Double Masters
New CD showcases talents both of American composer and Nashville ensemble
by Marcel Smith
Nashville Symphony Orchestra
Howard Hanson: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 (Naxos of America)
Ezra Pound once wrote that artists may be sorted into three main classes: inventors, masters, and diluters. An inventor discovers a new procedure, while a master refines and improves the inventor’s discovery. Masters are often not commercial successes; at toeing the bottom line, they are likely to be outperformed by diluters, who pander to the tastes of the peanut-crunching, Absolut-sipping crowd. Indeed, most masters are hardly known at all, even among specialists.
Pound was talking about writers, but the insight applies to all the arts, including music—both composing it and performing it. A new CD, released early this month, offers prime examples of just such musical mastery. The Nashville Symphony, in the first of its recordings for the Naxos label’s American Classics series, performs a program of music by Howard Hanson (1896-1981). Neither orchestra nor composer are household names, but this CD demonstrates that both deserve to be much better known.
Howard Hanson, born in Wahoo, Neb. (not exactly the nation’s cultural hub), won the American Academy’s Prix de Rome when he was 25, and was appointed director of the Eastman School of Music when he was 30—a position he would hold for 40 years. As composer, conductor, teacher, and passionate promoter of American music, Hanson was much honored in his lifetime. Even so, his music is not widely heard today; this new CD might help to change that.
Hanson never sought to be an inventor: His music was unabashedly tonal and Romantic throughout his career. He was from early on a lover of rich orchestral colors that recall Brahms or Ralph Vaughan Williams—and more immediately suggest Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg, and Hanson’s teacher in Rome, Ottorini Respighi. Though traditional, Hanson’s sound assimilates and metabolizes that tradition in distinctive ways.
The first offering on this CD is his First Symphony, composed when he was 26. The symphony is a melting-pot product. Hanson was an American from the Midwest, of Scandinavian ancestry, studying at the time in Rome. He calls his symphony the “Nordic” symphony, and indeed Sibelius and Grieg can be heard in it. But so too can Respighi—and all in Hanson’s own idiom. The young composer’s use of form seems improvisational (more Schumann than Bach) and yet is architecturally solid, calling to mind at once the splendor of forests and fjords and Northern Lights and the passionate austerity of Henrik Ibsen’s dramas. This is music that grows on you the more you listen to it.
The “Nordic” symphony is followed by two selections that, in different ways, explore the interplay of erotic urgency and moral constraint. The CD ends with a final selection that serves as a kind of quiet coda: a set of rhythmic variations on two ancient hymns.
The first of the Dionysian selections is a 1938 orchestral suite drawn from Hanson’s only opera, Merry Mount, based on a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though Merry Mount still holds the record for curtain calls at the Met (50), it has very rarely been revived. The story the opera tells is dramatically intense. It centers on a conflict between a community of hedonistic cavaliers and a community of moralistic Puritans in Colonial Massachusetts. Akin to The Scarlet Letter, the story is driven forward by a young Puritan preacher’s obsessive desire for Lady Marigold Sandys, a cavalier’s wife. That obsession explodes into murderous, suicidal violence.
But the music is neither violent nor murderous. It stands in sardonic relation to the events of the fable, from the rich melodious harmonies of the Overture, through the wittily, ironically agile Children’s Dance and the seductively lovely Love Duet, to the percussive throb that ends the Maypole Dances finale. A synopsis of the fable bespeaks raucous melodrama, but the music, as rich as it is, has an almost Mozartian lucidity. It both distances us from the fable and reminds us that the passions wrestling like serpents in the story are as alive now as in the 17th century. The unexpected melding of austere purity with throbbing human passion, of well-governed form with dark force, lifts Hanson beyond his mentor Respighi. There is more to his music than meets the casual ear.
And it is the Nashville Symphony’s performance that lets us hear this. The CD, just a couple ticks under 70 minutes long, is well-chosen, so that the parts within and among all the selections interrelate to make a coherent and dramatically satisfying whole. The program also showcases very well the whole of the orchestra—strings, brass, winds, and percussion (including piano); each of the sections gets the chance to flex its own pecs, while elsewhere the whole ensemble dances together in a corps de ballet, and principal players stand out in solo roles. The sound throughout is about as good as it gets—a solid tribute to the musical intelligence and taste of music director Kenneth Schermerhorn, and a tribute as well to the focused responsiveness of his players.
Sometimes people buy CDs the way they give to the United Way, out of generosity or duty, and never even unshuck them. This is a CD to be bought and listened to carefully. One careful hearing will lead to another, and you’ll only want to hear more.
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