Morton Gould
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MORTON GOULD AMERICAN SYMPHONETTE NO. 2 CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA INTERPLAY | FINDLAY COCKRELL, PIANO AMERICAN SYMPHONETTE NO. 3 CHORALE & FUGUE IN JAZZ ALBANY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1174 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2010 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. his teen years, he’d already earned a measure the Kennedy Center Honors Award for lifetime of celebrity for composing, arranging hit tunes achievement in the performing arts, in 1994, UNDERDOG MOXIE and playing a mean set of ivories in various and the following year the Pulitzer Prize, for Barely over five foot ten, the young Morton Gould in the mid 1930s and ’40s nonetheless Manhattan locales. From there he rose rapidly, his Stringmusic. He died the year after that, in stood like a colossus in the American music scene, one foot planted in the classical, becoming music director and composer-arranger Orlando, Florida, at the age of 82, a musical one in the popular. for a succession of popular radio shows, and alchemist who managed to transmute the raw kept rising, as high as a “not-really-serious” stuff that excited everyday people into brilliantly This disk offers a tantalizing biographer Peter W. Goodman, composer could go. burnished artistic gold. sampling of his work from that confessed it was “like tearing Powerhouse conductors like Toscanini, vibrant decade, featuring two out one’s guts”—a process Stokowski and Mitropoulos all programmed his AMERICAN SYMPHONETTE NO. 2 of his trademark Symphonettes exacerbated by critics who compositions. He in turn conducted the country’s At some point in his swirl of radio and recording (including the standout belittled him, as they had major orchestras. He recorded incessantly— deadlines, Gould wrote four snappy orchestral “Pavanne”) and the gutsy Gershwin before him, as not everything from cowboy songs to his own works miniatures he dubbed “symphonettes.” The first Concerto for Orchestra, wrap- really a “serious” artist. Yet Gould to orchestral standards—garnering a dozen two, probably penned between late 1937 and ping up with his earliest big persisted, partly because he was Grammy nominations and winning the award mid 1938 (Gould was notoriously slapdash about orchestral work—Chorale and simply bursting with music, but itself, for a 1966 Charles Ives album. Jazz dating his compositions), seem to have started Fugue in Jazz—presented in also because of an inexorable may have seduced him early, but his musical off being called his Swing Symphonettes. In short full for the first time since its fear of the wolf at the door. mistresses were many over the years, as he order they became known as just Symphonettes 20-year-old composer wrote it. “Daddy was a Depression delved into film, television, ballet and musical No. 1 and 2 and then as (among other variants) And centerstage is Interplay, the rompishly child,” recalls Abby Gould Burton. “He was comedy, and even tried his hand at hip-hop. his First and Second American Symphonettes. diminutive concerto Jerome Robbins would later always, always petrified of not having enough And when he inevitably plateaued, when the He apparently premiered the first one on air in turn into a choreographic triumph. Pianist Findlay money to support us.” demand for new works depressingly slackened, April 1938 and then conducted it at Manhattan’s Cockrell, longtime Gould devotee (above, right), Before he had offspring of his own to provide headlong into arts administration he plunged, Lewisohn Stadium with the New York Philharmonic not only performs as keyboard soloist but also adds for, Gould was monetary mainstay for his immi- ultimately serving as president of ASCAP from that 10 August. But it was Symphonette No. 2— to these liner notes a personal recollection of his grant parents, three younger brothers and 1986 to1994. He was by then convinced that first broadcast that May Day and performed with first encounter with the music and its creator. assorted other relatives in Queens, New York, no substantive artistic recognition would ever the Philharmonic at Lewisohn on 31 July—that The very act of creation, paradoxically, could where he was born in 1913. His precocious come his way. What then came his way was really caught on. be excruciating for Gould, who, as quoted by musical gifts developed fast and formidably. By Trim and tight, the second symphonette strikes CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA states, “I have attempted to write a show piece No. 1, that has enjoyed more prominence, the ear almost like a hepster’s challenge to Two months before the 1 February 1945 premiere for the modern symphony orchestra. There is especially since it became the score to Jerome Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony: Gould gets that of his Concerto for Orchestra with the Cleveland no programmatic idea,” and summarizes the Robbins’s popular ballet Interplay, the name by homegrown, nifty drum set going without once Orchestra, under Vladimir Golschmann, Gould three movements as “vigorous and assertive,” which (with Gould’s blessing) the orchestral turning his back on Continental culture. The was in Boston, attending the premiere of Béla “lyrical,” and “gay” with virtuosic passages piece itself is now generally known. opening fairly apes the jumpiness of the last Bartók’s own Concerto for Orchestra. It’s tempting and a boogie-woogie underpinning. As with the symphonettes, Gould crafted the movement of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and to wonder, as he skimmed the program note by That hardly does justice to the visceral punch piano concertette with his radio audiences in the finale’s theme—as Gould later told inter- the aging Hungarian— the Concerto packs or to Gould’s inventiveness mind—and also as a vehicle for the Spanish viewer Martin Bookspan—comes straight from as he pits one instrumental family against conductor and pianist, José Iturbi. Iturbi Bach’s third violin partita, only with a gallop. The general mood of the work represents, apart another. The work abounds in, delights in, performed it on the air 25 August 1943, with It was the middle movement, though, with its from the jesting second movement, a gradual tension—between major and minor intervals Gould conducting his WOR orchestra. impudent lilt, that caused the real sensation. transition from the sternness of the first move- (that hallmark of the blues), between “dignified” Iturbi liked freshness and flash, and the new He named it “Pavanne,” purposely misspelling ment and the lugubrious death-song of the and “dirty” playing styles—and in sonic contrast four-movement work exuberantly accommodated it, his daughter Abby explains, to distinguish it third, to the life-assertion of the last one— and mood swings; and its energy has a darkness him, from the jabbing jingle-bell rhythm at the from the famous Pavane by Ravel and also to that even the “gay,” astoundingly bravura finale top, to the breathless sort of barn dance-cum- steer people away from calling it “pa-vain.” whether Gould said to himself, “Lugubrious —ablaze with onrushing violins and erratic Beethoven at the end—not to mention the But however spelled or pronounced, it became death-song? Life-assertion? Maybe that’s why rhythms—can’t quite counteract. Fellow com- contemporary take on a gavotte and the funky for Gould what “The Pink Panther” would later critics pooh-pooh me—I just can’t conceive of poser and pianist Percy Grainger perhaps honky-tonk in between. It so attracted the young become for Henry Mancini—a hit tune everyone my music like that!” summed it up best, in a letter he sent Gould in Robbins, who caught the broadcast, that he hears everywhere, in countless arrangements. How he originally conceived of his Concerto 1955: the Concerto had, he said, “wild beauty.” quickly sought permission to choreograph it. It was even given lyrics by one Gladys Shelley, emerges in a May 1943 letter to conductor Artur The resultant dance piece—a winsome depiction curiously about a “dancing dolly” in a toy store. Rodzinski. He envisioned “a very virtuoso treat- INTERPLAY of kids at play—premiered 1 June 1945 on Conductor David Alan Miller does rather better ment of the orchestra,” possibly with “a lyrical After his four symphonettes, Gould completed Broadway as part of Billy Rose’s Concert at capturing the music’s essence: loyal to the blues” for the second movement and “a wild and two more pint-size spins on a classical format: Varieties and soon entered the regular repertoire composer’s original metronome marking, he colorful boogie-woogie toccata” for the finale. lean little concertos he called “concertettes”— of the American Ballet Theater’s parent company. brings out all the dreamy sexiness latent in When in autumn 1944 Gould finally wrote the one for piano and orchestra, one for viola and the movement, while still hinting at the refined piece for the Cleveland ensemble, he kept close to winds. It was the former, American Concertette court dance its name offhandedly evokes. this conception. His program note for the premiere quaint early-20th-century musical artifact—the Aside from its second movement—a curious Chorales and fugues tend to suggest the 78-rpm vinyl record (the work was short enough intermezzo that contrasts languid violin lines sacred, but if any such resides within this piece, for each movement to fit on one side of two 12-inch and their droopy tone bends with a somber Dies it’s the romanticized sacredness of a Hollywood platters)—at a post-ASO concert reception at the Irae-like bass—No.