post-Mahlerian funeral procession, which might not be out of place on the streets of New Orleans today, is a trumpet and tenor-drum-led oration that speaks of sorrow but more importantly of dignity and resolve. Price loves her brass chorales, as we shall hear. But she also loves her Jubas, with their jazzy strutting cakewalk manner and rhythms celebrating the bodyslapping improvisations that so defiantly substituted for confiscated drums. She even throws in a slide-whistle to wilfully coarsen the joyful noise.

It’s abundantly clear from this recording – download-only for now, but it will be issued on CD in January – that Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his Philadelphia Orchestra are body and soul into the joy and resolve of this music. Price can only have dreamt of performances like these – the fire, the spontaneity, the poetry of the many wind solos, the unapologetic tone that focuses not on neglect but discovery.

The weight of history bears down on the opening movement of the Third Symphony – another of Price’s signature brass chorales, ‘lest we forget’, morphing into a second subject on trumpet and trombone that wraps around you like a warm embrace. Again it’s the hope, not the sorrow, that holds sway. These are big moments where Price clearly feels the burden of the African American experience but allows it to fuel her soul.

The simple and the homespun can grow mighty in her music. There is a quiet pride and majesty about it but equally an infectious joy in the unquenchable spirit of her brothers and sisters. Nézet-Séguin is clearly on a mission to convey that. It isn’t music that was ever going to change the world or indeed the American landscape as Ives and others did – but its honesty, emotional truth and exuberance make it so much more than just a footnote. Had the world been different, what then of Florence Price? What might have been? Plenty of clues here. Edward Seckerson

Schreker . Zemlinsky Schreker Der Geburtstag der Infantin Zemlinsky Die Seejungfrau Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko Onyx F ONYX4197 (79’ • DDD)

Schreker’s Der Geburtstag der Infantin, based on Oscar Wilde’s short story

The Birthday of the Infanta, is most commonly heard in the form of the orchestral suite published in 1923. Petrenko’s recording gives us the original dance pantomime score of 1908, scored for a chamber orchestra of double winds, percussion, harp and strings. It also features around 10 minutes of music not included in the suite, including the tragic moment when the dwarf recognises himself in a mirror and his death from a broken heart. For this reason, the full-length version comes across as a weightier affair than the suite, despite the smaller forces used. In both cases, Schreker’s music is full of melodic and harmonic appeal, and the orchestration is lithe and imaginative. Vasily Petrenko’s interpretation is a pleasure from first to last. The excellent playing of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic brings each of the episodes vividly to life and overall there’s a depth of feeling that outshines the earlier recording by John Axelrod and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra (Nimbus, 1/08).

For a work that was withdrawn by its composer and thought lost for nearly 80 years, Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of interest in recent years, and at least a dozen recordings have appeared since Chailly’s pioneering 1986 account for Decca. Following the publication of the critical edition by Antony Beaumont in 2013, recent recordings have included a four-minute passage in the second movement removed by Zemlinsky before the first performance in 1905. I must admit I’m not wholly convinced that the additional music adds to the effectiveness of the work, and indeed the critical edition includes two versions of the movement so that performers can choose which to perform. Petrenko joins Storgårds, Krivine and Albrecht in including the extra music, and it may well be that this will become the standard version. The passage in question, depicting the realm of the Merwitch, commences at 7’06”. As in the Schreker piece, Petrenko directs a strongly communicative performance of Zemlinsky’s sumptuous score and the work’s many solos are beautifully rendered. The recording sounds slightly distanced but is detailed and well balanced. Altogether a very attractive release. Christian Hoskins

‘Americascapes’ Cowell Variations for Orchestra Hanson Before the Dawn, Op 17 Loeffler La mort de Tintagiles, Op 6a Ruggles Evocations a Delphine Dupuy va d’amore Basque National Orchestra / Robert Trevino Ondine F ODE1396-2 (63’ • DDD)

Robert Trevino has put together a cleverly varied programme of little-

known American orchestral works. Indeed, this is the premiere recording of Howard Hanson’s Before the Dawn (1920), a youthful, curiously compact tone poem full of heaving emotion. A sad, rather lovely passage starting at 3’13” seems to me to be not just at the work’s centre but also its heart, and it’s beautifully played here by the Basque National Orchestra’s woodwinds.

Carl Ruggles also crams quite a lot into his four miniature Evocations (1943) – better known in their original version for solo piano – though individually and as a set they sound satisfyingly complete. He was a famously cantankerous character and his music is both painstakingly written and uncompromising. Trevino emphasises lyricism over cragginess, and if his interpretation is less finely detailed than Tilson Thomas’s with the Rochester Symphony (originally on CBS, 1/81), it still packs a punch.

Charles Martin Loeffler was born near Berlin but emigrated in 1881 to the US, where he became a violinist in the Boston Symphony. Loeffler’s musical response to Maeterlinck’s La mort de Tintagiles is not nearly as macabre as the puppet play itself but is nonetheless exquisitely crafted and often ingeniously colourful. Listen, say, at 14’20” and you might think that he was cribbing from Debussy’s La mer, though actually Loeffler’s tone poem came first, having been premiered in 1898 (though it’s played here in its 1901 revision). Loeffler’s melodies may not always be the most striking or memorable but I find something to entrance my ears in nearly every bar – note, for example, the prominent part for the fragile-sounding viola d’amore (first heard at 8’00”). Trevino’s reading is slightly broader than John Nelson’s with the Indianapolis Symphony (New World, 9/88) but still conveys the composer’s keen sense of dramatic pacing.

Henry Cowell is best remembered as the radical who first employed tone clusters (Bartók asked his permission to use them), but the Variations for Orchestra (1956) comes from his more conservative later years. There are a few tone clusters here (the high-lying cloud of violins at 4’31”, say) along with other modernist techniques carried over from his iconoclastic youth, although these exist in the context of a more traditional language. What’s

46 GRAMOPHONE 46 GRAMOPHONE SHORTLIST 2022

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