Copland: Appalachian Spring; Lincoln Portrait. Hanson: Symphony no. 3
Melvyn Douglas, narrator. Boston Symphony Orchestra; Serge Koussevitzky, conductor.
Dutton Laboratories. Recorded 1940 (Hanson) and 1945 (Copland). Transfers from 78 rpm originals. Compact disc.
Koussevitzky’s Wartime Copland and Hanson: History Speaking through Static
These Dutton transfers plunge us into a specific moment—the mid-1940s, when Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony stood at the center of American musical life, championing native composers with an intensity that now seems almost quaint. The sound is what it is: constricted, bass-heavy in patches, with that peculiar mono compression that makes string tuttis blur into a single urgent mass. But dismissing these performances for sonic reasons would be foolish.
Appalachian Spring catches fire in ways that surprise. Koussevitzky recorded this just months after the premiere—the ink barely dry—and treats it not as the American pastoral icon it would become but as a genuinely modern score, one still crackling with Stravinskian angularities. Those slides at 13:45 that the annotator mentions? They’re almost vulgar, rushed and immediate in a way that later, more “refined” performances iron out entirely. The Petrushka influence leaps out, especially in the spiky wind writing, and Koussevitzky doesn’t soft-pedal the modernist bite. This isn’t folksy Americana; it’s chamber music writ large, nervous and taut.
What really arrests attention, though, is how he shapes the final pages. Instead of letting them simply wind down into benediction, Koussevitzky builds an Abschied—a genuine leave-taking with symphonic weight and consequence. The Shaker melody becomes something more than picturesque; it achieves a kind of tragic simplicity. Whether Copland would have approved is another question, but the maestro’s interpretive conviction is absolute.
Lincoln Portrait offers fewer revelations. Melvyn Douglas narrates with appropriate gravity, but the piece itself—let’s be honest—is more effective propaganda than enduring art. Still, there’s that moment when the music turns inward for “He was born in Kentucky,” and suddenly the bombast drops away. Koussevitzky finds genuine tenderness there, a brief respite before the peroration. James Earl Jones on Delos remains the gold standard for those who want this work, but historians will value this early document.
The Hanson Third is the real curiosity here. This 1940 release predates the symphony’s wider recognition, and Koussevitzky approaches it with the same seriousness he brought to European repertoire. The opening movement rumbles with Sibelian darkness—Pohjola’s Daughter filtered through American optimism, or perhaps American anxiety masquerading as optimism. The orchestration is expert, those pert wind interjections providing relief from the prevailing heaviness. But Hanson’s formal sense wavers. The slow movement reaches for the expansiveness of his Symphony no. 2 and doesn’t quite grasp it; the "finale" turns pesante when it needs drive.
Koussevitzky doesn’t help matters in the largamente, taking “all the time in the world,” as the annotator aptly notes, until the music turns static rather than monumental. Yet there are passages—particularly in the "finale"—where something genuinely unsettling emerges, a whiff of the surrealism that animated Hanson’s opera Merry Mount. (Will someone please record that work complete? The excerpts suggest something far more interesting than the composer’s symphonic blandness would indicate.)
The performances share a quality of high seriousness that’s now almost extinct. These aren’t entertainment; they’re cultural statements, arguments for American music’s legitimacy on the world stage. Koussevitzky conducts as if democracy itself hangs in the balance—which, in 1940 and 1945, perhaps it did.
Dutton’s transfers won’t satisfy audiophiles, but they’re perfectly listenable, free of serious distortion or wow. What matters is the music-making: urgent, committed, historically invaluable. At budget price, this belongs in any collection documenting American music’s coming of age.
