Customer Reviews

Symphony 1 2 & 3

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

 

 

This is the only recording of Sessions' first and third symphonies. The recording of Symphony No. 1 is not very good, which is a shame considering that it is one of Sessions most interesting pieces. The group sounds sloppy at times, and the sound (especially noticeable in the brass) comes off very harsh and edgy. The editing is pretty shoddy as well. Even somebody who didn't know anything about music would be able to hear several places in the third movement where sections have been cut and pasted together. The most unforgivable editing mistake is in the second movement. It is a largo movement that starts off with a typical Sessions long phrase that gets passed around between violin and viola. Unfortunatly....the editor decided it would be ok to use a take that didn't have the last note of the melodic line in the viola! The whole phrase has been building for 26 measures to that one note....to not have it there is a real letdown.

Symphony No. 2 is my favorite Sessions symphony and the recording on this CD is alright. The orchestra plays well, but the sound is not very good because of the age of the recording. This hurts because harmonic texture is something very important to Sessions' music, and you lose a lot of that on this old New York Phil recording. A key example of this is the beginning of the finale where Sessions writes a facinating multilayered texture that sounds like a giant blob of sound. A better one to have would be Blomstedt and San Francisco....if you can find it.

The recording of Symphony No. 3 is the best one on the disc. It's not his best symphony but I like it. This piece shows Sessions in his mature style. It was written after Sessions began to incorporate 12-tone technique into his compositions, but is not quite as "out there" as some of his later works. It's very similar to his second symphony with a moderatly paced opener, playful second movement, slow movement, and complex multilayered finale. The third symphony is much darker in character....more in line with his later style.

If you are already a Sessions fan, you'll love this CD; however, if you are just getting to know this composer, a better place to start would be the Juilliard Orchestra's recording of The Black Maskers or the Gunther Schuller's recording of the Violin Concerto.

My first introduction to Roger Sessions' music was his First Symphony on this recording. I found it while browsing around in the library. The first movement was a mind-blower. Instantly accessible, great rhythms, and good and loud. I wondered what other wonders were on this CD. Well, my first impression was that it was akin to white noise. I love Lutoslawski and Penderecki and it seemed to be noise. However, I gave it a second shot, and a third, and so on and the OTHER wonders of his music became apparent. Get this CD, give it a chance, and it'll grow on you. I have most of his symphonies and have several other pieces and I'm going to get more soon.

I have always loved Sessions' music and this CD has first recordings of these works. In the First, the Japan Philharmonic fit themselves well, but the sound is not so hot. (How about it, Neeme Jarvi/Detroit Symphony?) Mitropoulos' 2nd has a certain authority about it, but the sound here is tinny also. It is easier to hear the Blomstedt recording of this, which also has a wonderful performance of it on a London CD. This is well worth hearing though. The price of the CD, however is worth it for the 3rd. Buketoff was a staunch champion of unknown 20th century works. This recording came out in 1968 and on CD it still sounds very good. We do need more modern recordings of these works, but this will fill the bill in the meantime. Sessions deserves all of his works recorded in good quality digital sound.

His two Chamber Symphonies notwithstanding, Schoenberg never composed a symphony in the accepted sense (although the 5 pieces opus 16 and Variations opus 31 are great orchestral compositions in their own right), so we can be grateful that Sessions did in his stead. It did take the American composer three symphonies to warm up to it, as testified by the present disc.

Don't take this as a sneer. While I find the Schoenbergisms striking, all the way to the twists and turns of orchestration, Sessions' Third Symphony is a great work, dramatic and powerful, magnificently orchestrated, full of ear-catching musical events. Schoenberg would have no reason to blush had he composed it himself.

For the rest, the disc offers a fascinating presentation of the composer's evolution to his Schoenbergian self, starting with the early and, to my ears, not really characteristic First (1927). It is full of things Roy Harris might have composed, from the menacing and triumphant, pre-Bernstein bouncy brassy statements of the beginning to the second, lyrical theme of the first movement with the plangeant tone of english horn and oboe (2:47), and the "Scotch"-souding theme which opens the sarcastic finale, which at times also seems strongly indebted to Stravinsky's Petrushka. To me the most embarrassing is the pastoral and dreamy second movement, with its tritely sentimental oboe-clarinet and wailing violin melodies. But granted, the Symphony was written five years before Harris' great first statement (the Symphony 1933 - Harris had abandonned an earlier essay begun in the mid-twenties, and his Symphony "American Portrait" is from two years after Sessions' first), and it is a tribute to Sesssions that this was his point of departure, not of arrival.

In the almost twenty ensuing years, Sessions matured tremendously. The Second Symphony (1946) is a work of great power, thorny, angular, highly dissonant. In it I hear echoes of Berg's Wozzeck (try at 2:55 in the first movement) and, in the short Scherzo (2nd movement) and some passages of the finale (after 2:20), traces of Bartok, in particular the sardonic scherzo passages of Miraculous Mandarin or Concerto for orchestra. The powerful forward drive of the finale harks back to the earlier Sessions, but it is more angular and dark.

But the most remarkable thing I find is that, though the wailing violin then oboe are there again (at 1:40 in the first movement, and in the slow one), the effect is absolutely not sentimental, but rather evocative of a lost soul (some of Henze's early works come to mind). This is possibly because it is integreated in an architecture and a language that are not sentimental - or maybe because of the way the New Yorkers under Mitropoulos' baton phrase it: I don't get the same feeling with Blomstedt (Harbison: Oboe Concerto, Symphony No2; Sessions: Symphony No2). The emotional heart of the Symphony is its slow "Adagio tranquillo ed espressivo" (3rd movement), a threnody for Franklin Roosevelt, who had died a few months earlier. There, the intense, atonal lyricism of Berg and, already, Schoenberg looms large, together with their art of chamber-like orchestration. There weren't many orchestral works as original as this Symphony to be composed in those years - maybe Elliott Carter's Symphony (American Composers Orchestra), and some works of Wallingford Riegger (Riegger: Symphony No3, Romanza, Dance Rhythms, Music for Orchestra, Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, Music for Brass Choir, Movement for Two Trumpets Trombone and Piano, Nonet for Brass, Wallingford Riegger: Variations / Sym No.4). In general, what makes the Second and Third Symphonies works of enduring interest is not only their wealth of ideas, but also that (unlike the first, and so many other American symphonies written in those years - and still today), they never resort to the most immediately easily graspable and immediately appealing solutions.

This well-filled (74:22) CRI disc collates recordings from various dates - and regrettably CRI doesn't provide them. The First came out before 1961 on CRI 131 with William Bergsma's "Music on a Quiet Theme" and Russell Smith's "Tetrameron". It has some tape hiss but clear, stero sound. Mitropoulos' recording was awarded the 1949 Walter Naumburg Foundation award and came out in 1950, both on 78rmp and on LP - that's how old it is. I don't have the score so the following comment is gut feeling more than fully informed appreciation, but unlike the previous reviewers I tend to prefer it to the more recent Blomstedt/San Francisco. The latter's sonics are evidently very superior, more spacious (in tempo as well), smooth and comfortable, but I find that the very rawness of Mitropoulos and the New Yorkers suits the music well, and for all its harshness and lack of depth the mono sound has more presence (Blomstedt's orchestra is so spaciously recorded as to sound somewhat distant). The Third Symphony came out in 1968 on RCA LSC-3095 with Benjamin Lees' Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra.

This is an essential disc for the admirer of Sessions, and anyone interested in the history of the American symphony.

On first encounter I found the music of Roger Sessions harsh-sounding, dense, and almost, but not quite, inacessible. Something about it made me want to hear more. After hearing a lot more, lots of times, I consider him one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. I particularly recommend his First Symphony as the most listener friendly of the orchestral works with which I am familiar. Composed in the 20's, it's rythyms sometimes remind one of Stravinsky, it contains jazzy sections, and some beautiful slow sections. It may turn you off, but if you stick with it, a whole universe of wonderful sound is there to be explored.

It's great to have these works available on record as it is unlikely you would ever hear them in the concert hall, particularly in the UK. Even if you did it's unlikely you could grasp them in a single hearing. As a British fan of American music I've persisted with this intense, even forbidding, music. The 9 symphonies (all currently available on record) make him arguably the greatest American symphonist. Certainly each time you listen (and you really do have to listen) you notice something new. That was apparently his intention. On this record you can hear how his music slowly became dodecaphonic, this seems to have been quite a natural progression without any sudden change in style. The 1st symphony is somewhat neoclassical, even jazzy at times, but already the obsessive counterpoint is there. The 2nd and 3rd seem to be of very serious intent. His orchestration is bright, even harsh, but it grows on you and seems at one with the argument. Committed performances, albeit of some vintage, and by different bands.