Louisville First Edition Encores: Arthur Bird: Carnival Scene / George Chadwick: Euterpe / Frederick Converse: Endymion’s Narrative, Flivver Ten Million / Arthur Foote: Francesca da Rimini. Louisville Orchestra, Jorge Mester. Albany TROY030-2 (1990) 034061003021
Convers… ensational: “Flivver” is the find, here
Originally posted on Amazon.com in July 2011, apparently sneakily deleted by them at an undetermined time
The Louisville Orchestra was famous, from the 1950s onwards, with record collectors, amateurs of contemporary music and public librarians, for carving for itself a very special niche by devoting much of its activies to commissioning and performing music from contemporary composers, and recording it on their own “Louisville First Edition Records” LPs. It was the visionary idea of Mayor Charles Farnsley and a decision made in 1948 when the orchestra was on the brink of bankruptcy (like any other symphony orchestra in America or elsewhere, box office was simply unable of covering the costs, and the Louisville community wasn’t too supportive either), an idea that was indefatiguably championed until 1967 by its music director, Robert Whitney (who’d been at the helm since 1937 at the age of 33), then succeeded by Jorge Mester.
While Louisville First Edition Recordings totalled circa 180 releases between 1954 and the late 1980s, the CD era wasn’t very favorable to them (for the complete list see here, link will open new tab). They first entered an arrangement with Albany Records in the late 1980s, which resulted in the release of ten CDs, in a Louisville Orchestra collection first called “First Edition Series”, then (for one issue) “First Edition Classics”, before settling on “First Edition Encores”. Then Louisville went it alone, with eleven more, in a very similar presentation but now the series was called “First Edition Recordings” (one of those being not contemporary music but “Lee Luvisi Plays Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op.43 & Beethoven: Piano Concerto 5” on LCD 500 from 1993, barcode 034063050023). Then the orchestra, I think, went bankrupt, and the CD releases were interrupted, other than a few odd and occasional releases on other labels, the most significant being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Concerto Grosso; Symphony No. 3; Oboe Concerto on Koch International Classics 3-7278-2H1 (1995), barcode 099923727828. In the early 2000s an organization called The Santa Fe Music Group acquired the rights to the Louisville catalog and started reissuing it, in attractive reissues (in a collection now called First Edition Music) that, contrary to the Louisville tradition of motley assortments of composers and styles, were coherently composer-centered – the downside being that many of those CDs were disappointingly short. Sadly Santa Fe Music Group closed down not even halfway-through completion of the project, and it has remained that way since (although some of their transfers, including a number that had not been released on CD, appear, as of 2025, to still be available on download).
So much for the background, but it serves to point out the originality of the present release – Troy 030-2, part of the Albany batch of ten: an exception in the Louisville tradition, it is devoted not to music contemporary of when it was recorded, but to US music of the late 19th and early 20th century, featuring now nearly forgotten American composers of that era, who were among the prominent composers of their days, before the emergence of the generation of early 20th century composers that really put American music on the map, and made history: Ives, Cowell, Antheil, Copland, Thompson – you name ‘em. That small trend – recording not contemporary composers but forgotten composers and repertoires of the past (even more forgotten back then than now) – had been initiated in 1970 by Jorge Mester, who released a Louisville LP (co-published by RCA in Europe) with Max Bruch’s 2nd Symphony and Julius Rietz’ Concert-Overture opus 7 (Louisville LS 703), one with Joachim’s Violin Concerto (LS 705), another one with Reger’s Comedy-overture and Felix Weingartner’s orchestration of Bizet’s Chromatic Variations (LS 734), and Moszkowski’s Violin Concerto paired with Ernest Guiraud’s The Fantastic Hunt (LS 743).
While I have and have reviewed almost all the Louisville CD releases, I long shied away from this one, fearing that those composers and their compositions would be no more than hack rehashes of 19th Century German music.
Well – for the most part, they are. Not surprisingly, all these composers except Arthur Foote were trained in Germany, as was the norm for American composers back then, and even Foote was a student of Berlin-trained John Knowles Paine. No wonder that this is a “lost” generation. American classical music – meaning, not just classical music composed by American composers, but classical music that had something specifically American to say – was created by Ives, Cowell, Antheil, Copland and that later generation.
And not that these are the most talented and interesting imitations and imitators, either. While not nearly as genuinely “American” as the composers mentioned above, the symphonic poems of Loeffler (1861-1935) and Griffes (1884-1920) are well up to the best of their models, and still today can be heard with genuine pleasure and a sense of discovery; but then, although they too were trained in Germany (though he claimed to be an Alsatian, Loeffler was a true Berliner, although he is the only one who studied composition in France; he emigrated to the US in 1881, aged 20), their influences were French rather than German (and less Debussy than Saint-Saens, D’Indy and Chausson, in my opinion).
But the symphonic poems of Converse (“Endymion’s Narrative” from 1901, subtitled Romance for Orchestra), Chadwick (“Euterpe”, 1903, subtitled Concert-Overture) and Foote (“Francesca da Rimini”, 1891) sound not so much like good imitations of the best tone-poems of Liszt, or of the symphonies of Brahms, or of the orchestral music from the operas of Wagner – to say nothing of Strauss – despite constant whiffs of all these composers. There is a striking similarity with Wagner’s Walküre at 8:55 into Converse’s Endymion, introduced by a low drone note intoned by the bassoon, but after a minute that episode is over, and with its very descriptive and episodic character, the Overture sounds, really, like the run-of-the mill German opera of the days, derived from Spohr. Foote’s Francesca auspiciously starts with the somber hues of Brahms’ more dramatic symphonic moments, or Schicksalslied or Alto Rhapsody, but that doesn’t last long either, and after 1:45 enters a plangent theme on clarinet that makes it skid no so much into Liszt (like Gretchen’s theme in the Faust Symphony) as in the same kind of operatic music, and without the cogency and sweep of the symphonies of, say, Bruch or Volkmann (they happen to be two “minor” German Romantic composers whose symphonies I listened to recently). All those comments apply to Chadwick’s Euterpe.
Not that all this music isn’t well crafted. Sure it is, and it was OK for the symphony hall in late 19th and early 20th century, good introductions to a Violin Concerto of Joachim or Brahms, or a symphony of Spohr or Bruch. Those composers demonstrated that they could write music that was no different, and not inferior to the recognized (and now most of them nearly forgotten) German composers of their days. But they show no distinctive personality, Foote’s tone-poem could have been written by Converse or Chadwick – or Spohr – and the other way around.
Arthur Bird’s “Carnival Scene” does stand out to an extent, because of its subject matter and the more boisterous and comical atmosphere it elicits. Again its episodic and descriptive nature smacks of the opera, but one thing that speaks in its favour is that, though the earliest work featured here (1886), it is the one whose language sounds the most 20th century, rather than tritely 19th-romantic – OK, early and conservative 20th century language, the kind of music you imagine was much in vogue in Edwardian and Georgian England, but 20th century nonetheless: not so much Liszt (even less Strauss) as, say, Minkus or Lanchberry. Still, it doesn’t exhibit much distinctive personality either.
So, the listener is lulled into a kind of generalized boredom at the predictability of it all, and comes track 5, and suddently the ear is pricked out the lull. Eerie sonorities, pianissimo carpet of strings and mysterious trumpet theme, you’d think you were at the beginning of Villa Lobos’ Little Train of the Caipira, or maybe a precursor of Ives’ Central Park in the Dark. A typical, but highly evocative and colorful “Dawn on….” – well, wherever: dawn is dawn.
So, you jump at the booklet and notes, and it turns out, of all places, this is dawn in Detroit, and it is Converse again, but a quarter-century after Endymion: it is is 1927 tone-poem whose complete tittle – and it is a poem in itself – reads: “Flivver Ten Million: A Joyous Epic Inspired by the Familiar Legend, ‘The Ten Millionth Ford is Now Serving Its Owner””. The title starts making sense when you know that “flivver” was one of the nicknames given to Henry Ford’s epoch-making Ford Model T. The tenth millionth came out of the Detroit factories circa 1925 and the rest seems to have been, indeed, a publicity slogan used by the company back then. Inspired by Honegger’s Pacific 231, “Flivver Ten Million” is then a musical tribute to the famous car and, beyond it, to the American technological era. Keep in mind that Varèse’s Amériques was premiered in 1922, and John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers composed also in 1926. The orchestration uses automobile horn, factory whistle, anvil and wind machine, and the various episodes (here not tracked but indexed, and clearly indicated on the back cover) include “Dawn in Detroit”, “The City Stirs”, “The Call to Labor”, “March of the Toilers”, “The Din of the Builders”, “The Hero emerges from the welter: full fledged ready for service. He tries his metal” – here, at 5:31, Converse hilariously evokes the baby’s first cries with the automobile horn –, “He wanders forth into the great world, in search of adventure” and so forth.
And Converse was far-seeing too about the downsides of the technological civilization: after “The Joy Riders (America’s Frolics)”, his depiction ante-ends with “The Collision (america’s Tragedy)” – aren’t we exactly there? [2025 P.S. remember that this was written before 2016…] But Converse was a true American, also: he ends it not there, but with “Phoenix Americanus (The Hero, righted and shaken, proceeds on his way with redoubled energy, typical of the indomitable American spirit” [2025 addendum: Let’s hope he was prescient].
But, although the slapstick aspect of it can easily draw one to give the music short-shrift as mere jest, it isn’t just a slapstick jest. It is hugely entertaining, colorful, orchestrally inventive, original. That Converse could move from Endymion to Flivver proves again that one must never abandon hope that the human person can get better. Flivver would be reason enough to buy this disc – but I see that the ever-entreprising JoAnn Falletta has recorded a Converse disc for the ever-entreprising Naxos, 8.559116 bacode 636943911624, with the two pieces featured here and one more, so that is obviously now the better buy. I’ve just bought a copy. TT 68:35
But a sad concluding note. Checking on the orchestra’s entry on Wikipedia, I read the following : “The Louisville Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 3, 2010.” Things haven’t changed since 1948 and the visionary ideas of Mayor Charles Farnsley.