Customer Reviews

MacDowell: Piano Music, Vol. 1

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A master of the piano vignette, as these pieces aptly and beautifully illustrate, MacDowell (1860-1908) remains, for the most part, remembered solely as the composer of "To A Wild Rose," the first piece in his collection of Woodland Sketches, Op. 51, incomprehensible as it may seem.

MacDowell is a bit of a paradox. Musically schooled in Europe, admired by Liszt, taught by Raff, and having his own viewpoints about composition, nobody typifies, personifies or exemplifies what one might call the "New England School" like MacDowell does. He's rather the Thoreau of New England music, actually, and especially the piano vignette, of which he is a master.

Just look at the titles: Woodland Sketches, Fireside Tales, New England Idyls, Sea Pieces. For me, this music is New England. There's more nostalgia in these four sets than you can shake a stick at! But, you know, in this case, more is better, not less. This music has no whiff of the salon; it's of a particular place in America that calls to our very roots. It has a feel that cannot be accurately described. A mood. An ambience that resonates to the bottom of our consciousness. We become immersed in a dreamy reverie of our collected experiences, nostalgic yearnings, of people, places and things that have gone before... and are no longer. It's that kind of music.

It reminds me of my childhood, of late Autumn days, the smell of burning leaves as Halloween crept nearer, of rainy days, of places lost and found and lost again, walks on the beach at sunset, quiet evenings watching the embers fade in the fireplace, of first loves gone, of lighthouses... of sweet and bittersweet melancholy. That kind of music. The kind of music that one "knows" without ever having heard before, innate within us all, and reaching down to our very fiber. And that is the wonder, beauty and profundity of MacDowell.

[Running time: 63:49]

I had a gift certificate and as always, in addition to getting books, I throw in a CD of instrumental music. I played a couple of the easier McDowell pieces and fell in love with these wonderful pieces. It is a sad story that McDowell died young as well as the talented pianist on this recording. I enjoyed it so much that I traveled 150 miles to Pittsburgh recently to buy the sheet music to a part of this so that I can add these to my repertoir.

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, Schumann and Grieg are very prominent influences - but there are some inventive textures and colors in some of the music; simple charms, but quite effective at times.

In fact, the volume at hand is in many ways a good place to start; the works featured are often warm and charming, although MacDowell avoids the drama one can find in his sonatas - here we have 34 innocent, unassuming character pieces, almost all of them very brief and perhaps too much gentle romance to take in one go, but variegated and inventive enough to sustain the listener's interest. The best is perhaps found in the dreamily atmospheric Woodland Sketches (although the New England Idylls display just a tad more nuances and shadings than the rest), works that would, I imagine, grace any recital - perhaps filled out with selections from the slightly more craggy and chilly Sea Pieces. In any case, they are all very sensitively handled by Barbagallo, who plays them with commitment and as much panache as they can take. In sum, this is a rather rewarding disc of charming, evocative miniatures which would appeal to those who appreciate Grieg's Lyric pieces (though MacDowell's are not anywhere near as inventive, variegated and memorable as these), and they are well worth your time.

These vignettes are not bravura performances (such as Chopin, Polonaise in A-flat), but short and brief tellings of a larger story.

The only criticisms I have is that pianist James Barbagallo played, "To a Wild Rose", a bit too fast for my taste, and MacDowell might have written a different, "From a Wandering Iceberg", had he lived to see the Titanic disaster.

The Amazon reviewer (Gerber) is too condescending by half. No sensible listener would rate these pieces as the equal of efforts by the likes of Mozart or Schubert, and Macdowell never claimed they were. They are interesting period pieces, composed with a good deal of charm and skill. It is amusing that Gerber likens them to second-rate versions of the Grieg Lyric Pieces - as if those pieces were worth imitating. Even Macdowell knew better than to copy junk like that.