Search - Ives, Cowell, Harrison :: Wizards & Wildmen

An interesting program of piano music by three American mave

Discophage | France | 09/20/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Anthony de Mare offers an interesting program of piano music by three American maverick innovators, linked to each other by personal and stylistic ties. The excellent liner notes give a detailed account of how Harrison became in the mid-thirties an early advocate of Ives, whose music he had encountered through his composition teacher at San Francisco State College, Henry Cowell - himself befriended with Ives since 1927 and the indefatigable proponent of the composer from Danbury, Connecticut, who, in turn, supported financially Cowell's enterprises in favor of New Music.



As the liner notes point out, Harrison's piano music is one of the least-known branches of his compositional output - five of the seven works featured here are premiere recordings. Hearing them, one can understand why. Although based on elaborate compositional procedures, they don't sound very original. "Prelude for Grandpiano" (1937) can be taken as a joint homage to Ives (the angrily pounding piano runs) and Cowell (the harped strings and tone clusters). The Piano Sonata (1938) again sounds in places similar to Ives' studies in polyrhythms, while its use of stern and ominous chordal blocks or simple melodic progressions points to Ruggles. The sparse and enigmatic Saraband (1937) was lauded by another composition teacher of Harrison - Arnold Schoenberg. Sure enough: it starts like Schoenberg or Webern and develops into Ruggles. Largo Ostinato is simple but effective, somewhat evocative of Satie and quite bluesy in its slowly swaying pulse. Ultimately the only piece of some originality is "May Rain" (1941) - the setting of a poem by the Californian poet Elsa Gidlow, to be sung by the pianist himself, playing and singing very few, simple, ditty-like intervals with prepared piano and gong. The other pieces are insignificant, if charming, trifles.



Other than "The Alcotts", the third movement of his "Concord" Sonata, Ives is represented by some of his least-known piano pieces, like the Improvisations (actual improvisations of Ives, recorded in 1938 and painstakingly transcribed on score. The originals are available on Ives Plays Ives The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano, 1933-1943), The Celestial Railroad (an outgrowth of the second movement of the "Concord") or Study 22. They are quintessential-Ives - the polyrhythms, the angrily pounding or frenzied scurrying runs, the whimsical and jolting alternation of cacophony and serene, transcendental meditation.



But to me the most original inventor in piano sounds remains Henry Cowell. De Mare gives us here a selection of 11 pieces, among the composer's most imaginative inventions. It is particularly welcome to have "Dynamic Motion" and its five Encores grouped together - an obvious choice, but surprisingly one rarely encountered: in his invaluable traversal of 20 of his own pieces, Henry Cowell plays his own Piano Music, the composer leaves out the last Encore, "Time Table", and shuffles the others around.; the only competing version then is Chris Brown's on New Albion, New Music - Piano Compositions By Henry Cowell / Brown, Hays, Kubera, Cahill.



Interpretively, where I have scores and comparative versions to permit an informed opinion, De Mare is variable, from excellent to acceptable. Sometimes he favors a sense of precipitation, but it is at the expense of clarity of articulation, muscularity or atmosphere (as in Ives' Study 22 or Cowell's "Dynamic Motion"). In some other cases it is the other way around: in "What's This" (1st Encore to Dynamic Motion), he is not as dynamic as Cheryl Seltzer (Henry Cowell: Instrumental, Chamber and Vocal Music, Vol. 2) or Chris Burn (on an Acta CD available in England) but very articulated. In "Amiable Conversation" (2nd Encore) he is more pedestrian than the composer or Sorrel Doris Hays (Sorrel Doris Hays Plays the Piano Music of Henry Cowell), making it sound like a Bartok rustic dance - an approach very similar to Brown's on New Albion, but with more snap.



Sometimes he is just right, as in "Advertisement" (3rd encore) in which he has the bounce and the bite and is appropriately frenzied and cartoon-like, "Exultation" which he takes at a swift tempo close to Cowell's own and plays with snap and clear articulation, exuding a fine sense of barn-joy, or "Tiger", where he is cleanly articulated but, unlike Burn or Hays, not at the expense of tremendous power in the piece's massive discharges of energy, which makes up for the slight lack of frenzy when compared to Cowell's own recording or to Joel Sachs' (Henry Cowell: Instrumental, Chamber and Vocal Music, Vol. 1).



But while De Mare has the massive power called for by Cowell's clusters, what he is missing is both a Cowellian sense of rubato, and some evocative power. In "The Lilt of the Reel" he conjures fine colors but has none of the flexibility of rubato called for by Cowell. Likewise in "Aeolian Harp" he is atmospheric enough but he doesn't conjure the myriad colors produced by Cowell himself through various modes of directly harping the strings, and lacks the necessary tempo flexibility ("tempo rubato" is the score's indication). In "Antinomy" (4th Encore to "Dynamic Motion") he displays again massive power, but not as much evocative poetry as the composer himself in the way he plays the sweeter arpeggios that form the antinomy of the title. Finally in "The Banshee" - arguably Cowell's masterpiece, played entirely on the piano's open strings and putting to full use all the techniques invented by the composer (strings swept or plucked with finger flesh or nail) at the service of a terrifying evocation of the "fairy woman who comes at the time of death to take the soul back into the Inner World" (to quote the composer's own description) - De Mare is acceptably colorful and evocative, but what one hears are mesmerizingly resonating metallic strings rather than, as when Cowell plays, the terrifying moans of the Banshee.



Overall this is a more than an acceptable interpretation, but Cowell's own recording and the more recent ones of Hays and Burn are preferable.



And beware: as grateful as one can be to New World Records to have picked up the CRI catalog, this is the third of these reissues (after 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 and The Unknown Ives) in which I encounter irksome clicks and stops on the final tracks. I suspect there must be something with their duplication process. I've contacted them about this, and they have not responded.

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