Capital of the World / Undertow / The Combat

Antheil (Artist), Schuman (Artist), Banfield (Artist), Levine (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 19, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Angel Records
• ASIN: B000002SAT
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #459,355 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Capital of the World, ballet for orchestra, W. 249: Part 1. The Street; Paco into Shop; Imaginary Bullfight; Owner; Enrique; The Seam

2. Capital of the World, ballet for orchestra, W. 249: Part 2. The Pompous Bullfighter; Tubercular Bullfighter; The Bullfighter Assistan

3. Capital of the World, ballet for orchestra, W. 249: Part 3. Paco Back in Ship; Paco Practices Bullfighting; The Knives Fight & Paco's

4. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Opening - The Transgressor is born

5. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): The Transgressor approaches manhood

6. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): A group of hoodlums rush past

7. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Entrance of Volupia

8. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Polyhymnia urges salvation

9. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Entrance of Ate - Flirting with the Transgressor

10. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Drunken women mock the bridal couple

11. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Ate returns with the hoodlums

12. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): The drunken women interrupt - Ate escapes

13. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): The Transgressor & Medusa - Love & Death

14. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Alone, the Transgressor writhes with fear

15. Undertow, ballet (choreographic episodes): Finale - The Transgressor for his fatal act

16. The Combat, ballet for orchestra: Opening - Entrance of Clorinda

17. The Combat, ballet for orchestra: Tancred's dance - Prince of the Christian warriors

18. The Combat, ballet for orchestra: Clorinda and two Christian warriors engage in combat

19. The Combat, ballet for orchestra: Clorinda's plea for peace

20. The Combat, ballet for orchestra: Return of Tancred

See all 24 tracks on this disc

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling Ballet Music, May 3, 2005

By 

Jeffrey Lipscomb (Sacramento, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Capital of the World / Undertow / The Combat (Audio CD)

Unless you are a balletomane - and no, I'm not one either - the three works on this CD will be unfamiliar. Now out of print, this well-transferred mono EMI disc (just about identical to my old Capitol LP) is worth a search in the used bins at your local CD store. Judging from the $50 "1 used & new" asking price here, it has already become a collector's item. I agree with most of Paul Cook's Amazon editorial review, but these ballet scores rank a little differently in my own affections.

"Capital of the World" by George Antheil (1900-1958) is based on a Hemingway story about a young Spanish boy who goes to Madrid with dreams of becoming a famous bullfighter. Virgil Thomson called this work "the most original, striking and powerful American ballet score with which I am acquainted." As with all the works on this CD, Joseph Levine delivers a top-notch reading (slightly abridged), clearly superior to the only recorded competition on a Centaur CD. I think this is one of Antheil's best compositions: it doesn't have the excessive reliance on Prokofiev/Shostakovich imitation that afflicts many of his symphonies.

"Undertow" by William Schuman (1910-1992, probably America's finest symphonist) was described as unfolding "like the confession of a neurotic to a psychiatrist. Its tortured hero, frustrated by his infantile love for his mother, writhes eerily through the ballet, doomed to hate the women who most attract him." My advice: ignore the pretentious plot and just listen to the music. I think it is has finer craftsmanship than the Antheil, and while sometimes dissonant it's always tonal: some of Schuman's finest music.

But my genunine affection for this CD and its LP antecedent lies in "The Combat" by Raffaello de Banfield (born 1927 in England). This is the deeply tragic love story of Tancred and Clorinda, based on a poem about the Crusades by Tasso, the Italian Renaissance poet. This is simply gorgeous music that echoes a bewitching mixture of influences, from Respighi and Ravel to Bartok, Malipiero and even Bernard Herrmann. The only other work I've heard by de Banfield is his one-act opera "Lord Byron's Love Letter," based on a libretto by Tennessee Williams. It's about a poverty-stricken mother and daughter in their crumbling New Orleans mansion. Their only valuable possession left is a letter written by the English poet (which they charge a fee to examine). If you enjoy romantic operas like Barber's "Vanessa" and Puccini's "La Rondine," you'll probably love this one, too. Still quite popular in Italy, it was once available in a 1958 performance by Nicola Rescigno with Astrid Varnay on RCA LP (a rare collector's item). A fine "live" 1991 performance conducted by Gianfranco Masini can be heard on an inexpensive CD (Aura 409).

Highly recommended, especially for de Banfield's "The Combat."

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Schuman's Undertow the main interest of this CD - but it cries for modern stereo, June 3, 2009

By 

Discophage (France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Capital of the World / Undertow / The Combat (Audio CD)

Other than giving detailed synopses of the three ballets featured here, the uncredited liner notes, presumably reproduced from the original two LPs (Antheil and Banfield came together, Schuman was paired with Copland's Billy the Kid, now on Copland: Billy the Kid (Complete Ballet), etc.), are totally un-informative about the composers, compositions and performances. The Dance Company called, in the 1940s and early 1950s , the "Ballet Theatre" started off in 1937 as the "Mordkin Ballet" and was renamed in 1956 the "American Ballet Theatre" - which is familiar territory to people even remotely interested in ballet, since its artistic director from 1980 to 1989 was Mihail Baryshnikov. From 1950 to 1958 the Ballet Theatre orchestra was conducted by Joseph Levine (1911-1994), a former student of Joseph Hofmann (piano) and of Fritz Reiner and Arthur Rodzinsky (conducting) at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. In the 1950s he made a number of recordings of ballet music with the Ballet Theatre Orchestra for Capitol, some of which have been reissued in this EMI Fds series (the one mentioned above, and I've also reviewed Offenbach/Dorati: Suites from Bluebeard and Helen of Troy; Meyerbeer: Les Patineurs). These three were recorded in 1953 and 1954, in mono sound lacking spaciousness.

George Antheil and William Schuman of course need no introduction, but their respective ballet might. Antheil's Capital of the World is a late composition (1953) of the erstwhile bad boy turned conservative upon his return to America in the early 1930s. It is also a colorful score written for a ballet after Hemingway's short story with the same title, taking place in the bullfighters' world in Madrid - but it's not very original: in it I hear lots of Falla, some Broadway, whiffs of Prokofiev (and the Prokofiev of the lesser ballets at that) and echoes of Stravinsky's Petrushka. There are sections that Levine conducts with perceptibly more drive and elan than Barry Kolman, Antheil: Capital of the World/Symphony 5/Archipelago (especially in the more sentimental passages) - but not systematically, and in some passages he is even markedly more pedestrian and genial. One nice touch of Levine is that he has a small passage played by solo viola (track 3 at 3:23) rather than the full section like Kolman (3:39). But where Kolman clearly has the lead is that, ah, he comes in such incomparably better sound - and it does make a difference in a piece like this, where the orchestral color is the message and the substance - as to make any interpretive superiority of Levine fruitless (and really the merits are shared). Plus, Levine makes some cuts, some of them substantial and unfortunate. Comically, the liner notes boast "a unique feature of this recording... conceived by the composer as an integral part of the music": the flamenco foot-stamping of Roy Fitzell, principal male dancer of the Ballet Theatre: it comes at 7:57 on track 2. Kolman lets you hear the orchestra.

Schuman's Undertow was written in 1945, for the English choreographer Antony Tudor who was also one of the masterminds in the reorganization of the Morkin Ballet into the Ballet Theatre in 1940, and the company's resident choreographer for ten years. Undertow then comes from Schuman's early maturity, after Symphonies 3, 4 and 5 for strings. Seen from today the story is pretty silly, typical of an era when the American cultural and intellectual scene was discovering Freudian psychoanalysis with the over-enthusiasm of beginners. It features a main character called "the Transgressor", who because he was rejected by his mom in early childhood eventually murders a young seductress ("Medusa"). At times Schuman's debt to Copland's Cowboy style can be heard (tracks 6, 8 9) but at its best his score presents a syncopated dynamism, muscularity and sweep that are uniquely Schuman's (1, 7, 11-14). There was a competing studio recording in the LP era, made in 1950 by the composer himself conducting the Louisville Orchestra, on Mercury MG 10088, and ideally paired with Schuman's 1949 ballet Judith under Robert Whitney, but they are available only as mp3 downloads from Naxos (the Louisville-Whitney Judith available on CD, W. Schuman: Judith / Symphony 4 / Prayer in Time of War is a later remake from 1959, still in mono). Testament has released a broadcast recording of Guido Cantelli (The NBC Broadcast Concerts, December 1950). But really the ballet needs a modern, stereo recording.

Raffaelo de Banfield (1922-2008) was a Baron of something, son of an Austro-Hungarian nobleman and flying-ace and of an Italian countessa, and a jet-setter himself who liked to socialize with the high-society stars of Classical music and the arts like Karajan, Poulenc, Casals, Maria Callas, Picasso. Not that any of this counts. As a composer, he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger from 1946 to 1949 and "The Combat" was the piece that signalled his breakthrough in 1949. I hadn't enjoyed the one work of Raffaelo de Banfield that I have heard before - the opera "Lord Byron's Love Letter" (1955) after Tennessee Williams: he sounds to me like a sub-Menotti, a post-Puccini composer strayed into the second half of the 20th Century. But his Ballet "The Combat" is a little better than that. Yes the style remains post-Puccini, verging on Barber and at times definitely lapsing into maudling sentimentality (tracks 19 & 24), but in its best moments it does have genuine dramatic impact and there are touches that could come from Debussy's La Mer (strikingly track 17 at 1:30) or the ballets of Roussel. Track 18 with timpani has something of a romping and demented Rhumba. The story (and the combat) is that of Tancred and Clorinda from Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated, to which Monteverdi gave its timeless fame.

TT 71:38. I'll keep this CD only for Schuman's Undertow - and that is, only until a new, stereo recording shows up.