This release on the Ondine label might seem to be an unlikely candidate for high chart placement; the music is little known even to devoted Americanists, and one of the pieces, Howard Hanson's Before the Dawn, here receives its world premiere, but audiences have taken to the album even outside the U.S., and it's partly that the program hangs together in an unusually satisfying way. Conductor Robert Trevino and the Basque National Symphony Orchestra offer two heavily Romantic pieces, the Hanson and the opening La mort de ...
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This release on the Ondine label might seem to be an unlikely candidate for high chart placement; the music is little known even to devoted Americanists, and one of the pieces, Howard Hanson's Before the Dawn, here receives its world premiere, but audiences have taken to the album even outside the U.S., and it's partly that the program hangs together in an unusually satisfying way. Conductor Robert Trevino and the Basque National Symphony Orchestra offer two heavily Romantic pieces, the Hanson and the opening La mort de Tintagiles, Op. 6, of Charles Martin Loeffler, and two more modernist ones, Carl Ruggles' Evocations (in its 1943 orchestral version) and Henry Cowell's Variations for Orchestra. What emerges is just how Romantic American composers were, even when they were being modernist, at least until serialism got its claws into the scene. The Ruggles avoids the usual craggy, truculent quality of performances of his music, which are given lively, rich, enthusiastic performances. Even those who know...
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