The Music of Harl McDonald - Complete Set (1935-56) - PABX015

Harl McDonald: one of America's great forgotten tonal C20 composers

"I hugely enjoyed this voyage through the music of Harl McDonald. He is a composer of great gifts marvelously realized" - Fanfare

Returning to the United States, he began a career as a piano soloist, accompanist, and lecturer on composition, also working as a church choirmaster and, occasionally, a boxer. He received an appointment to teach piano at the Philadelphia Musical Academy in 1924. Within three years, he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, leading several of its choral groups and eventually becoming the head of its music department.

It was probably while preparing some of the university choruses that appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra that McDonald first met Leopold Stokowski, who encouraged his compositional activities by premièring his Santa Fé Trail Symphony in 1934, the first of several McDonald premières the conductor would undertake. That same year, McDonald was appointed to the board of directors of the orchestra, eventually becoming its manager in 1939, a post he would hold for the next sixteen years.

McDonald was a prolific composer; by 1944, it was estimated that he had written over 150 works. Several of them were influenced by his upbringing in the American southwest with its Spanish legacy, which can be heard in The Santa Fé Trail and San Juan Capistrano. Other compositions were suggested by folk themes, such as those in The Legend of the Arkansas Traveler and the Hebraic Poems.

From Childhood came about as a result of McDonald’s visit to Philadelphia Orchestra harpist Edna Phillips’ home. She was singing old English nursery rhymes to her children while improvising accompaniments on the harp. McDonald suggested that a suite based on the songs would make a good piece, which led Phillips and her husband to commission him to write one. The first movement quotes I saw three ships and Lavender’s blue; the second features The jolly miller and Three blind mice; while the third combines references to There was a lady loved a swine, Oranges and lemons and St. Paul’s steeple.

Interest in performing and recording McDonald’s works waned after his death on March 30, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey. Although Ormandy conducted The Santa Fé Trail as late as 1971, no new recordings of McDonald’s compositions have appeared in nearly 60 years, and reissues of earlier ones have been sparse. The Stokowski and Koussevitzky sides were released on CD in the early 1990s, but Ormandy’s recordings of The Santa Fé Trail and Cakewalk have not been seen since the LP era, while the Hebraic Poems and From Childhood have never previously been reissued. It is hoped that the current release will spark a new interest in this neglected composer.

Mark Obert-Thorn

Harl McDonald - Second volume celebrating the music of a forgotten American composer

"I can think of no living American composer who surpasses McDonald at his best. It’s time he was rediscovered" - Fanfare

This second release devoted to the works of Harl McDonald (1899 - 1955) begins with a Concerto for Two Pianos whose eclecticism reflects the wide-ranging influences of the American composer.  The second movement variations start with a Bach-like original theme, while the third is inspired by a dance of northern Mexico called the Juarezca.

My Country at War gathers together three of McDonald’s prior works into a suite.  The first movement, originally titled Overture 1941, premièred two days before the Pearl Harbor attack that drew America into the war that was already raging in the rest of the world.  The second was inspired by the unsuccessful attempt by American forces to withstand a long siege at Bataan.  The final two movements were originally set for baritone and orchestra, but revamped without soloist for the suite.

The cycle Songs of Conquest, based on poems by Phelps Putnam, looks back with pride at the achievements of the American pioneers while looking forward with unease at the then-current world situation.  The first song celebrates humankind’s triumphs (“Man has prevailed ... over insect and beast/He has forgotten the variable seas”).  The second depicts man as alone and terrified (“I am one who am solitary ... I have hurled my questions into the universe/I have pressed them into the earth and into my flesh”).  The third makes a statement about nations being able to resolve their differences rationally, a sentiment which must have already seemed like a lost cause by the time this was recorded (“Let us declare ... That the weight of seeing is upon us”).  The final song returns to the pioneer theme (“We have cut ourselves from our home as with an axe/The sea could not stop us, being our simple road”) before ending with a reprise of “Man has prevailed”.

The Miniature Suite presents McDonald in the rôle of arranger.  John Christopher Smith was a protégé of Handel, who later became an amanuensis to his patron when the older composer became blind.  The three movements were drawn from Smith’s My Hand and Musicke Book, published in London in 1784.

Like his suite From Childhood on Volume One (PASC 402), McDonald drew upon nursery rhymes for his Children’s Symphony.  Here, he introduces young people to symphonic structure by using familiar tunes in a four-movement framework, each of which has a principal and a secondary theme.  The songs used are “London Bridge is Falling Down” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” in the first movement; “Little Bo Peep” and “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be” in the second; “The Farmer in the Dell” and “Jingle Bells” in the third; and “Honey Bee” and “Snow is Falling On My Garden” in the final movement, with a reprise of “London Bridge” to close.

Mark Obert-Thorn

Harl McDonald - Symphony No. 3, Violin Concerto & more!

" I can think of no living American composer who surpasses McDonald at his best" -Fanfare

For this third and final volume in Pristine’s series devoted to the music of Harl McDonald, we turn primarily to live performances of works which were never recorded commercially. His hauntingly melodic Violin Concerto, which had its première the day before the broadcast heard here, shows the influences of several late Romantic composers (Elgar, Sibelius and Rachmaninov among them). The soloist is the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concertmaster, Alexander Hilsberg.

The next selection offers an opportunity to hear a McDonald work in progress. Before he included the “Elegy and Battle Hymn” in his symphonic suite My Country at War (reissued on Pristine PASC 430), it was a stand-alone work with a baritone soloist. The text (“Tall youth, with all of life and living stretched before you/Destroyed, destroyed by treachery”) was based on an essay by Edward Gilson, and deals with the surprise attack on America by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and the promise of retribution to come. The broadcast heard here was the world première performance conducted by Fabien Sevitzky, who had previously introduced the “1941” movement of My Country.

The next work suggests an unexpected connection. A cycle of sorrowful songs based on the works of a Chinese poet, translated in the composer’s vernacular – could his Third Symphony be Harl McDonald’s Das Lied von der Erde? Unlike the Mahler work, however, there is no pentatonic Chinoiserie here; McDonald was not out to stress the cultural origins of his text. “My object,” he wrote in a program note for the work’s première, “was to uncover in the poems four phases of tragedy that were unlimited by racial conventions or literary styles and to concentrate on the subject matter which seemed universal.” Leopold Stokowski introduced the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra in January, 1936, and the Ormandy performance heard here was given the year after McDonald’s death as a tribute by the orchestra to its longtime former manager.

While Mahler may not have been the antecedent for the Third Symphony, Copland was the likely inspiration for the final work on our program, the only studio recording here, and the last one made by the composer. The cantata Builders of America expands on the model of Lincoln Portrait by adding a chorus and focusing on two Presidents. The sung text was based on a poem by Edward Shenton, expanded to include a narration authoritatively declaimed here by actor Claude Rains. The recording was made less than a week after the work’s première during a session otherwise devoted to the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the “Columbia Chamber Orchestra” may well include members of that ensemble. (The solo flautist certainly seems to have William Kincaid’s trademark vibrato.) With the exception of two additional recordings of works which had previously been set down on disc (a 1953 taping of From Childhood conducted by Felix Slatkin, and a 1996 version of “Fiesta” from San Juan Capistrano with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops), Builders of America would bring to a close the discography of the works of Harl McDonald.

Mark Obert-Thorn