Search - Roy Harris :: Harris: Folksong Symphony / Creston: Gregorian Chant for String Orchestra

Deserves Four but it gets Five because the other review was

Wayne A. | Belfast, Northern Ireland | 01/20/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As crazy as this may sound, the composers of yore didn't sit around the campfire day after day and write music for our (meaning your and my) entertainment; Rimsky Korsakov didn't do up the story of Scheherazade so that we could test out our new hi-fi systems; Mozart didn't write Serenades so we'd have music for brunch; and Richard Strauss wasn't thinking of rock concerts or Stanley Kubrick when he composed Also Sprach Zarathustra.



Roy Harris wrote the Folksong Symphony in the early Forties at the ugly beginning of an ugly war. It was sung in New York by high-schoolers and broadcast to troops in North Africa. This kind of information is important to having an understanding of a piece of music sometimes. It helps us get a sense of oddities like Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory" which is hardly top flight Beethoven. It prevents us from being summarily dismissive of creative works that deserve a little respect, at least.



No its not like his other symphonies--it's barely a symphony--but it is a fascinating set of arrangements of folksongs. No this isn't a top-flight performance but its good enough and its very well recorded for 1960. The chorus has a common-folk quality that's possibly a hair better than the atmosphere conjured by the high-schoolers at the New York premiere in, I think, 1943. I'm sure some slick group could do a better job today but I'm equally sure they'd miss the whole point--this piece was never meant to be slick or even a serious addition to Harris's symphonic canon. The title--Folksong Symphony--is probably a way of giving something homely and earthy a bit of high-tone; that would make sense back then but I don't have enough room here to explain. The last arrangement is of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Some reviewers (ahem) would probably object to this as a suitable finale movement for a symphony; I'm sure the troops sitting in the sands of North Africa appreciated it nonetheless.



This is a nice work and the performance here is gentle and a bit sweet. Those who are more familiar with softer performance edge of old Broadway recordings than they are with classical will have no problem. Harris fans will enjoy it and so won't those who respond to olde-tyme Americana with a slightly modern edge. Vanguard probably recorded this back in 1960 because it once was a folk and peoples-music oriented label. It's been in and out of the catalogue since then, probably out now for good. Hopefully we'll get a new recording with Kent Nagano and Bryn Terfel in blockbuster SACD format. I'm being ironic.



The Creston piece included is a lovely one for strings based, apparently, on a Gregorian Chant. Those who like the Vaughn Williams string pieces will enjoy this immensely."