Search - Josten, Stokowski, American Symphony :: Jungle / Concerto Sacro I & II

Some valuable rediscoveries

Discophage | France | 10/31/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I had never heard of Werner Josten, and although I have downloaded Enno Riekena's invaluable Stokowski discography that is hosted on Geocities - well, it's a long discography, and this entry had escaped my attention. It is by pure coincidence that I chanced upon this disc, and wondered who was that obscure 20th Century composer that Stokowski championed.



Werner Josten (1885-1963) was born in Germany and trained in music in Munich - no pun intended. He emigrated to the United States in 1920 and in 1923 became Professor of Composition at Smith College, a post he retained for 26 years. He was one of the early champions of Renaissance and Baroque music in the US, directing the first American stage performances of Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Orfeo, and of Handel's Xerxes, Apollo e Dafne and Rodelinda. He and Stokowski became acquainted in the twenties and worked together under the aegis of the League of Composers.



"Jungle" (1928) is a fine surprise. It is a 15-minute symphonic poem inspired by the primitivist painter Henri Rousseau's picture "Foret Exotique", and imbued with the composer's fascination with the primitive, sensuous and exotic. The composition displays superb orchestral imagination, using a wide array of exotic percussion instruments to boot including a very litteral Lion's Roar. It evokes the "Amazonian" compositions of Villa Lobos. For its vintage it is quite an impressive piece, loud, rambunctious, dissonant, with even faint traces of Varèse's Amériques (at 12:51). The 1971 sonics are stupendous, with however an artificially long decay time on the last note, and not nearly enough blank time before the beginning of the next track.



Concerto Sacro from 1925 is very different. It is a kind of Sinfonia Concertante or Concerto Grosso for piano and string orchestra (here featuring no less than future composer David Del Tredici as pianist) inspired by the famous Isenheim Altar Tryptich of Renaissance painter Mathias Grünewald's (same painter who is the central figure of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler). The music is programmatic (its program is the Annunciation and the Miracle of Mary, the the Sepulchre and Resurrection) and descriptive (at 4:25 in the second part, track 3, you even get a graphic depiction of the braying ass in the stable at Bethleem) and it is also mystic, generally slow moving, romantic, with rather thick string textures. It evokes Hovhaness' homophonic mysticism, Cowell's Hymn and Fuguing Tunes and Villa Lobos' Bach inspiration (Bachianas Brasileiras, especially in the Lament, track 4). Hindemith's Four Temperaments can also vaguely come to mind. It is a curio more than a convincing musical inspiration, but quite unique even it its kitsch, and well worth a hearing. The original tape suffers a few dropouts.



Canzona Seria, subtitled "A Hamlet Monologue", was originally written for strings in 1940 and rescored for piano and woodwind quintet in 1957. It is a not very original nor distinctive neo-classical work.



The Symphony in F from 1936 is more interesting, and may be even one of the most interesting American symphonies composed in those years. Bear in mind: Barber's First Symphony is from the same year, Harris' First was written three years earlier and Piston's First the year after, and Josten's is in the same league: vigorous, dramatic and forward-moving in its outer movements, epic withoug any sentimentality in its Adagio, mildly dissonant (even a little more than that in the finale), compact also with each movement over with in less than 5 minutes and a half (the finale, which follows the adagio without a break, is not cued, and not even indicated in the booklet). It is conducted here by William Strickland in 1965.



Concerto Sacro, recorded in 1965, first came out on CRI 200, the Symphony from the same year on CRI 225 (paired there with David Van Vactor's First Symphony), while Jungle and Canzona Seria, both recorded in 1971, had their first LP release on CRI SD 267. TT is 72:06. The booklet offers a good general presentation of Josten and informative notes on Jungle and Concerto Sacro, less so on the two other pieces. This is well worth a try.



And a post-script:



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