Edward MacDowell - Piano Music (Late Romantic Piano Compositions) (Oehler)

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Edward MacDowell - Piano Music (Late Romantic Piano Compositions) (Oehler)

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This CD brings together works from different periods of Edward MacDowell’s life, thus giving a good overview of the composer’s diverse and many-faceted piano oeuvre. MacDowell’s third piano sonata, Norse, op. 57 opens the recital. It is followed by compositions from his early and middle periods, written either in Germany or in Boston. Three pieces are included here from the cycle Sea Pieces, op. 55: To the Sea, Song and In Mid-Ocean, Composed either in New York or in MacDowell’s summer residence in Peterborough, these are late works, and bring the recital to a close.
MacDowell was a versatile artist, what we would refer to in modern parlance as an ‘allrounder’. In addition to music, he was also intensely interested in painting and poetry, and he prefaced many of his compositions with poems, some of them by well-known writers and some from his own pen.
MacDowell took his inspiration for the Sonata op.57 Worse”(1899, Peterborough and New York) from the Nordic sagas of Gudrun and Sigurd. The work is laid out in three movements, all of which bear clear witness to MacDowell’s striving to achieve an orchestral mode of expression. He links one theme to another in grandiose Fashion, always adhering to his principle that the different themes must be related or connected in some way. In this work the composer makes use of the entire expressive range of his instrument. The individual subjects are all logical in structure and development, and MacDowell displays great mastery in gradually building up to a climax. In keeping with the underlying poetic idea, the classic sonata form is altered or even suspended in places.
In the Four Little Poems, op. 32, (1887, Wiesbaden), MacDowell reached the first creative peak in his career. The four piano pieces reproduce the atmosphere of the poems they are based faithfully and with great sensitivity, giving evidence of the composer‘s considerable talent for tonepainting.
Marionettes, op.38, was originally written in Wiesbaden in 1888, but MacDowell only published the work in 1901, after he had subjected it to a thorough revision. Only then, after adding Prologue and Epilogue to the six genre pictures, did the cycle assume its final form. The eight lively little pieces take their inspiration from the world of the string-puppet theatre, which in the 19th century was a form of entertainment popular with children and adults alike. MacDowell displays an astonishing breadth of expression here, ranging from delicate, finely-woven elegance to strong and heavily-accentuated emotions. In this piano cycle, MacDowell abandoned the traditional Italian terminology, substituting English words and expressions to indicate every nuance of the composer’s intentions. Thus stereotype formulas are replaced by a system of apt yet still flexible explanatory terms, e.g. “with sturdy good humor”, “mockingly”, “longing|y”, “with sinister emphasis”, etc.
In the ten Woodland Sketches, op. 51 (1896, Peterborough and Boston), MacDowell achieves another high point in his composer’s career, reproducing in music with emotional power and precision the landscape and the people that he experienced in the New England town of Peterborough and its surroundings.
MacDowell prefaced each of the eight late Sea Pieces, op. 55 (1896-98, Peterborough and New York), of which To the Sea, Song and In Mid-Ocean are played here, with a short motto or verse. In To the Sea, Song and In Mid-Ocean, he comes very close to a symphonic mode of expression, making use of the piano’s entire tonal spectrum. With a force nothing short of orchestral and with great compositional skill, the brief tonepoems reproduce the elemental power of the ocean. The piece entitled Song stands alone in the sense that it does not have any direct connection with the sea.