Customer Reviews

Samuel Barber: Symphony No. 2 / Essay No. 1 / Adagio for Strings / Music for a Scene from Shelley / Overture to The School for Scandal

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This CD is a perfect introduction to the art of Samuel Barber, or just another great addition ot your 'Barber' library. Schenck had the same sensibilities for Barber that another young conductor had - Thomas Schippers. High recommended.

I have owned this recording for many years, and I never replaced it because it is my only recording of "Music for a Scene from Shelley". That piece is typical Barber and I like to hear it every now and then.

A previous reviewer compared the conducting on this record to Schippers. That's a hell of a comparison to make, as Schippers is better than anyone else in Barber's music...even better than Bernstein. I must say, however, that I fully agree with the assessment. These performances really give Barber's neo-Romantic effusions the full-blown passionate treatment they deserve. Tempos and, more importantly, the "feel" of the music are perfectly judged.

As another reviewer noted, the New Zealand strings play very sweetly and give a good Romantic surge to the more lyrical passages. At times, particularly in the symphony, you wish for a larger body of strings, or perhaps a more present recorded sound. The winds and horns sound a bit recessed at times, so I once again concur with the previous reviewer, who noted that perhaps some "remixing" is in order.

I really like this CD for the unusual repertoire, but if you are new to Barber's music, don't start here. Begin with the Schippers recording -- it's easy to find on amazon. After that, if you want to hear more, I strongly recommend the violin concerto as recorded by Bernstein and an indispensible CD with Leontyne Price singing "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" and a couple excepts from Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra". From that point, you are ready for this CD and for a 2-CD set with Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Symphony that includes the 1st Symphony, the Piano Concerto, and the Cello Concerto, which is not a great piece.

That's probably a bit more than you really needed to know! Can you tell that Barber is one of my favorite composers?! He and Copland write music that sounds truly "American" but not trivial or glib as Gershwin and even Ives can seem at times. If you've never given Barber a try, or if you've only ever heard the Adagio for Strings, get that Schippers CD right away!

Yes, it is true that the technical aspects of the recording are lacking, but I find that all I have to do is turn up the volume to produce a somewhat better sound. Furthermore, the New Zealand Symphony deserves credit in their performance of this demanding, virtuosic orchestral writing. This is a decent CD, not the best perhaps, but there is fire and vitality that I believe is sufficient.

So if you're a perfectionist, you may want to continue searching. If not, I think you'll be satisfied with this one, especially with the ending of Symphony No. 2. (Although, the track of the final movement finishes right when the reverberation has died down, meaning that if you are playing this track on random shuffle on iTunes or your iPod, the next piece will start right away. You've been warned.)

What fit of madness seized Barber when, one day in 1964, twenty years after the completion of the work, he decided that his 2nd Symphony was "not a good work", that "times of cataclysm are rarely conducive to the creation of good music, especially when the composer tries to say too much", and ordered to have it withdrawn, and score and parts destroyed? Did he hear too much in it of its programmatic content - the piece was written in 1943 as a celebration of the US Air Force, and evokes in music various aspects of flying? But the Symphony stands perfectly on its own, and can be heard (and should be, really) with no reference to its program, as a piece of "pure" music. Sure, what happens at 6:45 in the first movement, when you know the program, sounds unmistakably like the flak from the Anti-Aircraft - but if you don't know the program, it is no less a climax of great power and rhythmic excitement.

(Incidentally, those were dramatic times of course, but weren't they great times, when the US air-force could commision a major young American composer to write "a symphonic work about flyers", believing the subject to be "of great fascination to the public", and in order to help the composer find his inspiration sent him on an Air-Force base to accompany "pilots on training flights under simulated battle conditions"? (information culled from the preface of the Schirmer score).

I was listening recently to an appalingly bombastic patriotic cantata of Liszt (see my review of Choral Works) and commented - apparently in agreement with Barber's own self-deprecating comment about his Symphony - that rarely did patriotic music yield good music . But then, the only example I could come up of patriotic music that was also great music was, precisely, Barber's Second Symphony. Put quite simply, it is one of Barber's best compositions, and one can be grateful that, in the 1980s, parts for the Symphony were discovered in a warehouse in England, allowing for a new edition, and that presumably the Barber estate lifted the ban on performances.

Based on the famous Adagio, the Concertos for Violin and for Cello, Knoxville and his operas, we tend to associate Barber with a gently lyrical and neo-romantic style. But there are more facets to Barber than just that. In the two Symphonies, the Essays, the Medea ballet, Barber writes in a more dissonant, vehement, urgent, angular and agitated manner. The second Symphony is extremely dramatic. Not that the more customary Barber is absent: the pastoral, romantic style is there, in the first movement's lyrical theme (first sung by oboe at 2:29, then picked up by the violins and then cellos, a line as lyrical as anything Barber ever wrote), in the second movement with its plangent to pastoral melodies played by woodwinds over a gently rolling tapestry of strings in 5/4 rhythm - but that too rises in intensity and reaches a superb climax in more anguished mood, and, bass pizzicati helping, the movement ends rather in the character of a funeral lament; Barber just described it as "solo flight at night". The symphony also has beautiful touches of orchestration (as the tuba counter-melody when that first movement violin line enters) and of rhythmic invention (binary rhythms within a ternary pulse, quintuplets made to sound like limping 32nd note-quadruplets in the first movement, biting and explosive "hungarian" rhythms in the finale). It has passages with the epic grandeur and sweep of the best works of Copland or Harris, a finale of considerable bite and excitement. And is what happens after the first movement "battle scene" mentioned above, at 8:07, when the music turns to major mode as if the squad was returning to base, out of the stormy clouds of the night into the sunrise, corny? No, it is Barber, and I'm all the more ready to accept it as it is followed by a coda recapitulating the more vehement and anguished mood of the beginning. No happy, bombastically triumphant ending as in George Antheil's 4th Symphony from 1944 (Antheil: Symphony No. 4 ("1942") / Copland: Statements for Orchestra).

Barber himself had recorded the symphony in 1950 for British Decca, a recording long gone, reissued on CD by Pearl in 2001, a CD apparently already gone too (Barber: Symphony No. 2, Cello Concerto, Medea). Andrew Schenck's recording was I believe the first to be issued on CD after the parts were rediscovered and the performance ban lifted. It is serviceable, suitably vehement and powerful but marred by muffled and distant acoustics, with the piano often blurred under the line of perception, depriving the orchestration of some of its edge and robbing the symphony of some of its tremendous impact in the outer movements; allowances made for the sonics, Schenck's finale is vehement and powerful, but you just need to turn to the live recording of the premiere by Koussevitzky to hear that the movement can be conducted with considerably more drive, bite and intensity (more about that in the comments section). But in the middle movement the strings of the New Zealand SO do have the required silky softness and atmosphere.

I won't comment on the rest, a. because I don't have the scores and haven't made any comparative listening and b. because I think the 2nd Symhpony is the main attraction of this disc. Suffice to say that it attractively completes the program, with a good mixture of the "popular", arch-romantic and sweepingly lyrical Barber (Adagio, Music for a Scene from Shelley), sometimes harking back even to Brahms and Strauss (in the second theme of the - mostly merry - School for Scandal-overture after Sheridan), and the vehement (not confined to just one composition, but more to the fore in the First Essay, which, of course, also has its moment of brooding lyricism).

TT 66, scanty liner notes.

I agree that the orchestra us somewhat distant in this recording, but it's more than acceptable. Schenck's conducting is fine, Fine's production is great. This was one of a series of great Barber and Rosza recording on Koch that ended up on this cheapo label. Don't be afraid. This is good stuff. And it is only one of two available recordings of Barbers Second Syphony--and far more idiomatic than Jarvi's.

Don't hesitate. If you love Barber as I do, grab it! And if you can ever find it, Barbers "Cave Of the Heart" balet, coupled with the original 13 instrument version of Apalachian Spring from the same Conductor and producer is not to be missed!!!