Victor Herbert, Irish by birth, moved to Germany when he was eight and came to America when both he and his wife landed gigs with the
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York. Operetta was plainly his strength, and his works in that medium remain his best known. But he soaked up enough of the German tradition (in 1883 he played in a tribute concert to Liszt, with Brahms of all people conducting) to want to write serious music, and he notched several major disasters in that field. That in turn has led to neglect of smaller works like the ones on this album, which contains several gems. No less a figure than Dvorák realized that Herbert wrote effectively for the cello, and the seven pieces for violoncello and string orchestra heard here, even if arranged from earlier cello-and-piano or solo piano works, are delightful pieces that would enlighten any collegiate recital. They were composed in New York in the years after 1900, when Herbert was already gaining renown as a theatrical composer, and they play on the listener's expectation that the cello will simply take the place of a vocal melody: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes it does but then does things only an instrument can do. Cellist
Maximilian Hornung gives lively performances. The five-movement Serenade for string orchestra, Op. 12 (1889), with its central "Liebes-Scene," is a pleasant mixture of Brahmsian idioms, and don't miss the final "Sunset" movement of the Three Pieces for string orchestra, published by G. Schirmer in New York in 1912. It's a gorgeous example of Herbert's gift for sheer melody, and it's all but unknown. The
Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim under
Sebastian Tewinkel occasionally lacks smoothness in the strings and makes you want to hear what could be done with this music in the hands of the
Boston Pops, but now that it has been resuscitated, that's all the more likely to occur.