New York Classical Review

The more one knows about Victor Herbert, the more interesting he becomes. That was the premise of a concert of Herbert rarities Friday night at the Église St-Jean-Baptiste Catholic Church on East 76^th Street, as Steven Byess led the New Victor Herbert Orchestra. With high-energy performances and commentary by the orchestra’s founder and dramaturg Alyce Mott, they made a convincing case.

If one had to think of a Herbert-like figure on today’s music scene, a celebrated composer and orchestra leader equally at home with the classics and popular entertainment, it might be John Williams. But Herbert arrived here at a very different time in American history.

Born into an Irish literary family, Herbert grew up in Stuttgart, where he received a thorough German education. He excelled at the cello, which turned out to be his ticket first to Vienna, where he played in the Eduard Strauss orchestra and imbibed waltzes and operettas, and then to the U.S.A., where he became principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera.

His talents for composing and conducting were soon noticed by leading conductors such as Theodore Thomas and Anton Seidl, who commissioned new works from him or hired him as an assistant. For a time, he directed the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, bringing it to a level that rivaled orchestras in Boston and New York, and then toured with his own band, the Victor Herbert Orchestra.

The composer of Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta brought a touch of Continental sophistication to a concert scene that, thanks to contemporaries like George Whitefield Chadwick and John Philip Sousa, was starting to bubble with enthusiasm for American content. As Friday’s program amply demonstrated, Herbert was eager to get with that program too.

Taking over the baton of the 22^nd Regiment Band in 1893 from the legendary Patrick Gilmore, Herbert introduced himself with American Fantasia, which, especially in the orchestral version with strings heard Friday, was a Wagnerian potpourri of ecumenical American tunes, with “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” rubbing shoulders with “Dixie” and “Old Folks at Home,” closing with a full-length rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (for which Friday’s audience rose to its feet).

Herbert composed Columbus Suite for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892. The last movement, “Vision of Columbus,” was to have accompanied a pageant including replicas of Columbus’s ships on Lake Michigan, which never took place, but on Friday it wasn’t hard to imagine the murky dawn, the cry of “Land ho!” and the triumphant arrival, thanks to Herbert’s evocative orchestration.

Herbert’s concertante works for cello, composed to exhibit his skills as composer and soloist, have clung to a spot in the concert hall, particularly the Cello Concerto No. 2. So has the Serenade from the Suite for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 3, his earliest known composition, dating from 1883 when he was 24. In the latter work Daniel Scoggins, the orchestra’s principal cellist, soared easily on Friday over the delicate accompaniment, tinted with pizzicato and triangle.

Herbert celebrated his own roots in the Irish Rhapsody, composed in 1892 for his first orchestra of freelancers, showcasing their skills with bold and varied orchestration. After a splash of brass to start, the piece’s many episodes included a misty moment for harp and woodwinds, a warmly sentimental tune for strings, an incisive oboe dancing a jig, crisp brass punctuations, suspenseful low strings over a pianissimo timpani roll, and finally an expertly built crescendo leading to an exciting fast coda.

Friday’s players executed their parts vividly. The performance would have benefited from a little more gauging of the brass and percussion climaxes, to give it shape and more of a through line.

Herbert composed Royal Sec: A Champagne Gallop, his second known composition, while he was a cellist in Stuttgart’s Royal Court Orchestra. Vienna and the Strauss family were certainly the godparents of this witty horse race, complete with starting bell, wood block, cowbell, and slide whistle.

By 1911 Herbert’s fame was such that the news that he was composing a grand opera for the impresario Oscar Hammerstein aroused a storm of anticipation. But despite its colonial American setting and opera superstars Mary Garden and John McCormack in the lead roles, Natoma was a flop, torpedoed by an inane libretto.

Friday’s performance of the prelude to the opera’s Act III, thick with foreshadowing of the story’s tragic conclusion, gave a sample of what was apparently a high-quality score by a gifted admirer of Liszt and Wagner—a reminder of how much good music has been lost because the stars didn’t align for it to succeed with the public and endure.

Perhaps it made sense that some music didn’t outlast the occasion it was written for. Another world’s fair, the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., included the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performing Herbert’s new piece, Panamericana: Morceau Characteristique. Lasting just a few minutes, this morceau skipped from “Indian” music (pounding timpani, low strings) to “ragtime” (castanets in habanera rhythm) to “Cuban/Spanish” (minor key, hard-driving) before a bang-bang finish, and left no coherent impression.

Another pan-American mix went into Herbert’s Suite of Serenades, four movements designated Spanish, Chinese, Cuban and “Oriental,” composed for a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, titled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” led by bandleader Paul Whiteman.

If this story is starting to sound familiar, it may be because the next piece on that 1924 program was the first performance of a little item by an up-and-coming composer. Its title, suggested by the composer’s brother, was Rhapsody in Blue.

Herbert’s piece was not particularly “modern,” but vintage Herbert: not ethnic caricatures, but characteristic melodies such as a seguidilla for oboe, or a tune in parallel fifths for flutes, or a languid habanera kissed by percussion, attractively presented in ever-changing orchestral guises.

On the other hand, George Gershwin’s piece was a thunderbolt.

It was not hard, listening to Friday’s fine performance of what turned out to be Herbert’s last composition before his death of a heart attack at age 65, to imagine a baton being passed from the pop-classical star of one generation to his counterpart in the next.

Americans love anniversaries, and so of course the city of Chicago celebrated the 12th anniversary of the Auditorium Theatre, inviting Herbert and his Pittsburgh orchestra to perform his new composition, Auditorium Festival March.

Concluding Friday’s program, this boisterous piece launched with a fanfare, then settled Sousa-style into a sturdy hymn-like tune in brass, smoothed it out in strings, and then swung unexpectedly into “Auld Lang Syne”—apparently a tip of the hat to Herbert’s mentor, the Chicago conductor Theodore Thomas–before building the orchestra to maximum power for a spectacular finish.

Here and at other fortissimo endings, the audience paused to savor the church’s reverberation before applauding. No doubt that same reverb was partly to blame for the sheer noisiness of some forte passages, as brass and percussion sounds overlapped themselves.

The orchestra delivered an encore, a “Persian Dance” Herbert composed for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921, in which horns and low strings pounded out a twisty melody to a syncopated beat on bass drum.

This was one more rescue piece from the research of Alyce Mott, a one-woman Herbert movement and founder of the modestly titled “Victor Herbert Renaissance Project LIVE!” Mott has directed Herbert productions and even tried to lift this composer’s curse of bad librettos by writing or reworking libretti for 24 of his operettas. Her commentaries Friday night fairly vibrated with love for her favorite composer, and with scorn for his neglect in our time.