Photograph of Leon Fleisher made around the time that the recordings on the album being discussed were made (photograph by Bender included in a Seattle Symphony Orchestra brochure, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
The last of the ten CDs in the Sony Classical box set that reproduces the content of all of the recordings released under support by the Fromm Foundation between 1956 and 1963 is explicitly labeled as a “bonus.” Neither Paul Fromm himself nor his Foundation had a hand in its production. The album presents pianist Leon Fleisher playing twentieth-century compositions. Three of the composers were closely affiliated with Fromm: Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Leon Kirchner. The final composer on the album is Ned Rorem.
Taken as a whole, the album amounts to a survey of solo piano music composed during the first half of the twentieth century by Americans. This was a time when American composers were just beginning to come into their own; and, as might be expected, all four of them stood on European shoulders in one way or another. Copland was one of the first students to enjoy the benefits of the Fontainebleau School of Music and Nadia Boulanger. Sessions’ primary European influence came from Ernest Bloch, with whom he studied at Yale University; and he developed a friendship with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles during the time he was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. As has already been observed, Kirchner studied with Schoenberg at the University of California at Los Angeles. Rorem studied at both the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, both rich with European influences; but his more direct influences came from the relationships he established with working musicians and other artists while living in Paris after his studies.
While each of these composers established his own unique voice, the “program” of Fleisher’s album suggests at least signs of a shared rhetoric. They key element of that rhetoric is assertiveness. It is the sort of assertiveness that one encounter’s in the essay that Henry Miller wrote about Edgard Varèse included in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare:
No one asks you to throw Mozart out the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Laotse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.
The compositions by Copland, Sessions, and Kirchner are never shy about scratching at those window-panes with the conviction that there is more to musical life than the past mapped out by the likes of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Frédéric Chopin. There is even a strong sense of determination in the three barcarolles by Rorem that conclude the album, however lyrical the thematic material may be.
From our current vantage point, however, it seems as if that assertiveness did not register as strongly as Fleisher (or the composers he had selected) would have hoped. Over the course of my own listening experience, I have encountered only one of those four pieces in recital, the Copland sonata; and my most recent listening experience was on Conrad Tao’s American Rage album, which I discussed this past November. It is thus likely that this “bonus” offering will, for most listeners, be as much a journey of discovery as were the other nine albums in the Fromm collection.
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