Barber: Serenade for Strings – Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

Four American composers, all young when they wrote most of this music, all still finding out what an American string sound could be. That’s the through-line here, and it’s a good one, even if the disc itself, licensed and repackaged on the cheap under Warner’s Apex budget line, doesn’t announce its ambitions very loudly.

Start with Barber. The Serenade, op. 1, is juvenilia in the best sense: a teenager’s homage to lyricism, written before he’d fully absorbed Sibelius and long before Knoxville: Summer of 1915 taught him how to make nostalgia sound inevitable rather than merely pretty. The first two movements sit a little too close together in temperament, both spinning out that long-breathed melancholy Barber never really abandoned. But the finale wakes up. Its dance tune has real snap, an angularity that suggests the composer glancing sideways at Les Six even while his heart stayed planted in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Paul Shure’s Los Angeles players handle it with a clean, unfussy sense of forward motion. No schmaltz, thank goodness.

Irving Fine’s “Serious Song: A Lament for String Orchestra” is the disc’s emotional center. Written in 1955 for the Louisville Orchestra, that extraordinary commissioning project that gave American composers actual paying work in the Eisenhower years, it carries none of the neoclassical wit Fine is usually remembered for. This is Fine stripped down, almost severe, building through sustained lines and slow harmonic tightening to something genuinely wrenching. Fine died young, in 1962, at forty-seven, and hearing this piece now it’s hard not to read intimations into it that probably aren’t fair to impose. Still, the tension here is real, not manufactured, and Shure’s strings sustain it admirably, even when the studio acoustic, dry, boxy, unglamorous, refuses to give the climaxes any bloom.

Carter’s Elegy started life as a cello and piano piece back in the early 1940s; he arranged it for string orchestra around 1952, in that murky transitional decade before the First String Quartet cracked open into full modernism. You can hear him testing the medium: pushing celli into their thumb positions, basses up into a register where they sound like something else entirely, violins pressed down low so the whole texture inverts itself. It’s beautifully judged, never merely effortful, and it repays repeated listening far more than its modest five or six minutes might suggest.

But the real discovery, for listeners who don’t already know it, is the Diamond. Rounds for String Orchestra, composed in 1944, has an energy and clarity of thought the other pieces on this disc, attractive as they are, don’t quite match. The opening movement bounces along with a rhythmic spring that recalls Walton’s Portsmouth Point, or, more tellingly, the muscular contrapuntal athleticism of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, a work Diamond could not have known yet but seems to intuit anyway. The slow movement is where Diamond’s ear really shows itself: soft dissonances suspended between extreme registers, high violins and low basses reaching toward each other across empty space, then resolving into a melody that unfolds with unhurried confidence. The finale turns to Bartók’s pizzicato snap, basses striking the fingerboard with real percussive bite, but even borrowing that device, Diamond’s own voice comes through unmistakably. This is not pastiche. It’s a young composer synthesizing everything he’d absorbed, Copland’s open textures, Sessions’s rigor, a little Roy Harris, into something that sounds, finally, like nobody but himself.

The performances throughout are sturdy, well-tuned, decently blended. This is a good chamber orchestra playing carefully rather than a great one taking risks. Ensemble is tight; tone is warm without being plush. What lets the disc down is the engineering: recorded in 1980, venue unlisted (Apex doesn’t tell us, and one wishes it would), the sound is close, airless, a little congested in the bass. The slower music suffers most. The Fine especially needed more room to breathe, more sense of a hall around the strings rather than a booth.

Collectors wanting first recommendations for the Diamond or the Fine might do better hunting down Gerard Schwarz’s Seattle recordings for Delos, which give both works more sonic space and, in the Diamond’s case, more overall polish. But nobody investing pocket change in this Apex reissue is going to feel cheated. It’s a modest, intelligently assembled survey of a repertoire that deserves more attention than American orchestras generally give it. At this price, curiosity costs almost nothing.