Graeme Steele Johnson: Forgotten Sounds
Delos

Graeme Steele Johnson has established himself as a versatile clarinetist, a member since 2022 of the award-winning American wind quintet WindSync, and a sought-after collaborator with artists such as violinist Stella Chen, Miró Quartet, and Imani Winds. The holder of graduate degrees from the Yale School of Music, Johnson has seen his work as an arranger and performer applauded around the world, and he's recorded for Hyperion Records, Azica Records, MSR Classics, Musica Solis Productions, and now Delos. On Forgotten Sounds, his role is not only that of instrumentalist but also musicologist and archivist. In rescuing Charles Martin Loeffler's Octet from oblivion and giving the work its world-premiere recording, Johnson has not only done a valuable service to the Berlin-born, Boston-based Loeffler (1861-1935) but to classical listeners everywhere.

It was in April 2020 that Johnson, having turned his attention to writing program notes when the early days of the pandemic wiped out performance opportunities, discovered the unpublished manuscript to Loeffler's 125-year-old work. It received two performances in 1897, its premiere at Boston's Association Hall by the Kneisel Quartet and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a March performance a month later by the same musicians at the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner, but, inexplicably, after that was never heard from again.

Why this distinguished chamber work disappeared so completely, given that Loeffler's works were regularly performed at home and abroad during his lifetime, is a tad mystifying, especially when the material possesses such strong melodic appeal (a reviewer at the work's 1897 premiere wrote that it “took nearly everyone by storm”). In liner notes, Johnson opines that perhaps Loeffler “was too American for the European musical establishment and too European for the maverick sound of the New World—a predicament that effectively wrote him out of both musical histories.”

After making the discovery, Johnson set about reconstructing the score from a scan of a handwritten, seventy-five-page manuscript covered in the composer's revisions (“annotations, deletions, scratchings, and sketches,” in his words), the outcome of his dogged, year-long undertaking a three-movement work of a half-hour's duration. Framing Octet on the forty-five-minute release are Johnson's 2018 octet arrangement of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and a second little-known Loeffler work, Timbres oubliés performed as a duet by the clarinetist and harpist Bridget Kibbey.

For his stirring rendering of Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Johnson's joined by flutist Ji Weon Ryu, harpist Han Lash, violist Matthew Cohen, cellist Yun Han, double bassist Kohei Yamaguchi, and violinists Bora Kim and Rachel Loseke. The intimacy of the tone poem is well-suited to the modest ensemble size, and the players, clearly familiar with Debussy's iconic piece, give it a luscious, texturally resplendent reading. Ryu and Lash excel, but singling them out risks shortchanging the others when they execute the material with an equivalent degree of expression and poise.

The performance of Octet involves personnel changes when its arrangement is for two clarinets, two violins, viola, cello, harp, and double bass. Johnson returns, of course, but this time in the company of fellow clarinetist David Shifrin, violinists Stella Chen and Siwoo Kim, violist Matthew Lipman, cellist Samuel DeCaprio, double bassist Sam Suggs, and, on harp, Kibbey. Things begin promisingly with the pastoral warmth of the “Allegro moderato” and a performance by the players that's effervescent and wholly engaged. The musicians seemingly bask in the lilt and languor of the romantic material, with woodwinds, harp, and strings interweaving in a brightly hued tapestry that exudes the homespun character of American folk music. Yearning intensifies in the lyrical adagio, with the emotional outpouring and the upward-seeking arc calling Wagner to mind, and the spirited, folk-tinged andante that concludes the work is no less appealing. As the work advances through its three parts, hints of French, German, and even American composers similarly emerge in Loeffler's writing but never off-puttingly. During the performance's unfolding, you'll probably repeatedly ask yourself why a composition of such splendour hasn't been a staple of the classical repertoire since its premiere.

August 2024