Reuben Blundell and the Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra: American Romantics III
New Focus Recordings

To a large degree the third volume in Reuben Blundell's American Romantics series picks up where the first two left off but for one significant difference. Whereas the initial sets feature Blundell conducting the ten-member Gowanus Arts Ensemble, the third presents material performed by the Philadelphia area Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra, of which he's Music Director (he holds the same title for the Riverside Orchestra in New York). As commendable as the first volumes are, the third benefits noticeably from the opulence a full orchestra brings to the music.

That difference aside, the latest collection shares much with the others, and again we're indebted to Blundell for bringing this material into the world and rescuing it from oblivion. As before, he selected previously unrecorded pieces from the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and those performed are world premieres of works produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the composers were born in America, while others emigrated from Denmark, Canada, and Switzerland. It's natural that some material reflects the influence of a European Romantic style, but a distinct American voice asserts itself, too, especially in those settings that draw from Native American themes and folk songs. Regardless of origin, the album's eight pieces are engagingly melodic and often pastoral and programmatic in character, and, as he did for the first installments, Blundell has provided detailed liner notes that provide fascinating background. Some composers were amazingly prolific: Gena Branscome, for example, wrote operas, orchestral works, and more than 150 songs, whereas the equally inexhaustible Charles Wakefield Cadman composed orchestral suites, chamber works, five operas, film music, and over 250 songs.

The sixty-nine-minute volume's framed by two dynamic pieces, their robust energy in keeping with their respective overture and festival procession status. Prince Hal (An Overture), composed in 1915 by David Stanley Smith (1877-1949), introduces the album on a high and true to overture form is wide-ranging. Alternating between episodes of sweeping grandeur and delicate introspection, the twelve-minute piece captures the rambunctious spirit of the Shakespearean character but also his reflective side. Immediately the impact of the orchestral resources is felt in the symphonic richness of the arrangement and the interplay of the strings, horns, and woodwinds. At album's end is Festzug (Festival Procession) by Ludwig Bonvin (1850-1939), a rousing set-closer marked by a horn theme one could imagine played at a fox hunt.

Rather more representative of the release are the plaintive settings between those bookends. Carl Busch (1862-1943), a familiar name from the preceding volumes, is represented on the third by two standouts, Minnehaha's Vision (1914) and The Song of Chibiabos (1916), both symphonic tone poems. With Busch drawing from Native American themes in the pieces, the first is a particularly lovely evocation that instantiates the pastoral and plaintive dimensions of the volume as a whole. A powerful sense of yearning is conveyed, the material reflecting the young Minnehaha as she awaits Hiawatha with expectation, and the romantic quality intensifies until peaceful resolution arrives, the moment signifying perhaps the couple's wedding (Busch used Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha as originating material for the two settings). Following a gently serenading introduction, The Song of Chibiabos gradually darkens in tone, the work's trajectory perhaps intended to mirror the character's own evolution from beloved friend of Hiawatha to chief of the underworld after malevolent spirits steal him away from the living.

Two lovely miniatures follow. The artistry of Branscome (1881-1977), who was born in Picton, PEI and studied in Chicago and in Berlin (a year under the tutelage of Engelbert Humperdinck) before settling in NYC, is well-accounted for by 1911's A Memory, a gorgeous salon piece for violin that eleven years later was converted into an arrangement for strings and harp by William Happich. At an Old Trysting Place, by Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) and performed in a strings-only arrangement by Edmund Tiersch, is as elegiac as its title suggests and moving, too, despite its brevity (much the same could be said for Cecil Burleigh's At Sunset, graced by a stirring arrangement by William Happich). Considerably longer is Cadman's Thunderbird Suite (1918), a five-part work that, similar to Busch's, incorporates Native American themes, specifically Blackfeet Indian melodies in its three central movements. After the delicate pastoral opener “Before the Sunrise” (note its bird-like flute trills) we're presented with heartfelt longing (“Nuwana's Love Song,” “Night Song”), high spirits (“Wolf Dance”), and sombre drama (“The Passing of Nuwana”).

June 2018