Americascapes
Charles Martin LOEFFLER (1861–1935)
La Mort de Tintageles, Op. 6 (1897) [25:48]
Carl RUGGLES (1876–1971)
Evocations (orchestral version, 1943) [10:13]
Howard HANSON (1896–1991)
Before the Dawn, Op. 17 (1920) [6:44]
Henry COWELL (1897–1965)
Variations for Orchestra (1956) [19:21]
Dauphine Dupuy (viola d’amore) (Loeffler)
Basque National Orchestra/Robert Treviño
rec. 15–19 September 2020; Miramón, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
ONDINE ODE1396-2 [63:06]
The American symphonic tradition between 1897 and 1956 resists easy summary—perhaps because it never quite constituted a tradition at all. This Ondine release, intelligently programmed by Robert Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra, gathers four composers who shared little beyond geography and a certain prickly independence. What emerges is less a coherent landscape than a series of isolated peaks, each catching different light.
Charles Martin Loeffler remains the most elusive figure here, and La Mort de Tintagiles the most seductive music. This 1897 score—inspired by Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama—inhabits a twilight world somewhere between late Romanticism and the threshold of something stranger. Loeffler, Alsatian-born, Berlin-trained, a violinist in the Boston Symphony for two decades, absorbed influences promiscuously: Wagner, certainly, but also Debussy before most Americans knew the name. The orchestration shimmers with unusual colors—the viola d’amore (played here with appropriate tenderness by Dauphine Dupuy) weaving through textures that suggest Celtic mist and medieval reverie without ever quite committing to either.
There’s something hothouse about this music, almost decadent in its refinement. The harmonic language hovers perpetually on the edge of resolution, chromatic lines sliding past one another like silk. Treviño understands the score’s ambiguity, refusing to push it toward either Wagnerian grandeur or impressionist vagueness. The Basque orchestra—an ensemble I’ve not encountered often enough—responds with remarkable sensitivity to Loeffler’s subtle demands. Listen to how the strings sustain that long, dying fall around the thirteen-minute mark: it’s the sound of Pre-Raphaelite painting translated into orchestral color.
Carl Ruggles makes for a violent contrast. Evocations, in its 1943 orchestral incarnation, compresses a lifetime of uncompromising modernism into ten minutes of granitic intensity. Ruggles wrote so little—his entire output barely fills a single disc—because he carved each note as if in stone, revising obsessively, destroying more than he kept. This is music that refuses charm, refuses even basic pleasantness. The four movements (or evocations, if you prefer) build from craggy dissonances that never quite resolve, brass chorale-like passages that sound simultaneously ancient and utterly modern.
What’s remarkable here is Treviño’s refusal to soften Ruggles’s asperities. The opening “Largo” emerges with all its awkward nobility intact, the melodic lines deliberately avoiding the comfortable intervals that might make them singable. This is American transcendentalism in sound—Emerson’s self-reliance translated into a harmonic language that owes nothing to anyone. The recording captures the music’s sculptural quality; you can hear the weight of each sonority, the way Ruggles builds his structures from massive blocks of sound rather than flowing lines.
Howard Hanson’s Before the Dawn offers the disc’s only conventional beauty, and after Ruggles it arrives like a cool drink. This early work—Hanson was only twenty-four—already displays the Nordic romanticism that would mark his entire output. The six minutes unfold as a single arch, pastoral themes emerging from darkness into tentative light. It’s skillfully done, orchestrated with a sure hand, but it feels oddly cautious after what’s preceded it. Hanson would champion American music tirelessly as director of the Eastman School, but his own idiom remained firmly rooted in late nineteenth-century models. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but the music doesn’t surprise.
Henry Cowell’s Variations for Orchestra closes the disc with characteristic inventiveness. By 1956, Cowell had long since moved past his early experiments with tone clusters and prepared piano—those notorious assaults on the keyboard that had scandalized audiences in the 1920s. These variations display instead a mature craftsman at work, exploring orchestral color with an almost scientific curiosity. Each variation investigates a different timbral possibility: now the strings in harmonics, now the winds in close harmony, now the percussion in complex polyrhythmic patterns.
The music’s episodic structure could feel disconnected, but Cowell’s ear for orchestral blend holds it together. There’s real wit here—the fifth variation’s mock-solemn brass chorale, the seventh’s refined filigree of woodwinds. Treviño paces the work expertly, understanding that Cowell’s variations function less as transformations of a theme than as a series of sonic experiments, each self-contained yet contributing to a larger architecture.
The Basque National Orchestra plays throughout with technical security and stylistic awareness. The ensemble’s sound—warmer and more rounded than the typical American orchestra—suits this repertoire surprisingly well, lending even Ruggles’s thorniest moments a certain Mediterranean glow. The release, made in September 2020 at Miramón, captures the orchestra in a spacious acoustic that never becomes diffuse. Details register clearly without spotlighting; the overall impression is of music-making in a real space rather than an engineered construct.
Does the disc cohere as a portrait of American music? Not really—but then, coherence may be beside the point. What we have instead are four distinct voices, each speaking its own language, united only by their refusal to conform to European models. Loeffler’s symbolist reverie, Ruggles’s granite modernism, Hanson’s pastoral romanticism, Cowell’s experimental pragmatism: these are the scattered pieces of an American tradition that never quite jelled into a school or movement. Perhaps that’s the real Americanscape—not a unified landscape but a continent of isolated voices, each insisting on its own vision.
This is valuable work, rescuing Loeffler and Ruggles especially from undeserved obscurity, and presenting all four composers in performances that honor their singular achievements. Recommended without reservation.
