Customer Reviews

Cadman: Piano Trio in D major, Sonata for Violin and Piano

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While I find that Charles Cadman is today totally underrated in our musical estimation, these chamber gems are emblematic of his ability, and should be heard much more often than they are. They possess a feeling of breaking-free from the European shackles, but they do not embrace the modernists or the iconoclasts. His love of Native American music, which he made his own specialty, is not evident here in these pieces; rather, they are exciting in their own way, with a dramatic intensity we wouldn't ordinarily associate with Cadman. ("The Land of Sky Blue Water" was his big number, as well as "At Dawning" - and they are much too tame for his very intense soul.) His operas need to be heard again, as their faults are no worse than those of Mascagni's or Scott Joplin's.

Cadman (1881-1946) was a "middlebrow" composer who composed his chamber music while living on revenues from songs such as "At Dawning" (op. 29/1, 1906) and "From the Land of Sky-blue Waters" (op. 45/1, 1909). The three-movement Piano Trio, from this early period, is a resolutely "optimistic" work with then-novel ragtime syncopation in its last movement. As with Cadman's songs, the mood quickly becomes conventionally sentimental when the music is not lively. Much of the music _is_ lively, though, and the performance is engaging.

Many of the sentimental elements in Cadman's style had been expunged by 1930, the date of the pleasant Violin Sonata -- though (excepting occasional "color" chords) its stylistic and harmonic idiom is still what Cadman would have heard in the 1890s. The vigorous, slightly Gallic last movement brings out the best in Cadman and the performers, who in the earlier movements play cleanly but without betraying any deep conviction.

The stand-out work here is the three-movement Piano Quintet of 1937. By that year Cadman had lost most of his former audience and revenue streams. This unsettling state of affairs brought out the best in him, compositionally. Thanks to Naxos and the performers for resurrecting this outstanding unpublished work. If Cadman leans on Bloch rather obviously in certain passages, he also finds fresh music that is quite his own, while also holding himself throughout to a consistently high compositional standard. The Quintet is a winning work, worth well more than Naxos's modest price. Recommended.