Search - Macdowell, James Tocco :: Piano Works 2

Not the most interesting volume of James Tocco's MacDowell-G

Discophage | France | 11/19/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is volume 2 of James Tocco's 4-volume series of piano music by Griffes and MacDowell, published by Gasparo in the early years of the CD era, back in 1984. See my review of volume 1 (MacDowell: Griffes, Vol. I) for a general presentation of the two composers and the reasons why it was a nice and appropriate idea to pair them together.



MacDowell's four Sonatas were composed in close succession, between 1893 and 1901, and here we get the 3rd, subtitled "Norse" and dedicated to Grieg. Maybe then it is the Grieg influence (I am not familiar enough with the Norwegian's piano output to jugdge), but whereas I rather enjoyed the Rachmaninoff similitudes of the 4th Sonata (volume 1), and the Liszt-Chopin influences in the 2nd (MacDowell & Griffes, Vol. 3), I do not warm up very much to the 3rd. In it I hear only the trite gestures of late 19th-Century Romanticism, grandiloquent and hollow.



Griffes' Rhapsody is an unpublished work from 1912 and it gets its premiere recording here. It sounds to me like second-tier Rachmaninoff, but at least it has a melodic freshness that I don't find in MacDowell's Sonata. I don't find the Fantasy pieces to be among Griffes' most interesting inspirations either. Composed between 1912 and 1915, they consist of a gently-swaying to busily animated Barcarolle, a dreamy Nocturne and a flashy Scherzo. Though the Debussysms can be heard in the Nocturne (not surprisingly, it is the one that was written last), overall the language is not as impressionistically evocative as the composer's Roman Sketches (volume 1) and Three Tone Pictures Op. 5 (MacDowell & Griffes, Vol. 4), and the traces of the trite parlor Romanticism of his days is more in evidence. Also, in the piece's construction Griffes brings to bear all the Romantic pianistic techniques for developing and varying a theme - and I find that he somewhat overdraws his basic material. I don't have any comparative versions against which to check this one, but heard with score, Tocco seems perfectly on top of the music, and in his other instalments in this series where I did have comparative versions, I have indeed usually found him outstanding, so I am assuming he is here as well. But this is not the most interesting volume of the series, and as with the other .discs, at 42:50 the total timing is way too short. Everything would have fitted nicely on 3 CDs.



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