Variations on America - Explore Unique American-Themed Products & Gifts for Home Decor, Travel, and Patriotic Celebrations

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Review Quinn, Organist and Director of Music at the Cathedral of St John, Albuquerque, presents this all-American program on the 4-95 stop Harrison & Harrison (1962) in Coventry Cathedral. The organ has the traditional sound of many English instruments. The resonance is fine, but the miking seems a bit distant. The clarity in the inner lines is sometimes muffled or fuzzy. This will appeal mostly to collectors--and professors who teach units on American music. There is a certain sameness in sound. I find the tenor of the recording serious if not somber. Perhaps the opening Copland title sums it up. Quinn's aim was to record a number of pieces not previously recorded. The Ives pieces still bring a smile, as one reflects on how "radical" his harmonies were. The fugues are the easiest contrapuntal selections to follow in this program, with their almost textbook form. Cowell (1897-1965) wrote a series of pieces titled `Hymn and Fuguing Tune' (I know of 16) for a variety of ensembles, a form he is said to have defined as "something slow followed by something fast". Number 14 (1962) is a busy work and the only one in the series for organ. It is much more complex than the Ives. He combines two folk-hymn tunes (not identified) with two fuguing tunes. Still's popular Reverie makes a good prelude for services, with hints of spiritual melodies. Barber's piece was written in 1927. The Prelude is a slow, gently imitative work for manuals over a repeated note pattern in the Pedal. Not very interesting. The following fugue subject--an upward scale passage--has more meat to it, yet it too is rather labored. Quinn conveys well the qualities of the variations in Barber's Wondrous Love settings. Stephen Paulus has written music for a broad range of performing ensembles. Triptych from 2000 posits two very rhythmic and quick tempo bookends for a slow central section of remarkable beauty. It has the qualities of an introspective improvisation done by, say, Hancock or even Cochereau. Long held chords with string registration support simple melodies. Very nice. All three movements use hymn tunes (not identified) in their structure. Quinn plays well, but I believe the nature of the program limits its appeal. -- American Record Guide, Donald E Metz, November-December 2009This is one spectacular organ recording, even given its Chandos pedigree. Pedal tones are vividly and viscerally registered, even in the quietest moments, and the sound is utterly undistorted, top to bottom, at all dynamic levels. "Variations on America" is an apt title for this release. In it, Welsh-born organist Iain Quinn has chosen pieces that reflect America's religiosity, innocence, and dynamism. The Copland Preamble for a Solemn Occasion was originally an orchestral score composed in 1949 in commemoration of the first anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. I find it painfully ironic that Copland was hauled before the McCarthy committee in 1953 for his alleged communist sympathies, and that for years thereafter, the FBI maintained a file on him. In that same year, Copland transcribed Preamble for organ. As with all masterful transcriptions, this one seems as if originally conceived for the instrument. That Quinn has dedicated so much of this disc to Charles Ives shows both his understanding and appreciation of the American spirit. Ives was an unrepentant iconoclast, visionary, blazer of new trails, and intensely creative, all the best traits of the American psyche. The notes to this release have imparted something I hadn't previously known--that his Variations on "America" was a work in progress from its inception in 1891--as a written-down set of organ improvisations he had performed in the course of an organ recital in Brewster, N.Y.--until the year 1949, when he added its strikingly bitonal passages. It, like his setting of Adeste fidelis and the two following fugues, is Ivesian to the core in his reverence for its original tune and in his striving to make that all too familiar music into a newly transcendent experience. Ives's protégé Henry Cowell is a highly underrated composer. This performance of his typically well-crafted Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 14 inspired me to go back into my vast vinyl collection in search of the half dozen or so pieces of his that I have. Outstanding among them is a recording of his 1962 Symphony No. 16, "Icelandic," by the Iceland Symphony conducted by William Strickland (CRI 179). Cowell, like Ives, was an experimenter. Unlike Ives, Cowell often immersed himself in the musics of other cultures and sought to incorporate them into contexts that would be intelligible to our Western ears. That "Icelandic" Symphony is based on Icelandic hymnody and minstrelsy. Cowell was also fascinated by the musics of the Far East, putting him in line with, and in some cases a forerunner to, such luminaries as Alan Hovhannes, Harry Partch, Colin McPhee, and Lou Harrison. In this Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 14, however, one finds oneself immersed in pure and quite conventional Americana. African-American composer William Grant Still, a student of both George Chadwick and Edgard Varèse, has written more than his fair share of colorful and highly accessible music. Reverie, a dark-toned and haunting miniature, however, shows another side to his persona. The piece quietly and tentatively searches for resolution, but finds none. I wonder what he would have written were he alive today. Samuel Barber's two pieces show him in a ruminative mode. Composed in 1927, the Prelude and Fugue in B Minor is a comparatively early piece, composed in 1927, and full of quietly stated yearning. Unlike Bach's numerous preludes and fugues, Barber's Fugue never escapes the slow-paced darkness of its Prelude. Wondrous Love, op. 34, composed in 1958, is a set of variations on a shape-note hymn. It, like the Prelude and Fugue, is muted and troubling. To put it in a larger context, and at the peril of nailing shingles to the fog, it projects a sense of overarching yearning and doubt--another facet of the American experience. In their wisdom, the producers of this disc have chosen to put the most spectacular piece last--Paulus's Triptych, composed in 2000. Stephen Paulus (b. 1949), was a student of Dominick Argento, a composer with more than his fair share of stunning choral pieces. This is an all-stops-pulled tour de force for both the organ and the organist, and it, also based on hymnody, conveys to me a celebration of America's might as an industrial and military giant, yet, along the way, positing some deeply existential questions. The organ is that of the 14th-century cathedral of St. Michael in Coventry. It was first built in 1886, and, after the cathedral's destruction in World War II, painstakingly rebuilt by Harrison and Harrison in 1962. That ill-fated but redeemed cathedral provides a fine acoustical surround that enhances and, like Quinn's musicianship, enlivens all the pieces on this release. Full organ specs are provided. -- Fanfare, William Zagorski, Jan-Feb 2010