Customer Reviews

Edward Macdowell: Piano Music, Vol. 2

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

 

 

This is only the second volume in what is now a four volume series on Naxos label. The really good news is that these are from the same masters from which came the more expensive Marco Polo sets and here they are at half the price. No matter that our great American composer is more often than not indistinguishable from many European composers of his time. His "Woodland" pieces are marvelous little tone poems and no doubt he had New England scenery in mind when he composed them, regarless of the musical idiom in which he expressed himself. I urge you to collect all four CDs, all the more so because of Barbagallo's symphathy with the music he is playing. It would be a valuable experience to compare the selections on these discs with other Naxos releases that feature the work of more recent composers such as Siegmeister, whose pieces seem more cerebral and less heartfelt than do Macdowell's. But be sure to add these New England inspired pieces to your collection. And at these prices, you cannot afford not to (a cliche, but nevertheless true).

Edward MacDowell is best known for his Piano Concertos and his short solo piece "To a Wild Rose". This collection provides an insight into some of his nearly-forgotten solo piano music, resurrected here by the late James Barbagallo, whose obvious enthusiasm for the music infuses each track with newfound vitality and energy. Recommended at full price...and at six bucks, why not?

This is a beautiful recording of music written in the romantic style, when modern was new. I had to double check and make sure all the pieces were solo piano. I was sure there were pieces for orchestra and piano--like an impressionist painting that captures the play of light and shadow when I'm standing away, the nuanced lushness of the piano is so rich that I walk away with an impression of much more than solo piano.

The rules of romantic impressionism are stretched without breaking into atonality. If you like the piano works of Debussy and Ravel you'll probably like this CD. The playing, the recording and the composing are all really good and the music taken as a whole sounds fresh. If your favorite composer is Bach, you may not like this, but if you love Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and Terry Riley then I'm pretty sure you'll love this CD. I know I do.

In the latest print version of its catalog, Naxos has deleted all four volumes of Barbagallo's recordings of MacDowell piano music, so if you appreciate these works, you might want to get them very soon. (Naxos boasts about having 6000 titles in its catalog, but it says not a word about all the titles that it is deleting/has deleted.)
Four stars for performance and recording.

There is certainly much to enjoy in the late Barbagallo's sensitive and committed series of MacDowell's piano music, but the musical content is of variable quality - very often charming and atmospheric, sometimes imaginative, but sometimes also rather trite and empty; and in a series like this we will inevitably run into music that is hardly worth the effort. None of the music is very individual - Liszt, Chopin and Grieg are very prominent influences - but there is much that is colorful and several pieces that exhibit genuine inspiration.

The first modern suite is tumultuous and flashy, strongly reminiscent of Liszt at times but with a dreamy, Chopinesque andantino and an almost baroque-inspired finale - it is no masterpiece, and would hardly have sounded modern if it had been published 50 years earlier, but a very effective work and handled with flair by Barbagallo. The same kind of praise cannot be heaped on the early, non-descript Amourette or the eminently forgettable Lilting Rhythms, despite all the poetry Barbagallo tries to infuse them with. Six Idylls After Goethe sounds more tantalizing than they in fact are - gentle salon pieces, relatively well-crafted but without anything remotely memorable.

The Norse Sonata is a better work; compact, well crafted, lyrical and heavily indebted to Grieg, with a darkly shaded first movement, a genuinely touching tristesse second movement and a ferocious finale. It is not a masterpiece, not even particularly memorable, but certainly worth a listen. I can hardly imagine better advocacy for it than it receives here. Overall, though, this is probably not the place to start one's investigation of MacDowell's piano music, even if it can be safely recommended for those who have an idea about what they'll get. I wonder whether the other reviewers have listened to the same disc I have, however - the Woodland Sketches are certainly beautiful, but they aren't featured on this disc, and the harmonic language here is pretty conservative; I could find absolutely no trace of impressionism, extended tonality or harmonic exploration here - this music wouldn't scare anyone who thinks Grieg is as modern as they can take.