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Album Savings: £7.81 compared to buying all songs
- Original Release Date: 12 Jun 2000
- Format - Music: MP3
- Compatible with MP3 Players (including with iPod®), iTunes, Windows Media Player
- Also available in CD Format
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Naxos "American Classics" has already given us several acclaimed releases by these artists. This one is easily the best so far in terms of performance and sonic quality. The Kiev orchestra are clearly having a field day, and what a splendid band they are ! It's hard to imagine this music being played better by the Boston Pops or New York Philly. The sound quality is every bit as good as you'd expect from a full-price CD by one of the big names.
Morton Gould was a precociously gifted composer, pianist, arranger, and director, who should probably rank right along with Bernstein and Previn. The music presented here is colorful and extrovert. Admittedly some of it would not go amiss behind a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but it's never less than entertaining.
The American Ballads are the most substantial fare here, having moments of Copland-like tenderness as well as quasi-symphonic grandeur, the magnificent final surge of the 'Hymnals' perhaps the best example. The rousing arrangement of 'Johnny comes marching home' in the American Salute is sure to bring the house down, although I don't care much for the exaggeratingly whipped-up tempo in the final pages.
All in all, this is an immensely enjoyable issue. It helps of course if you like Americana. But if you think you don't, perhaps this CD might just change your mind.
Format:Audio CD
Morton Gould is well worth investigating. This disc features a selection of the suites of Americana that he favoured and good examples they are too. What makes this disc remarkable though is just how idiomatic and into the genre this Ukraine orchestra sound. On other Naxos discs I've found them rather crude and ill-prepared. Here they prove to be in excellent form and conductor Kuchar - who has lived in the US I think - has the swagger and feel for this music perfectly. At crazy marketplace prices this is a must buy.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Americansky Salutsky
10 Oct 2000
Format:Audio CD
Morton Gould (1913-1996), that Dean of Americana, avoided banality by ruthlessly breaking up familiar tunes and making his presentation of them entirely developmental. Listen to what he does with "The Star Spangled Banner" in the first of the six "American Ballads" (1976). It is almost Ivesian in its effect of disintegrating the homely into something so dismembered as to be (as the Germans would say) ganz unheimlich. Like Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, Gould also wielded the knack of discovering fundamental motifs common to two or more traditional tunes. Thus, in the second of the "American Ballads," "Amber Waves," we hear fragments of "American the Beautiful" which sound identical to fragments of "The Star Spangled Banner." All sorts of weird instrumental effects pass by on display, like the strange flute-trills that seem to be razzing aspects of "America the Beautiful." The "Foster Gallery" is older by four decades. But even here, Gould is aware that he cannot simply serve up these salon-favorites with new harmonies; he everywhere disrupts and mocks - and eventually reasserts the original validity of - his material. The "American Salute," based on the Civil War song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," is less devious, more heart-on-its-sleeve, in manner, as befits a celebration of the return of victorious American soldiers from Europe and Asia. The National Symphony Orchestra of the Ukraine under Theodore Kuchar play this music as though they were Brooklyn-born and members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. This is a gem in Naxos' seris of American Classics.
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