New York Classical Review

Musically backward? The United States of America? We are the country that gave the world Dudley Buck and George Frederick Bristow!

Folks who attended the National Peace Jubilee in 1869 or the Philadelphia Centennial Celebration in 1876 might have said exactly that, as they heard our homegrown, European-trained composers taking on Handel, Beethoven and Mendelssohn at their own game. Back then, jazz was a disreputable entertainment, not the stuff of State Department tours, and Aaron Copland wasn’t even a gleam in an immigrant’s eye.

Friday night in Carnegie Hall, with the U.S.A. approaching its 250^th birthday, the American Symphony Orchestra, led by Leon Botstein, invited listeners to return with them to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when conductors like Theodore Thomas rode the plains (and the trains) to bring culture-hungry Americans the music of…Wagner. And, sometimes, Buck and Bristow.

All three of those composers figured in Friday’s program, with a tantalizing side trip to the songs of black America, artfully set by Dvořák’s friend from Erie, Pennsylvania, Harry T. Burleigh.

The red-white-and-blue waved over it all, except Wagner’s Großer Festmarsch (Grand Celebration March), which, though composed on commission for the Centennial event in Philadelphia, contained nothing American at all in terms of story or tunes. (More than one contemporary reviewer expressed relief at not having to sit through another set of variations on “Yankee Doodle.”)

On the other hand, Buck’s Festival Overture on the American National Air, which led off Friday’s concert, was as American as they come, being a free fantasy on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” including a full statement of the theme at the end, grandioso, with which conductors used to invite the audience to sing along. (The Bard Festival Chorale played that role lustily Friday.)

Buck, a native of Hartford, Connecticut who was a conservatory classmate of Grieg in Leipzig and became a noted organist, conductor and teacher back in the States, fulfilled his commission for a Fourth of July piece in 1879 with smartly stepping music touched with snare and bass drums à la Sousa.

The patriotic melody stole in, just a few bars at first, in overlapping imitation inspired by Beethoven. Horns led the way as the familiar tune turned sassy, then mellow, then lyrical, and finally to a minor key, a reminder of the dark days of the Civil War, then fresh in memory. Although Friday’s performance could have used more contrast of moods and sense of direction, there was no questioning Buck’s skill at composition.

As to contrast, there was plenty of it between Buck’s patriotic fortissimo finish and the prayerful spiritual songs as arranged by Burleigh and sensitively sung by mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges. (It’s remarkable how the sound of one human voice can give a whole new dimension to an orchestral concert.)  In “Go down, Moses,” Bridges evoked both the suffering of Moses’s people and (in a hair-raising crescendo) the force of his demands for freedom, over a soft orchestral accompaniment that rolled like the Red Sea.

Though he was not officially Dvořák’s pupil, Burleigh was indebted to him for the bright woodwinds and swooping strings of the Christmas song “Behold that Star!” But the imaginative treatment—soft and wondering at first, ringing out with blues harmonies by the close—was all Burleigh’s own. In contrast again, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was a model of restraint, almost an interior monologue for the singer, with just a murmur of strings and winds as accompaniment. Bridges’s exquisite artistry earned her the warmest ovation of the night.

As a participant in Europe’s democratic revolutions of 1848, Richard Wagner might have welcomed the commission from conductor Thomas, his avid advocate, for a centennial piece honoring the American revolution. (He certainly welcomed the $5,000 fee, a tremendous sum in those days.)  Instead, at least on one day recorded in his wife’s diary, he felt “great disgust” for the project, which he (and she) considered “unworthy of him.”

And it showed in the final product. Especially in Friday’s rather stolid performance, the Großer Festmarsch offered moments of Meistersinger-like stride and camaraderie, and a few outré modulations and dramatic pauses, but little of the vital spirit that made Wagner a household name in the U.S. and elsewhere. The piece seemed to be on this program because of the occasion it was written for, not because it contained anything American or was representative of the Wagner who inspired the more progressive American composers.

In any case, the model for George Frederick Bristow’s Symphony No. 5 (“Niagra”) was not Wagner but Beethoven—specifically, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. For what turned out to be his last composition, Bristow produced nothing less than a symphony in four movements with an extended choral finale, inspired not by Beethoven’s Freude (joy) but by an American natural wonder unduplicated in Europe.

The Brooklyn-born Bristow didn’t go abroad for his training, but took lessons from his father, a talented immigrant from England, and from celebrities passing through such as the violinist Ole Bull. He was a longtime member of the New York Philharmonic first violin section, a choral conductor and a teacher in the New York public schools—and, on the evidence of his Fifth Symphony, an imaginative composer and proficient orchestrator in the late-Romantic style.

The distinguished conductor Anton Seidl was slated to introduce this symphony in 1893, but he unexpectedly died two weeks before the concert. The piece had to wait another five years before the composer himself led an incomplete performance in Carnegie Hall.

Changing musical fashions and the logistical challenge of mounting the work caused the symphony to lie unperformed from that day until Friday’s return to Carnegie 128 years later. The work’s overt, wholesale lifting of passages from the “Hallelujah” Chorus by Bristow’s other hero George Frideric Handel may have also been too much for critics and programmers. In any case, Botstein claimed in his program essay that Friday’s performance marked this symphony’s world premiere in its complete form.

A piece inspired by one of the world’s grandest waterfalls deserves to start with a robust sonata movement, and Bristow delivered scampering figures driven by the rat-a-tat rhythm from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony finale, coupled with swirling strings and a mellow horn tune.

On Friday the Andante was distinguished by hymn-like brass and a broad-shouldered variation and fine violin solo à la Brahms, but came a-cropper by the end because of problems with ensemble and intonation. The Scherzo featured piccolo and triangle in a chugging dance spiced by syncopations, which, after a gentler trio, returned with muted strings in a ghostly jamboree.

The finale was based on a poem by a friend of Bristow, Charles Walker Lord, whose encomium to Niagara was reminiscent of another tribute to a waterway, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” by Robert Underwood Johnson, which inspired the great, mystical song and orchestral piece by Charles Ives. But there was little Ivesian transformation in Bristow’s recasting of the hymn tune “Old Hundredth” and Handel’s chorus to set parts of the text.

The capable soloists took turns invoking various meanings of the waterfall: the powerful lyric tenor Freddie Ballentine expressing awe of spirit; the sturdy bass Alan Williams projecting a prayer to the cataract to give him strength for life’s journey; mezzo Bridges and silver-toned soprano Anna Thompson anthropomorphizing the waters as they seek the mother sea; and, after a wild chorus evoking “rapids…eddies..giddy whirlpools,” soprano Thompson returning to pronounce a misty benediction.

A swirling crescendo of strings (Beethoven again) brought in a hearty chorus in praise of the “King of Nature’s wonders,” including a Handelian fugato (which Bristow wrote himself this time) and closing with a choir cutoff and orchestral flourish, one last tribute to Beethoven’s Ninth.

Even in a performance with many rough patches where the energy level often needed a boost, one’s curiosity about Buck and Bristow was whetted. The reputations of Wagner and Burleigh are secure in their respective spheres, but one hopes the other two get more hearings as artists and even orchestras look for repertoire that will set them apart.

The Bard Festival Chorale, prepared by its director James Bagwell, realized Bristow’s borrowings and original passages with alacrity and well-supported pianissimos.

The American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, will perform Weber’s Der Freischütz in French, as arranged by Berlioz, 8 p.m. April 16 at Carnegie Hall. americansymphony.org