Orchestral Harris-ment

From the Classical Vault Dept.: It numbs me sometimes to think that a review such as the one below was crafted 34 years ago. Although my doctor insists it’s merely neuropathy. In any event, here’s a review spotlighting a Roy Harris work I’m eager to hear again.

                                                                                   

THE MOST REPRESENTATIVE FLAVOR of 20th-century American music is in the music of Roy Harris. It may not be a majority representation – there are too many disparate paths to follow. Nor is it a popular representation – anything that could possibly be labelled classical is damned where popularity is concerned. But a merry amalgam of the many voices of this country sparkles through Harris’s work, as his 1940 (but only recently premiered) violin concerto reveals.

Roy Harris

Soloist Gregory Fulkerson did a magnificent job performing it with the Albany Symphony Orchestra on Friday night at theTroy Music Hall, proving Harris to be a quiet champion in the virtuoso tradition. There was no question that the violin was the star, but a benevolent one, happy to share the spotlight with the orchestra. Led by music director Geoffrey Simon, the ASO was a strong and effective partner.

Tinkering with the concerto tradition a little, Harris opens the single-movement work with a languorous melody on the violin, echoed by a plaintive oboe. The several changes of mood are anticipated by the soloist, urging the orchestra into ever-faster dances, until the piece sweeps to a jaunty finale in which the soloist gets to fiddle his heart out, replete with an impressive parade of technical devices that Fulkerson negotiated with ease.

Harris absorbed the folk-song traditions of this country, and, although he could tend toward the mawkish, as in his “Folkaong Symphony,” he captured, when at his his best, the sense of protest and adventure characteristic of that tradition.

Which also describes a sense that informs symphonic composition in this century. Composers are challenged to find idiomatic voices even as audiences cease to listen and care, which begets such a piece as Donald Erb’s “Treasures of the Snow” which opened the concert.

Written in 1973 for fu1ly stocked orchestra (including a chromatic scale of soda bottles), it’s a three-movement study of texture that begins with a steady crescendo of chaos and proceeds to a display of textural minutiae, finishing with a hilarious sequence of unexpected orchestral color that includes lip-farts on the mouthpieces of reeds and brass and general mayhem in the percussion.

The work has the opacity that allows any competent performance to sound good (can chaos sound bad?), but the ASO has enough experience with such works to convey a conviction that comes only with stylistic familiarity. It must be hoped that the audience shares this sense of adventure.
 
If any single composer can be held responsible for the numbing of the musical mind, I’d nominate Tchaikovsky. Little could he have known that his grand symphonies would accompany the end of an orchestral tradition as a succeeding generation rebelled against the pomp and patness of his work.

His Symphony No. 2, which closed the program, was presented in an original form, before the composer shortened and reworked it. In that respect Tchaikovsky should have been trusted. The work is a pastry – a Russian Danish. Like any pastry, it needed shortening.

The performance began with a certain roughness, as the sections struggled to keep together in the tricky and very pronounced accompanying figures of the opening Allegro. The succeeding movements, however, had the proper glaze of bombast so easily mistaken for excitement.

The next pair of concerts by the Albany Symphony Orchestra will be performed Feb. 26 and 27; Julius Hegyi will conduct music by Haydn and Elgar, and synthesists Priscilla and Barton McLean will perform their own “Voices of the Wild.”

– Schenectady Gazette, 18 January 1988