Gottschalk/Heinrich

Album review

Written in 1847 and revised in 1856, this symphony, played with great vigor by the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christopher Keene, is a masterpiece by this self-taught, highly original and controversial composer. The title of the work reflects his friendship with the naturalist James Audubon. At the age of forty, Heinrich became a composer while living in a log cabin in Kentucky, and filled his works with great themes of his new homeland -- of the legends of Native Americans, of great birds and beasts, of explorers, of daily life (e.g., The Barbeque Divertimento of 1819). He evolved (some say "naively") an advanced style of musical composition by the use of gestures rather than classical forms, although his "sound" draws from Beethoven, Italian opera and American band music and folk tunes. Critics of the nineteenth century liked his music but couldn't explain why, because there were no formal terms to cover it (" ... in the midst of this sublimity and grandeur, we are sometimes startled by the quaintest and oddest passages we ever heard."). Throughout the symphony, surprising characteristics appear in his use of energetic syncopation and dense coloristic writing, and several delightfully deceptive "big" endings, until surprising the listener with a calm, pastoral flute cadenza over strings as the "real" ending -- perhaps, an image of the Condor flying away into the distance. Originally performed in Brazil in 1869, at an enormous concert with 650 players, Gottschalk's score was stolen and not heard again until 1955. Meanwhile, incomplete piano and duo piano arrangments of the score were played. The opening Andante movement is a lovely Romantic modal texture in a Berlioz-like style. The Allegro moderato is a foot-tapping Cuban rumba with great coloristic writing and even a small fugue at the end.

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