The name of Walter Piston (1894-1976) isn't frequently encountered after leaving college, where his textbooks on harmony and orchestration are among the student's indispensable guides. Piston's compositions are accordingly tarred as \o7 academic, \f7 as if writing texts and teaching at a university--Piston was the bulwark of the Harvard composition faculty for three decades--were synonymous with lack of creative imagination.
Piston was not only an inspiration to his students, a glittering, heterogenous assemblage that included Elliott Carter, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero and Leonard Bernstein, but was himself an important creative force, as the current recorded examination (live performances remain rare) of his sizable output indicates.
As part of their ongoing American music recording project--still, at this writing, handsomely supported by the National Endowment for the Arts--Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony are turning their attention to Piston's eight symphonies, with Nos. 2 (1943) and 6 (1955) and the 1941 Sinfonietta making up the initial release (Delos 3074).
The Second is a terrific piece, emotionally spare, yet full of lively rhythms and some ear-sticking tunes. The brilliant orchestration and all that contrapuntal activity may be textbook stuff in certain respects, but Piston wears his erudition lightly--and he did, after all, write the book.
The Sixth is more self-consciously grand and showily orchestrated, but with a gregarious, sharp-witted scherzo/second movement to balance the rhetorical tone of the outer movements.
Both symphonies are projected with optimum clarity, affection and skill by Schwarz and his responsive Seattle musicians, while the third work on the program, the tough, dark Sinfonietta (1941) has Schwarz leading the New York Chamber Symphony.
Samuel Barber, like Piston, spent a period of time studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris during the '20s, but, unlike the clear-eyed Piston, he became fully immersed in the spirit of European Romanticism while there.
That Romanticism comes to full flower in the 1948 "Knoxville, Summer of 1915" settings of deep-South nostalgic texts by James Agee. "Knoxville"--is there a more lushly lyrical vocal work in all of American music?--is for the first time recorded by non-native forces: British soprano Jill Gomez, in a performance of gorgeous, relaxed sensuality, with the City of London Sinfonia under Richard Hickox (Virgin Classics 90766).
