The music of American composer William Schuman may be due for a revival. Two generations ago it was commonplace on symphonic programs, and his attempts to create a thoughtful patriotic idiom, which were much admired by
Aaron Copland, could find resonance today. Hear the fine wartime A Free Song: Secular Cantata No. 2 (1942), with its measured words of an America that has been prosperous but now must face "crises of anguish." The text comes from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," and one of Schuman's strengths is his attraction to high-quality texts and his effective ways of deploying them. The a cappella Prelude, composed in 1939, sets a poetic passage from the Thomas Wolfe novel Look Homeward, Angel, with textures ranging from a whispered passage in the full choir to a beautifully written soprano solo, nicely rendered here by Ingrid Kammin. It's a haunting, meditative work. In general the performers, all associated with the University of Illinois, are fine, although the opening American Festival Overture really requires a brasher sound than indefatigable conductor
Ian Hobson can get out of the
Sinfonia da Camera. The bad news is that the world-premiere marquee attraction here is not terribly successful. On Freedom's Ground: An American Cantata for baritone, chorus, and orchestra sets original texts by poet Richard Wilbur and commemorated the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. The work draws on a variety of idioms, including even polka music, intending to suggest the scope of the American national experiment, but this has been done so much better (by
Ives, to begin with), and the themes just don't stand up to the weight of the occasion. The five-movement work gets to be a tough slog by the end of its roughly 40 minutes. This is probably of most interest to Schuman buffs, but it suggests directions for future programming.