Americans —Lucerne Symphony/James Gaffigan; Paul Jacobs, organ (Harm Mundi 902611)
John Henken’s excellent liner notes for this album begin: “The melting pot pluralism of American music is well-known; ‘famously open,’ as John Adams put it. (The composer, not the president.) These pieces are indeed ‘classics’ of the tradition, distinctive distillations of both individual and national characteristics, each with a secure place in the pre-Mimimalist repertory.” He goes on to comment on each of the works played by a Swiss orchestra led by an American conductor, who was once an assistant here in Cleveland. Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from 'West Side Story' starts the program and Samuel Barber’s celebratory Toccata Festiva for organ and orchestra—both works from the early 1960s—concludes it. In between are Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 3 'The Camp Meeting' with its quotations of well-known hymn tunes, Barber’s brilliant early work, the Overture to 'The School for Scandal,' and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings, described by John Henken as “…. a single, mysteriously oscillating composite melody, heard at the crests of overlapping pulses. It is a mesmerizing work of strange and solemn beauty, ultramodern in concept and boldly individual in execution.” [Release date: Friday May 28]