Works by Ives, Smyth, Still, Shaw and Elgar
Lausanne Chamber Orchestra/Joshua Weilerstein
Claves CD 3091 102:21 mins (2 discs)
Decades ago, I used to have fun with an old friend concocting imaginary Prom concerts featuring horrid combinations of irreconcilable works. Yoking Charles Ives with Ethel Smyth, however, was one trick we missed, though it rushed into Joshua Weilerstein’s head for this strange and unsatisfying orchestral assemblage recorded in 2020-21 just after his stint as the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra’s artistic director ended.
In his note, Weilerstein establishes three areas of similarity between his five British and American composers: ‘folk music, classical idioms, and a generally warm and Romantic sensibility’. Some of that is true: but listening to the results involves so many disorientating stylistic jolts that common ground soon disappears.
In Weilerstein’s hands, Ives’s sharply impressionistic Three Places in New England proves of no matter: the performance begins by being pedantic, unatmospheric, and oddly balanced, and improves only slightly. Conductor and orchestra appear more at home with the orthodox 19th-century European padding of Ethel Smyth’s breezily confident works: a first recording of the Suite for Strings, arranged from her String Quintet and a Brahmsian Serenade that needs livelier material and judicious weeding.
Of the shorter pieces filling out the album, the orchestral expansion of Caroline Shaw’s 2011 string quartet piece Entr’acte, with its hesitating and haunting repetitions and pizzicato flings, is easily the most enjoyable. Still’s Mother and Child of 1943 is nobly designed if overladen with syrup. Elgar’s ‘Chanson de nuit’ and ‘Chanson de matin’, tacked on like encores at the end, add little to the proceedings except the comfort of familiarity.