(++++) LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3, “Organ.” Park Avenue Chamber Symphony conducted by David Bernard. Recursive Classics. $16.98. 

Gary William Friedman: Journeys Piano Concerto; Palimpsest String Quartet; Butterfly Cantata. Tanya Gabrielian, piano; Skye Stauffer, soprano; Neal Benari, baritone; Antoine Silverman Orchestra conducted by Gary William Friedman; Charlotte Munn-Wood and Aimée Niemann, violins; Blake Allen, viola; Dara Hankins, cello. 150 Music. $15.99. 

     Sometimes a CD really wishes it had been a DVD. The Recursive Classics live recording of Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony as performed by the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony under David Bernard is more a souvenir of a very thoughtfully produced concert than a competitive rendition of this work. The performance is very fine throughout, but that is not the issue: the concert was designed as an immersive experience in which the audience was literally surrounded by the sounds of a digital organ, and the enthusiastic applause at the very end of the disc certainly shows the intensity of listeners’ response. But this is only a 35-minute-or-so symphony (actually 37 in Bernard’s reading here), and it is offered alone on the disc – not even paired with Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2, with which it shared the original program in November 2025. In the absence of video or a compelling multi-work presentation, the CD seems fitting mostly for people who attended the concert where it was recorded and want to revisit what was clearly a highly involving performance. 

     Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony is more-or-less an occasional piece, created for a specific venue in London possessing both an organ and a high-quality acoustic setting for an orchestra. The work has created performance challenges ever since, because very few suitable locations existed at the time of the work’s creation (1886) and even fewer remained in subsequent years. The solution demonstrated in this recording is a fine one for those not insisting on use of a pipe organ, but the high-quality performance does not, in and of itself, stand significantly above other recordings that handle the work’s auditory complexities differently. This is in many ways a very strange symphony, containing not only the organ but also a piano that requires both two-hand and four-hand performance. But nothing is done purely for effect: the unusual elements are thoroughly integrated into an overall sonic environment that they both support and help create. It is easy to see why there has never been another symphony quite like this one, and also easy to see why its effectiveness has scarcely diminished with time. Just how unusual the organ’s position is comes clear throughout: it is not a soloist in a concerto or a basso continuo supporting other instruments, but a fully integrated member of the orchestra, perhaps inevitably primus inter pares because of how distinctive its sound is in this context, but nevertheless functioning as in effect an additional section of the ensemble. Contextualizing the organ is very difficult, and a major challenge for a conductor is to make the symphony into something other than a buildup to its finale, when the organ emerges front-and-center – similar to the complication inherent in Beethoven’s Ninth. Bernard does an excellent job of seeing the symphony as a totality, with the quiet portions particularly well done and the overall performance showcasing the especially impressive strings, whose easy elegance fits this music particularly well. The symphony is in two parts, although sometimes, as here, presented as being in four movements. Bernard handles the first part (or first two movements) expansively, starting with quiet precision that immediately draws listeners into a scene as if dawn is breaking for one minute, a pleasant journey with fine sense of flow then begins, and the atmospheric setting is tempered by some genuine sweetness – all this in a very different way from that of, say, Mahler’s First, completed just two years later. If the Saint-Saëns is thought of as being in four movements, then Bernard’s way with the quiet ending of the first is especially well-handled, allowing the music to blend seamlessly into the following Poco adagio, wherein the organ first appears. The second half of this performance is less determinedly expansive, with the Allegro moderato bright but scarcely jaunty, and good rhythmic sense throughout – and a particularly effective quiet section toward the end, culminating in a full-sounding Maestoso organ entry that comes as something of a shock. The inevitable, inextricable interweaving of the organ with the form of the fugue is one of many subtly impressive elements of this symphony, and Bernard’s handling of the work’s final portion – up to and including having the orchestra really cut loose in the last 90 seconds – is skillfully managed and produces as full-fledged a triumphal conclusion as any listener could wish to hear. This CD will nevertheless mostly be a souvenir d'un lieu cher for people lucky enough to have experienced the performance in person and understandably wanting to revisit a musically meaningful time and place. 

     Music can go back to places of horror as well as ones of joy, and can try to come to terms, at some level, with the nearly unimaginable cruelties associated with terror-permeated sites. That is what Gary William Friedman (born 1957) attempts in Butterfly Cantata, a seven-section work setting poems written by children incarcerated at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp. “The wind sings song of far away,” “this plot of grief and shame,” “the wheels hurry onward…they carry a cargo of shivering shoes,” and similar words of affecting naïveté are combined with music that sometimes underlines their meaning, sometimes contrasts with it. It is all very well-intentioned, deeply unsettling, sensitively composed and gently sung, with Friedman at pains to keep the words front-and-center at all times, whether they are experiential, metaphorical, or frighteningly direct (“evil sickness spreads a terror in its wake”). The sincerity of the work is beyond doubt – as is the sincerity of many other modern works that have mined this and similar horrors for similar purposes. The irony is often laid on very thickly indeed (“the world is full of loveliness – how fine it is to live”), and elements of the composition are far from unexpected, such as having it start and end with the word “Listen!” It is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to return repeatedly to so dismal and bleak a work – which, however, underlines its points effectively enough on a single hearing. The other pieces on a new 150 Music disc travel in different ways and to different kinds of locations. Journeys Piano Concerto deals with going places inwardly rather than externally. Its three inward-looking movements, which have no titles or tempo indications, have a kind of film-music emotionalism about them. They are reflective enough in a kind of bluesy, thoughtful, melancholic mode, but they tend to wallow: all three are moderately paced, and the largely unrelieved jazz/improvisational feeling of the piano part wears thin very quickly. The music has no real sense of evolution or progress, and the swooning string sounds that pervade the orchestral portions start inconclusively and never really move into any other mode. Cut from much the same dark-but-not-quite-depressive mode is Palimpsest String Quartet, whose two movements also lack titular or tempo indications and whose “visiting places” are, according to Friedman, directly musical: he says he wanted to revisit his earlier works and use their elements differently. Requiring audiences to know the genesis of a piece in order to understand it is a conceit of many contemporary composers, but Friedman does not quite insist on this – although knowing the source material for this quartet would undoubtedly give it more meaning than it has when simply listened to without preconceptions. The vast majority of the material is handled by the ensemble rather than the individual instruments, and there is a curious blending of sound that makes the distinctive voices of the higher and lower strings seem much more similar than is usual in quartet writing. In both this quartet and the piano concerto, there is an underlying lugubriousness that seems to want to pass for deep thinking but that makes the works less-then-rewarding places for a listener to spend time and attention. All three pieces on this (+++) CD are certainly well-wrought and well-performed, but the expenditure of emotional energy they require to connect with what Friedman wants to communicate is more substantial than the evocative nature of the works really justifies.