Customer Reviews

Mennin: Symphony No.3/Piano Concerto/Symphony No.7

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'Who the hell is Peter Mennin"? you ask.I'll tell you.In addition to to his administrative job as the dean of the julliard school of music in nyc(a post he held from the early 60's,to his untimely death at age 61,in 1983),he is also the author of the most powerfull,brutally violent,dramatic and lyrically despairing symphony ever written by an american composer.although many would give that distinction to the Ives 4th,Copland 3rd,or one of the Sessions symphonies(all great),i do not.The seventh(the variation)symphony;as it is titled,is overwhelming in it's power and craft.written in 1962-63 when Mennin was but 40(and with all the angst of the then recent Kennedy assassination),it's one movement(18 minute or so)design is flawless and faultless.the opening theme(announced forbodingly by the low strings)is the heart of the work and sets the tone of the entire piece.this (12 tone)theme is then subjected to all manner of thematic transformations,and variations,in which new motives and themes emerge,all derived from the opening one.Make no mistake, this is not a serial work.Only the main theme is.It is dissonant, but tonal-that is to say with growing familiarity,one can "hum"it(and i assure you i can,and it's great fun).Contrasting "calm and storm"episodes establish the flow of the work creating the feel of a three or four part symphony in a taut single movement.what Mennin does with rhythm(and it's variation ),is incredible.along with his genius at counterpoint and instrmentation,it is Mennins driving and very american(frenzied almost 'swinging' march tempos in duple time)rhythmic designs that give his music so much power.The sections of the orchestra fighting each other for supremacy. racing flute and woodwind flourishes (in insane registers) interupted violently by plummeting string passages,which are in turn taken over by the most hair raising brass swells you've ever heard in your life.not since Mahler has a composer used horns and bones to such effect.all these above evaluations seem to be primarily concerned with technique and craft,but the listening result is (i assure you) a totally emotional and musical one.A sound unlike any before it or since. granted this listening experience is a challenge.it took many listenings for me to understand and fall in love with this work,but it is now my favorite symphony of the 20th century,and any thing i can do to propegate it's existence,however small, is worth the effort to write this review-for this work should be known better,and performed more often. this is one of two recordings available on cd,and by far the best.the other was done recently by gerard schwartz with the seattle symph;a good second cd once you know the work from this cd.the other works on this collection are the piano concerto(the 2nd mvt is a masterstroke),and the 3rd(he wrote 9!!!sound familar)symphony.Mennin is an american master.

I first heard of Peter Mennin when the Martinon performance on this CD of the seventh symphony was broadcast over the radio in Australia about 10 years ago. At the time I taped it and played it to death. I searched for many years to get the LP, without any luck, and finally found it on CD here at Amazon.com. This is a fabulous performance of an underrated and underperformed work by a top class orchestra. What more can one say? Except that the piano concerto is in a similar class, with John Ogden at his best, and there would be no better advocate for the third symphony than Mitropoulos and the NYPO.

Mennin's compositions have never, to my knowledge, been performed in Australia, and one never sees more than passing references to it in English journals. I feel sure he was killed off by the American music critics of his day, with their often pejorative references to Mennin's conservative taste in clothes and other non musical trivia. His music is strongly contrapuntal, well orchestrated, and full of melodic invention. His harmonic style is firmly 20th century, with plenty of dissonance within well crafted musical structures.

This CD is a good place to start with Mennin's music. My next choice would be to seek out the cello concerto performed by Janos Starker available on Albany Troy 044 (1998). Don't expect Mennin to turn up in the American Masters (Naxos) series - no plans there, so Naxos tell me.

Friends of mine and I have been bellyaching about this material not getting reissued. Well, it did get reissued while we were looking for it all on parent labels.

These nonpareil presentations of three of Mennin's masterworks have been praised to the skies again and again, so my pipsqueaking isn't worth listening to. But the disk is, and I'm relieved that when my LPs go, I can fall back on this CD waiting in the wings in my collection. It doesn't concede very much to the LPs in sound and it perpetuates the memory of a compelling composer that we lost way too early.

Add Hanson's Mercury reading of the 5th Symphony to these and you truly have a treasure chest for yourself on just two disks.

All these wonderful well-earned reviews and the disc is gone--possibly for good. It was amazing CRI released it in the first place. Now I believe CRI is gone too. Mark that on your calendar. For decades CRI was the no-compromise label; they believed stuff deserved to be preserved. I remember way back when we had a government, a population, and a host of very visible Ivy League school heads that sort of accepted the odd notion that some things, like the nation's history, education, ideals, and culture, stood just slightly aside from base economic or trendy cultural pressures. We're unwilling to acknowledge excellence and unwillingly to spend money to point excellence out to others; multiculturalism's fine and dandy but has anyone noticed whose culture strangely got left out of the mix?

Options?

1) I suppose we can download this stuff from each other to keep it alive and prevent it from turning up for small fortunes on the Internet. Not sure how that gets the message out though.
2) Would public radio today even consider running a program of old classic (largely mono) stuff? Check your local one. They could wedge it between the Afro-Caribbean show and the Andean flute program. Bill it as "rediscovering the music of a forgotten culture?"
3) Hello Naxos?
4) Some other small European labels might give it some thought--cheap box sets of American Classics or something (ugh, how depressing)
5) The Japanese oddly have a better appreciation of Western culture than many in the West. Maybe they could bail us out the way Ireland did after the fall of Rome?

Just some brain-storming.

Though with a mere thirty works his output is relatively small, Peter Mennin (1923-1983) is regarded as one of the major American symphonists of the 20th Century. His first essays in the genre were composed during the war while he was still a student in composition at the Eastman School, and in the course of next forty years he wrote a total of nine, the last dating from 1981, two years before his death; he also wrote three concertos, for cello (1955), piano (1957) and flute (1983), plus a string of lesser orchestral pieces . This CRI CD conveniently collates three significant first recordings - but CRI has done a surprisingly sloppy job at providing correct production info about them. The 3rd Symphony was performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos and recorded in February 1954 (CRI gives an incomprehensible 1965 - possibly the date of the first CRI reissue? - but 1952 is when the Walter Naumburg Recording Award was granted to this recording project, a year after Riegger's Third Symphony and a year before Piston's Fourth by Ormandy; the recording was first released as Columbia ML 4902, paired with the Riegger Symphony, in late 1954 or early 1955). The 7th Symphony was recorded by Jean Martinon and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in November 1967 (not "1968") for RCA (LSC 3043) and paired with Martinon's own 4th Symphony (one wonders how, as the disc's production notes maintain, it could have been re-released by Orchestra First Edition Records in 1959... four years before it was premiered!). Finally the Piano Concerto was recorded in February 1968 by John Ogdon and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra led by Igor Buketoff, and apparently released only in 1971 (I'll take CRI's word on this one!) on RCA LSC-3243, with Yardumian's Passacaglia, Recitatives andFugue (RCA).

I find the Third Symphony from 1946 a disappointing work. It is written very much in the style of everybody else who wrote a symphony in those years, a neo-Romantic work which has sweep, grandeur, drama and robust rhythms in its outer movements, framing a slow movement that unfolds from the broodingly pastoral (integral with oboe then flute melody over strings) to the vehemently dramatic. But it is also pretty trite and impersonal, it has none of those stylistic traits than make you immediately recognize a symphony of Copland, Schuman or Sessions, and especially in the finale its heroism often turns to bombast (I have the same misgivings about his next symphony, the Fourth. See my review of Symphony No.4/Milena). By 1957, the year of the Piano Concerto, the style hadn't changed all that much. The orchestration is richer and more subtle, the expression has added a shade of grimness but it is still muscular, dramatic, relentlessly urgent, nervously busy in the outer movements. But the piano's sharp attack lends the piece an exciting toccata-like edge, and the music's irrepressible forward-moving, kinetic energy does make up for the possible lack of substance. These two movements also frame an "Adagio Religioso" of great sonic and emotional restraint likening it to some Bach keyboard "Allemande", rising to a dramatic climax in a traditional arch-shape, before rapidly receding back. The whole architecture and mood of the Concerto brings Bartok to mind, and especially his Second Piano Concerto.

The same stylistic elements are again at work in the 7th Symphony, the so called "Variation Symphony" from 1963, but within a somewhat richer approach to form and orchestration and ultimately a more personal expression. The Symphony consists of five variation movements that unfold without break in a slow - fast - mixed - fast toccata-like scherzo - fast toccata-like finale. The first movement's string introduction, with its atmosphere of mystery and pent-up menace, is again strikingly evocative of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Divertimento. The fast movements are echt-Mennin, with an urgent motoric drive, an angry and dramatic mood and a rich and plump orchestration, somewhat reminiscent of Walton's First Symphony. The middle movement again has the plangent flute and clarinet wail over strings, but it soon rises to recurring dramatic climaxes of great impact. It is a convincing work. To bad it was a point of arrival for Mennin, rather than a point of departure.

Despite my reservations about the music's value (especially with the 3rd Symphony), this CD is an indispensable acquisition for anybody interested in the American 20th Century symphony. It is now available as a New World reissue (and this is how I have it).

I can't advocate more convincingly on this recording's behalf than the previous reviewers, so I'll confine my comments to the comeuppance of avaricious internet opportunists. New World Records has recently purchased the entire CRI library and made all the discs, including this one, available for $15.99. They are CD-R and include original liner notes and a reproduction of the original cover art. Sound quality is excellent. Sorry if this sounds like I'm shilling for New World, but I feel I must in light of the outrageous prices marketplace sellers are asking. This recording is probably the best introduction to Mennin's work, with a definitive performance of the 7th and the only recorded version of the piano concerto (featuring the great John Ogdon), but it certainly isn't worth a gouging. Now you can get it for a reasonable price and put the greedy vultures out of business.

This unknown masterpiece is my favorite 20th century piano concerto. It edges out Bartok 1, Ravel, Prokofiev 1, 2, 3, Shostakovich 2. One need not wonder why this extraordinary piece remains completely unknown to most concertizing pianists, and by extension, concert audiences. It's difficulties are so intimidating, so formidable, that only that Great Bear of the Keyboard, the redoubtable John Ogden, dared to take the challenge. It may be the most difficult piano concerto ever written, the ultimate "knuckle buster." Ogden's performance is stupefying, electrifying, even terrifying. One could say the same about the music itself. The neo-baroque outer movements have a relentless, violent, contrapuntal drive, with the gravity and heft of Brahms. It's like a Bach keyboard concerto gone insane on steroids and amphetamine. The emotional intensity is almost unbearable at times, but it grips your attention every moment. The central movement broods magnificently. It's the equal of any Russian keyboard brooding you might happen to enjoy. The orchestral writing is skillful. The balance between the orchestra and the soloist is perfect. When the piece is over, the catharsis is powerful. One feels wrung out, exhausted, yet renewed and cleansed having survived the journey into some of the darkest, scariest places in human consciousness, and back. Some may insist that the work is redolent of Stravinsky. That is superficial. A lot of the tonal music from this period is influenced by Stravinsky. The contrapuntal density, the deep emotional turbulence and existential angst of this music: the rage, the despair, the frustration, the aggression, the torment, etc., depict a psychological topography more rugged, extreme, and direct than anything in Stravinsky. Perhaps a comparison to Bartok might be more apt. Still, it outdoes Bartok in any way that it might resemble Bartok, except for martellato piano writing. An interesting quality about the piece is that it is somehow immediately recognized as "American." The period recorded sound leaves something to be desired, but the performance is top notch. Do listen to it. There will never be anything like it again.

Este es un disco fundamental para cualquier discoteca que tenga interés en música del SIGLO XX. El programa no podría ser mejor. La extraordinaria Tercera Sinfonía (la mejor obra de Mennin), interpretada por Dimitri Mitropoulos con la New York Philharmonic, ésta es una interpretación COLOSAL, superior a cualquier otra. Mitropoulos pone un temperamento rítmico fascinante!

Una obra injustamente olvidada es el bellísimo Concierto para Piano de Mennin, ésta obra no tiene nada que envidiarle al famoso Concierto de Samuel Barber, pero por cosas del destino en la actualidad, nadie lo interpreta. Por suerte existe esta grabación del famoso pianista británico John Ogdon, que es un noble interprete de este magno concierto.

Y para finalizar tenemos la Sinfonía en un movimiento "Variation Symphony" por Jean Martinon con la orquesta de Chicago. Lo que pocos saben es que Martinon fue el director estable de la CHSO por algunos años después de la muerte de Fritz Reiner y antes de la era Solti. En ese tiempo Martinon no realizo muchas grabaciones más todas las que hizo son de gran calidad como se puede evidenciar en este disco.

Por lo tanto RECOMIENDO ESTE CD CON ENTUSIASMO!