BMOP/sound Releases Walter Piston Album

courtesy of AMT PR

Regular readers are probably familiar by now with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and its BMOP/sound label, each of whose releases tends to focus on a single composer that contributed to the repertoire of twentieth-century music. The most recent article on this site surveyed roughly three decades of compositions by John Adams, following up on an album of early compositions by Elliott Carter, released about two months earlier. Last month BMOP/sound released two new albums, and the composers are sufficiently different that these albums deserve to be examined separately.

This article will deal with the album devoted to the music of Walter Piston. Piston was a major figure in the Harvard University Music Department when I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman in September of 1963. Determined to make studies my major focus, I limited my extracurricular activities to the campus radio station (whose call letters, at that time, were WTBS), where I launched a weekly program entitled Music of the Twentieth Century. With the assistance of my Program Manager, I was able to record an interview with Piston during that program’s first season, even though my knowledge of him was limited to the suite he had extracted from his score for the ballet “The Incredible Flutist” and an awareness of his four textbooks, Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration, and Harmony. My only other awareness of Piston took place in 1965, when I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiere his eighth symphony.

The fact is that Piston did not make very much of an impression beyond the Greater Boston Area. The only exception was that “Incredible Flutist” suite, which Howard Hanson had recorded with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra for Mercury, an album that only made the transition from vinyl to CD in one of the Mercury “anthology” collections (the second of three released thus far). The themes from that suite remain familiar to me, along with the dog that barks at the end of the “Circus March” movement.

The BMOP/sound does not include the “Flutist” music, which was composed for the ballet in 1938. However, the “major attraction” (for which the album itself is named) is the 1934 concerto for orchestra, making it probably the first effort in that genre to be performed by a major ensemble, the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) with Piston conducting. (Béla Bartók’s more familiar concerto was composed in 1943, also for the BSO.) The more recent selections are the divertimento for nine instruments (1946), a set of variations on a theme by Piston’s composition teacher, Edward Burlingame Hill (1946), and the 1967 clarinet concerto.

While conductor Gil Rose delivers suitably attentive accounts of all four of these selections, none of them ever musters the sort of rhetoric that seizes and maintains listener awareness. The concerto solo work by clarinetist Michael Norsworthy tends to provide the most engaging moments on the album. This may be due in part to Piston’s skill in distilling the entire “concerto journey” into a single movement, but Norsworthy’s performing style may well be just as much of a factor.

When I wrote about the Adams album, I suggested that his early work situated him among composers that were determined to advance beyond what I called “the ‘mathematical abstractions’ of post-Schoenberg serial technique.” Piston was interested in those techniques, and they left recognizable marks on his clarinet concerto. Nevertheless, no one would confuse his music with anything by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, or those later “mathematical abstractions.” However, while he could reject such premises when working on the four selections on this album, it is unclear just what premises he was committed to accepting.