A Salute To American Music Clearance Best

This is not just an anthology which works—it’s a wow!

This is the sixteenth gala of the Richard Tucker Music Foundation—”a look at an era just gone by”, as conductor James Conlon calls it—recorded live before an enthusiastic audience. It starts with a great lift-off: America the Beautiful (no mention of its composer Samuel Augustus Ward, whose hymn is treated to a showbiz arrangement) sung by Leontyne Price. At the age of 63 she can still summon enough patriotic fervour to make non-Americans want to apply for citizenship papers on the spot! And she isn’t the oldest performer by any means. Robert Merrill is ten years her senior and delivers Weill’s ”September Song” touchingly but with a maddening tendency to anticipate the beat.

Weill is also represented by the ecstatic virtuosity of the Ice-Cream Sextet from Street Scene, still fresh in one’s memory from the ENO performances in London and the two recordings now available on Decca and TER. Then there are two settings of William Blake’s ”Tiger! Tiger! burning bright” (”Songs of Experience”). Virgil Thomson set the poem twice: this is the second of his Five Songs from William Blake written in 1951, but it is William Bolcom who brings the house down with his version for chanting chorus backed by a variety of orchestral percussion.

One of the most moving performances is Karen Holvik in Stephen Foster’s immaculate Ah! May the red rose live alway, with piano (Steven Blier). More calculating, but equally polished nostalgia comes from Barber, especially ”Must the winter come so soon” from Vanessa, hauntingly sung by Frederica von Stade, recently admired for her Melisande at Covent Garden. But also ”Give me my robe” from Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra, sung with equal poignancy by Carol Vaness.

Tatiana Troyanos sings Copland’s setting of Robert Lowry’s ”At the river” with impressive, quiet dignity. Bernstein is the only composer who gets in three times—the Collegiate Chorale is on form for the first of the Chichester Psalms; Jerry Hadley sings ”Maria”; and there’s an ensemble from Candide. Finally, in case you didn’t sign on for US citizenship, Marilyn Horne gives a truly commanding performance of Berlin’s classic God bless America. This is not just an anthology which works—it’s a wow!

— Peter Dickinson, Gramophone [6/1993]