With the market bearing enough CDs of
Copland's Appalachain Spring to reach to the sun and back, it seems there would be room for the delightful (and regrettably few) orchestral works of Douglas Moore. Moore preceded
Copland in the use of the modern "American vernacular" style by a decade, but as Grove's Encyclopedia has pointed out, "time has not been kind to Moore's work." This CRI disc of ancient recordings from the 1950s indicates that this state of affairs may not have been Moore's fault. The Farm Journal is based on Moore's film score for Power and the Land (1940), a documentary made by Pare Lorentz and Joris Ivens. The CRI note writer draws parallels between this score and that by Virgil Thomson for Lorentz' The Plow That Broke the Plains (1937), but Moore's music has nothing of Thomson's acerbic tension. Not is it in possession of
Copland's jerky angularity. Farm Journal is as pure as the plains that it is written to describe; tuneful, lovingly scored, and emotionally tender. Cotillion Suite (1947) is a fine complement to Farm Journal and has many of the same appealing qualities, if it is not as engaging. Time has not been kind to these CRI tapes; Moore's Symphony No. 2 is hard to evaluate due to the gritty, deteriorating mono recordings, poor even for their era. The Marion Bauer works presented here are even worse -- these are SPA (Society for Performing Artists label) tapes seemingly edited for release by a monkey with a meat cleaver. With CRI bidding farewell, once this disc is out of stock these recordings will likely never again appear on CD. So if this program is appealing, the time to act is at hand.