Sousa: Music for Wind Band,
Volume 11. Royal Swedish Navy Band conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $9.99.
Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 1
and 2. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.
Giovanni Sgambati: Symphony No.
1; Cola di Rienzo—Overture. Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma conducted by
Francesco La Vecchia. Naxos. $9.99.
The direction in which
a composer’s mature works will progress is often, but not always, clear from
listening to the early pieces through which he or she is developing a personal
style. The latest volume in Naxos’ excellent John Philip Sousa series shows
this particularly clearly, with five of the 14 tracks offering works that Sousa
(1854-1932) wrote before he was 30: In
Parlor and Street Fantasy (1880), Wolverine
March (1881), Globe and Eagle March
(1879), Guide Right March (1881) and Bonnie Annie Laurie (1883). These pieces
collectively show most of the directions in which Sousa would later take his
music and his world-famous band. Marches are, of course, the works for which he
is best known: he wrote some 135 of them. And these early ones already show the
verve and bright character of his later ones. But Sousa wrote more than 200
compositions in all, and the In Parlor
and Street Fantasy shows one area that he was later to revisit a number of
times: a mixture of then-popular tunes, operetta excerpts (Die Fledermaus) and even bits from grand opera (Il Trovatore, no less), rising above
pastiche through cleverness of instrumentation and free-flowing form. And Bonnie Annie Laurie shows yet another
side of Sousa’s productivity: he had a lifelong fascination with folk songs,
considered this one the most beautiful of them all, and was fond of arranging
them and incorporating them into other works – often quite creatively, as here,
where he writes an original tune and sets it in counterpoint to the folk song
itself. Slightly later pieces on this excellently played CD continue to show
Sousa’s mastery of form and color: Mother
Hubbard March (1885, including no fewer than seven nursery rhymes), On Parade March (1892), Tally Ho Overture (1886, for a play by
his friend Joaquin Miller), and the particularly attractive National Fencibles March (1888). The
five other offerings here were written in the 20th century, when
Sousa was at the height of his fame and creative powers, and they display a
sureness beyond that of the early works – although not much beyond it, with Sousa refining his already considerable talent
rather than discovering entirely new ways to display it. Of the two late
fantasies on this CD, one is religious in orientation (In Pulpit and Pew, 1917, opening with Onward Christian Soldiers and concluding with Adeste Fidelis); and one is entirely secular, with the mixture of
popular and operatic tunes of which Sousa was fond (You’re the Flower of My Heart—Sweet Adeline Fantasy, 1930, in which
Sousa manages to bring off a close juxtaposition of a trumpet-dominated version
of the lovely Merry Widow Waltz with
the amusingly inelegant song For He’s a
Jolly Good Fellow). The three remaining later works, all marches, show
Sousa at the pinnacle of his creativity in the form with which he is most
closely identified: Keeping Step with the
Union (1921), We Are Coming (1918,
a march version of a war song), and Liberty
Loan (1917) – all infused with patriotism and uplift and a very strong
element of American sensibility, for all that the performances here are by
Sweden’s only professional military band, which is a very fine ensemble by any
standards..
The sensibility is
clearly Russian in Tchaikovsky’s first two symphonies, neither of which shows
his fully developed late style but both of which display a combination of
overtly nationalistic elements with ones from the Germanic symphonic tradition
– a mixture that was part of Tchaikovsky’s work throughout his life. Like Sousa
in band music, Tchaikovsky was a highly skilled orchestrator in works for the
concert hall, and his coloristic abilities are already on full display in his
first two symphonies. So are the depressive elements of his personality and
music: the finale of Symphony No. 1 begins Andante
lugubre, a designation that seems to stand for much of what Tchaikovsky
wrote. But the first symphony, sometimes called “Dreams of a Winter Journey”
or, as in the Naxos recording featuring the Seattle Symphony under Gerard
Schwarz, “Winter Daydreams,” is scarcely depressive in its overall feeling –
wistful, yes, even melancholic in parts, but highly skilled in scene-painting
(especially in the second movement) and eventually propelled at the end of the
finale by an ebullience that makes the concluding G major tonality
over-abundantly clear and looks ahead structurally to the
also-somewhat-too-emphatic conclusion of Symphony No. 5. As for Symphony No. 2, the “Little Russian,”
it contains multiple folk songs (most famously “The Crane” in the finale) and
has a brightness and poise that look ahead to the much later Nutcracker ballet. Neither of these
symphonies shows the fully mature Tchaikovsky style, but both show it well
along in development – and both give strong indications of where the composer’s
tremendous strengths and sometimes-apparent shortcomings will appear in his
later music. These performances date to 1992-93 and are among the Seattle
Symphony ones that originally appeared on Delos and are being re-released by
Naxos. Schwarz is not a completely idiomatic Tchaikovsky conductor, but his
somewhat superficial leadership actually comes across better in these first two
symphonies than a similar approach would in Tchaikovsky’s later, more-personal,
more-intense symphonic creations. Symphony No. 2 is very fine indeed,
well-paced and with nice instrumental details. And the middle movements of
Symphony No. 1 are quite effective as well. But Schwarz is out of his depth in
that work’s outer movements, altering tempos for no discernible reason in the
finale and doing so even more frequently and egregiously in the opening
movement – as if that movement is a precursor of the tone-poem-like first
movement of Symphony No. 4, which, however, it is not. Schwarz nevertheless
makes a good, solid case for Tchaikovsky’s first two symphonies, both in
themselves and, to an extent, in the ways in which they look ahead to the
composer’s later works.
Like Tchaikovsky,
Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914) offered a blend of influences in his music – in
Sgambati’s case, the same Germanic elements that Tchaikovsky absorbed, but
mixed with Italianate melodies and textures. Wagner admired Sgambati’s music,
and the two even created very different works on the same theme: Wagner’s Rienzi, a vast and vastly underrated
opera that dates to 1837-40, is based on the same story as Sgambati’s Cola di Rienzo—Overture. This overture
is from 1866 and was written as part of incidental music for a dramatic poem by
Pietro Cossa. This was Sgambati’s first orchestral work, and it shows clearly
where his influences came from: Liszt and Schumann as well as Wagner. Suitably
solemn and dramatic, the overture is well structured and fits its subject
matter well, but it does not yet display any very considerable sense of
personal style. The first of Sgambati’s two symphonies, though, does show
originality. Sgambati was one of several Italian Romantic composers trying to
reassert the power of purely instrumental music in a country where opera had
become the primary musical form – an endeavor later continued, somewhat more
successfully, by Ottorino Respighi. In
Sgambati’s first symphony, which dates to 1880-81, it is clear that the
composer has progressed significantly since his youthful Rienzi overture. There
are similarities, notably the resemblance of the motivic structure of the first
movement to the design of the earlier overture, but the symphony as a whole shows
a surer sense of thematic presentation and transformation and does not seem so
directly influenced by the works of other composers. The theme of the second
movement, for example, has Germanic orchestral treatment but is itself Italianate
– a good encapsulation of what Sgambati was trying to accomplish throughout
this work (and to some extent in all his music). The orchestration of the scherzo of the
five-movement symphony is particularly impressive, showing Wagnerian influence
but transcending it through Sgambati’s own emotional imprint. The finale, which
sums up the work both structurally (using techniques of elaboration and
variation) and emotionally (with intensity plus warmth), is an effective
capstone to a piece that fits firmly into the Romantic era but clearly takes
its own approach to the music of its time. Francesco La Vecchia, who has been
exploring a number of less-known composers and pieces with the Orchestra
Sinfonica di Roma, once again shows himself here to be a committed and sensitive
interpreter of music that has more to say than its comparative obscurity would
indicate.
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