by strings and woodwinds. The music has an elegiac feel, reflective and not somber. The final movement bears the title: Affirmation. This music is a triple fugue and begins with the same atmosphere of the prior movement, quickly building in tempo and volume as the music becomes more optimistic; a picture of the enduring human spirit.
This is a well played and recorded CD that belongs in the collection of anyone interested in American music, a definite must for those interested in Roy Harris.
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