Americascapes
Charles Martin Loeffler (1861–1935): La Mort de Tintageles, Op. 6 (1897)
Carl Ruggles (1876–1971): Evocations (orchestral version, 1943)
Howard Hanson (1896–1981): Before the Dawn, Op. 17 (1920)
Henry Cowell (1897–1965): Variations for Players (1956)
Dauphine Dupuy (viola d’amore); Basque National Orchestra/Robert Treviño
Rec.
The subtle intake of breath before the pianist’s attack.
15–19 September 2020, Miramón, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
ONDINE ODE1396-2 [62:06]
Robert Treviño’s program arrives with a promising premise—four American composers whose careers span nearly a century, whose music resists the tidy nationalist narratives we’ve been fed about Copland’s prairies and Gershwin’s city streets. But promising premises and satisfying performances don’t always coincide. Loeffler’s La Mort de Tintageles opens the disc, and here at least the conception holds firm.
This is strange, twilit music—part Wagner, part early Debussy, wholly itself in its orchestral luxuriance. Loeffler, that curious Alsatian transplant who spent decades as concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, wrote for an enormous orchestra; including two harps, celesta, English horn, and the haunting viola d’amore that threads through the score like Isolde’s half-remembered dream. Dauphine Dupuy plays that treacherous instrument with admirable security, though I wanted more vibrato, more sensual abandon in those soaring phrases where the viola d’amore should sound like it’s singing from another century entirely.
The Basque National Orchestra navigates Loeffler’s dense textures with considerable finesse—listen to how; the strings cushion those chromatic descents around the ten-minute mark, all velvet and shadow. But there’s something too polite here, too careful. Loeffler’s score, inspired by a Maeterlinck drama that probably seemed profound in 1897 and now reads like perfumed nonsense, needs more than clean execution.
It needs decay, eroticism, the whiff of something decadent. Treviño gives us a well-groomed performance when the music cries out for dangerous intimacy. The Ruggles Evocations fares better, perhaps because this composer’s granite-hewn modernism resists prettification.
These four brief movements—originally for piano, orchestrated by the composer in his late sixties—sound like granite blocks being slowly, methodically arranged by some cosmic mason. The dissonances don’t resolve; they accumulate. Treviño understands this music’s architectural severity, and the orchestra responds with impressive unanimity in those treacherous brass clusters.
Still, I’ve heard more terrifying accounts. John Mauceri’s recording with the American Symphony Orchestra finds something genuinely apocalyptic in these pages. Then comes Hanson’s Before the Dawn, and suddenly we’re in different territory entirely—and not necessarily better territory.
This early work, written when Hanson was just twenty-four and already director of the Eastman School, wears its Respighi influence on both sleeves. It’s gorgeous in that art-deco-poster sort of way, all burnished brass and shimmering strings building toward a sunrise that arrives right on schedule. Treviño and his forces play it beautifully.
Too beautifully, perhaps. The performance is so immaculate, so perfectly balanced, that the music’s essential slightness becomes impossible to ignore. This is cocktail-hour Americana, not the real thing.
The Cowell Variations should anchor the program—nineteen minutes of music from a genuine American original, a composer who understood folk traditions, Eastern musics, and high modernism with equal facility. Should anchor it. But something’s gone wrong here.
Cowell’s theme, announced by solo flute, wants to sound folk-like, artless even, but the players makes it sound studied. The variations that follow explore an impressive range of textures and moods—there’s a fugato that Hindemith would — have approved, a percussion-dominated section that nods toward Cowell’s own experimental past, a string variation of Coplandesque transparency. Yet the interpretation never quite catches fire….
Tempi feel cautious; climaxes arrive without the proper preparation or release. I kept wanting more spontaneity, more risk-taking, more of the wild inventiveness that made Cowell such a force in American music. The production itself, made in the Miramón auditorium, captures the orchestra in pleasant, somewhat — distant sound—plenty of hall ambience, perhaps too much for music that often demands more immediacy.
The balance is generally good, though I wanted more bite from the brass in the Ruggles and more presence for that viola d’amore in the Loeffler. This disc wants to reveal neglected corners of American orchestral music, and yes, we need more Loeffler and Ruggles on disc. But we need performances that illuminate why these composers matter, not just that they existed.
Treviño conducts with obvious intelligence and preparation. What’s missing is the kind of passionate advocacy that makes you sit up and reconsider music you thought you knew—or discover music you didn’t know you needed. This is respectable, well-intentioned work.
