Amy Beach: "Gaelic" Symphony; Piano Concerto

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Music reviews of Amy Beach: "Gaelic" Symphony; Piano Concerto

Music Review: Two Sunny Beaches
Rating: 5 Stars

The Piano Concerto is a four-movement, 37-minute, grandiloquent showpiece that is from the sound world of Grieg or MacDowell: melodious, big-gestured, rigorously crafted with an immediately discernible Romantic form--a crowd-pleaser if ever there was one. And in its day it pleased many concert-goers. Beach herself played the solo part at its 1900 première by the Boston Symphony. It was recorded before, perhaps twenty years ago, by Mary Louise Boehm, a pianist who has made something of a specialty of Beach's music, but this new recording supersedes the older one largely because Feinberg's performance is more assured and brilliant, the sound is crystalline, and the Nashville Symphony's playing is much better than that by the Westphalian Symphony under Siegfried Landau.

Another advantage of this issue is that Beach's once-familiar 'Gaelic Symphony' (1896) is coupled with the Concerto. It has tougher competition on CD--a Chandos recording by Neeme Järvi conducting the Detroit Symphony--but this performance is quite as good, and of course Naxos's budget price, as usual, is a definite plus.

If anything, the 42-minute, four-movement Gaelic Symphony, making use of Irish tunes (as well as original tunes that Beach wrote in the style of Irish folksongs), is even more tuneful and immediately attractive than the Concerto. The Andante second movement is particularly appealing; its major theme is the kind that immediately sticks in your mind's ear and won't let go (what the Germans call an Ohrwurm, an 'ear worm'). The third movement (Lento con molta espressione) is luscious and deeply melancholic. The symphony ends with a congeries of Irish tunes and dances in a paean of dramatic exultation.

I have no hesitation in recommending this CD. It is another recording in Naxos's admired American Classics series which seems to go from glory to glory. Naxos is doing for American classical music what Lyrita, Conifer, Hyperion and Chandos have done for native British music. The ongoing discovery of the depth and value of our American classical heritage continues to thrill me.

Scott Morrison

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