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By JOHN BELL YOUNG
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 3, 2001
MACDOWELL: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1 & 2, STEPHEN PRUTSMAN, PIANO (NAXOS)
Were it not for the vicissitudes of popular culture, the career and immeasurable contributions of Edward MacDowell (1860-1907), one of the greatest American composers, would not have been foreshadowed by one of his less impressive works, played by every 8-year-old piano student: To a Wild Rose.
A meticulous compositional craftsman, MacDowell was also a painter in sound who, at his most imaginative, could hold his own next to one of his most enthusiastic supporters, Franz Liszt. Though he studied in France and Germany, MacDowell's roots were strictly Yankee. Indeed, after his premature death, the result of head injuries sustained when he was run over by a buggy in Boston, his widow established the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, a still extant institution that went on to support the careers of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thompson, to name only a few.
The two piano concertos are object lessons in charm. Vivacious, elegant, occasionally dizzying and always ardent, these glamorous works are tone poems, sumptuously orchestrated and replete with artfully drawn melodies and glittering passagework.
The magnificent soloist here is another American, Stephen Prutsman, a virtuoso from California. At once substantive and glamorous, Prutsman's musicmaking is unimpeachable for its precision, power and intellectual savvy. As he flies through this music, Prutsman brings to mind, in many ways, a superstar pianist of an earlier generation: Byron Janis. His remarkable reading, for example, of the evanescent Witches Dance is a gossamer affair: fleet-fingered and atmospheric, yes, but hardly superficial.
Aisling Drury Byrne proves an affecting cello soloist in the blithe, tenderhearted Romance for Cello and Orchestra, while Arthur Fagen, a fine New York-born conductor, leads the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, a most impressive ensemble. This recording is yet another entry in Naxos's ambitious American Classics series, a bargain both individually and collectively at its famous budget prices. Grade: A.
-- JOHN BELL YOUNG, Times correspondent