Stokowski & NBC Pops = COOLEY: Promenade from “Eastbourne”; LAVALLE: Symphonic Rhumba; HARRIS: Folk Hymn of Today; VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Fantasia on Christmas Carols; ZIMBALIST: American Rhapsody; GOULD: Guaracha from Latin-American Symphonette; FERNANDEZ: Batuque; GUARNIERI: Dansa brasiliera–Flor de Tremembe–Dansa selvagem; KELLY: Sunset Reflections from Adirondack Suite; MILHAUD: 4 excerpts from Saudades do Brasil – NBC Symphony Orchestra/ Leopold Stokowski
Guild GHCD 2361, 67:31 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
The ever-versatile colorist Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) here finds representation “in the lighter vein” (to paraphrase one of his RCA Victor LPs), 1941-1944, as he leads the NBC Symphony in ethnic and dance pieces popular to audiences of wartime America. The range of composers themselves proves rather eclectic, opening with a work by NBC violist Carlton Cooley (1898-1981), his recollection the southern coast of England, his Promenade (24 March 1942), which calls for some sea-breeze aeronautics and dervish motives from the NBC strings over plucked chords in the basses. Paul Lavalle (aka Joseph Usifer) served as a clarinetist with the NBC Symphony; his Cuban-style Symphonic Rhumba (1939) receives its world premier (6 December 1942) and the grand treatment–including exotic bird calls and glissandi a la Xavier Cugat–in this inscription.
Stokowski leads the Three Brazilian Dances (1941) of Camargo Guarneri (9 January 1944), the composer’s popular calling-card, the colors a mixture of Brazilian rhythms blended with orchestration Guarnieri absorbed from French impressionist Charles Koechlin. The individual woodwinds flutter, shimmy, and soar in aerial dynamics that well insinuate the tropical birds of the region. The second dance, Flor de Tremembe, utilizes a fugal opening to capture our sense of the panoply of national colors in his palette. The Dansa selvagem emanates those primitive and feral elements we associate with head hunters in movies like James Whale’s Green Hell. From the same concert we hear the Batuque from the opera Malazarte by Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez. A savage pulsating ostinato rips through this visceral dance, its African roots strong despite the Brazilian colors.
Roy Harris often evinced string sympathies for American folk music, and his 1942 Rhythms of Today (rec. 19 December 1943) alternately put on war paint and banjos in spirited colors, the NBC brass and battery quite busy. We can hear Mischa Mischakoff’s plaintive violin in the midst of “prairie music,” the softer riffs reminiscent of Virgil Thomson’s film scores. Robert Kelly (1916-2007) rarely finds himself on concert programs, but his Sunset Reflections from Op. 1 Adirondack Suite (18 November 1941) give us the only pre-WW II moment of bucolic innocence on this disc, the moment recorded at Cosmopolitan Opera New York. Darius Milhaud, the consummate collector of dance and jazz rhythms, created his Nostalgic Reminiscences of Brazil in 1917, and Stokowski selected four of them for his concert 14 April 1942. Botafago sounds like a feria dance or drunken song. Copacabana elicits tropical breezes and unsteady dancers. Ipanema frolics for less than minute but bubbles with Rio de Janeiro gaiety. Gavea gives us fort-five seconds of village flutes and exotic colors.
Stokowski and Ralph Vaughan Williams remained devoted friends, and this world premier (19 December 1943) of the Fantasia on Christmas Carols oozes with devotions of the season, and maybe a nod or two to Tiny Tim. Let nothing you dismay. Virtuoso Russian violinist Efrem Zimbalist (1889-1985) concocted his jingoistic American Rhapsody (1936; rev. 1943), rippling with lush variants of “O Susannah!” and “Turkey in the Straw.” Stokowski (16 January 1944) leads a performance whose date comes soon upon Zimbalist’s premier of the Martinu Concerto with Koussevitzky in Boston on 1 January 1944. The bucolic coloration strongly resembles music by Delius, if we did not know better.
Last, the 15 November 1942 broadcast performance from Radio City of Morton Gould’s Guaracha from his 1941 Latin-American Symphonette, a Cuban dance which likely inspired Bernstein’s dances from West Side Story. It ends with a rhumba in an impish mood.
–Gary Lemco
