Cheap Schuman, William: Credendum, Piano Concerto, Fourth Symphony (Music) (W. Schuman, Mccabe, D.A. Miller, Albany So) Price

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Customer Reviews of Schuman, William: Credendum, Piano Concerto, Fourth Symphony

"Credendum," (Latin for "That Which Must Be Believed," and subtitled "Article of Faith") exists in this orchestral version and also in a wind band version fashioned by the composer. It was commissioned by the State Department to honor UNESCO. It has three sections. The first, "Declaration," is a forthright and declamatory movement primarily for brass, winds and percussion. It feels like an oration about important things. The second section, "Chorale," is primarily for strings and is an urban nocturne. It is interrupted by the bustling "Finale," which eventually leads back to a restatement of the striking "Declaration" material. This piece has always struck me as the most rhetorical of Schuman's works and, given the circumstances of its commission, that is appropriate. There is still available a recording of "Credendum" by Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadephia Orchestra; the current performance is its equal and is in superior sound.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Piano Concerto (1943). I was attending a public rehearsal of the piece many years ago (Samuel Lipman was the pianist) and noticed a woman in the audience following a score. I asked if I could look on, and thus started one of my longest and closest friendships. The piece is brashly jazzy in spots, and features one of Schuman's most characteristic techniques, that of rhythmically interesting modern counterpoint. Schuman was certainly one of the most skilful of mid-century America's contrapuntists. The fugal sections of the finale are light-hearted and invigorating. Particularly effective is the middle movement, an achingly yearning night-piece, reminding one of the better-known "Lonely Town" that Leonard Bernstein wrote a year or so later for his ballet "On the Town."

The Fourth Symphony (1941) is similar to its more famous brother, the Third. It is in three movements. It begins with a mournful English horn solo accompanied by a solo bass viol; this sets the tone for the symphony as a whole. It is dark, passionate, often bitter in tone. (That tone was perhaps appropriate in that its première came only weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.) The last movement features an attractive fugue - Schuman seems to work fugal passages into most of his orchestral music - which is heard above the opening movement's striding bass line; eventually the two themes are set against each other in the bass voices before the symphony comes to a close in a blaze of victorious C major.

Schuman's music now strikes a somewhat nostalgic chord in that it celebrates the broad-shouldered, if occasionally bewildered, optimism of the industrial, urban USA at a time when that optimism was being tested by the Second World War. The big rhetorical gestures may now feel a little trite; the irony of our age doesn't allow for that kind of open-hearted determination, more's the pity. It is strong, attractive, skilfully made music that undoubtedly will last, even if it is somewhat out of fashion these days.

David Alan Miller obtains lively, lovely performances from the Albany Symphony Orchestra, a group that for decades has made a real reputation for itself by playing modern American music. John McCabe gives an alert and musical account of the piano concerto, certainly outdoing the old and inadequate recording with Gary Steigerwalt and the MIT Symphony. And the performance of the Fourth Symphony easily outshines the old and now-unobtainable recording by Robert Whitney and the Louisville Symphony.

Scott Morrison