Yankee Doodle Discs. - Review - sound recording reviews

National Review, Nov 22, 1999 by Jay Nordlinger

Along with Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, those pieces constitute the first of the discs. As we can see here, there is a lot of "program music"-which is to say, music meant to depict a story, or event, or thing-in this collection, as against "absolute" or "pure" music (such as any Beethoven symphony, except the "Pastoral," which is an example, if an exceptionally high one, of program music). Many of the compositions are decidedly second-rate, even student-like, hardly cause for much patriotic chest-thumping (or even, perhaps, a Celebration).

More Copland comes with his Music for the Theatre, an engaging work. (When Copland's fellow composer Roy Harris first heard it, we learn from a note by Phillip Ramey, he "jumped up excitedly, threw out his hands, and exclaimed with delight: 'But that's whorehouse music!'" This was 1925, and Europe was seeming farther and farther away.) There is a great deal of Copland in this set, arguably too much, given the ground to be covered and the space available. His Lincoln Portrait-here conducted by Bernstein and narrated by William Warfield-is an amazingly shallow, bombastic, and stupid work, incapable of impressing anyone over the age of, say, 12. His Salon Mexico, on the other hand, manages to survive-though barely-the ethnomusicological earnestness that prompted it.

The French-born Edgard Varese is represented by his Integrales, performed in his memory not long after his death. Indeed, many of these performances took place for ceremonial reasons, rather than for what might be considered normal, or everyday, ones: It was this one's 75th birthday; it was the 50th anniversary of that one's death. It is possible that this says something not entirely reassuring or flattering about the quality of the music. Ned Rorem (represented in the set by his superb Third Symphony) once said that the highest compliment that had ever been paid him was when Leopold Stokowski programmed a piece of his without telling him about it. Stoki simply went ahead and scheduled it, as though Rorem were a regular composer, not needing to be present, not needing to stand and acknowledge applause, and so on. He was just a composer, a grown-up, like, oh . . . Haydn.

A few of the pieces assembled here are so poor as to be laughable. Consider Old California by William Grant Still (conducted by the august Frenchman Pierre Monteux, who was something of an old Californian himself, given his association with the San Francisco Symphony). It is shot through with hokum, attempting to recreate tribal chants, Spanish yelps, and the like, all for the glory of the City of Los Angeles's 160th anniversary (for which the piece was commissioned). It could serve as the accompaniment to a particularly campy film: Where are Bing, Bob, and Dorothy Lamour? William Grant Still was a better composer than revealed in this piece, an oddity that he, if he could, would probably be glad to bury.

Other works in the set, however, deserve to be more widely known than they are. Ernest Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1 is an intelligent piece, bowing to a form of the past while incorporating the modern. Henry Cowell's Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 2 displays a similar keenness, here beautifully rendered by another French conductor, Paul Paray. Carl Ruggles's Sun- treader is a complicated work, brilliant in a way, not one to clutch to the heart, but featuring an uncanny orchestral architecture, not unreminiscent of Bruckner. George Crumb's Star-Child is a similarly strange and wonderful creation. And Peter Mennin's Concertato is no less than a rediscovery, taut and driving.