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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
a well-crafted but ultimately impersonal neo-romantic idiom, but fans of Barber and Diamond will probably enjoy, August 22, 2008
Robert Ward belongs to the crop of "minor" 20th Century, neo-romantic American composers, among which David Diamond has made belated thrust to the limelight in the last ten or fifteen years. A student of Hanson at Eastman, Ward (still living) had a measure of success in his heydays, especially when his opera after Arthur Miller "The Crucible" got the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, but it didn't really last. Listening to this Bay Cities CD, released in 1989 and reissuing material published earlier on LP in 1973 (Musical Heritage Society), 1966 (Sacred Songs - CRI) and 1955 (Euphony - Louisville First Edition), one understands why. Ward is content to write in a well-crafted but ultimately impersonal neo-romantic idiom of no particular distinction. Prairie-Overture (1957) is exactly what the title seems to imply: sub-Copland, cowboy music blown to orchestral size. Invocation (from Invocation and Toccata, 1966) is meditative and wistful (twilight on the prairie, memories of things past), rising to a somber climax, while Toccata, Festive Ode (1966) and Euphony (1954) are dramatic, epic and boisterous. Nothing you haven't heard before and elsewhere, in the ballets of Copland or the film music of Virgil Thompson, Bernard Hermann or Miklos Rozsa, with whiffs of Gershwin here and there. And you don't perceive much development either in the fifteen years that separate the first (Sacred Song from 1951) and last compositions featured on the disc. The same stylistic traits are indeed already at play in the five "Sacred Songs For Pantheists" (1951) on poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Stephens and Emily Dickinson, beautifully sung by Sylvia Stahlman, but here I find Ward's operatic melismatas more endearing. Barber (Knoxville, the operas) comes to mind. Anyway, those with a taste for the composers mentioned in this review will now doubt find more felicities in this disc than I did.
Excellent sound - only Euphony, recorded in 1955 by the Louisville Orchestra and originally published on one of the first Louisville First Edition LPs, 545-10, betrays its age) and good notes (although Euphony is given the wrong composition date of 1956) with texts of songs provided, but ungenerous TT of 51:11.
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