This is a welcome reissue on CD if only because it fills gaps in the British record catalogue. There are more recent recordings of the Piston and Schuman in the American catalogue (in the case of the Piston, the version by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra under Gerard Schwarz is available here on Delos/Pinnacle (CD) DE3074, 9/90), but not the Ruggles. The real landmark for Ruggles was the two-LP set on CBS with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas released as ''The Complete Music of Carl Ruggles'' (reviewed 1/81—nla). As his Barbican concert in the autumn of 1989 showed, Tilson Thomas has a special feeling for Ruggles. He invests the com-poser's credo—dissonance as a moral imperative—with a kind of glamour inherited from the Bernstein tradition. These qualities are present in Tilson Thomas's 1970 performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but the recorded sound isn't as full although it is transferred cleanly to CD with low background noise.
Piston's war-time Symphony No. 2 is very typical. It starts unobtrusively but builds up a melodic sweep through the strings of almost Nordic proportions. But we shouldn't be fooled. The oboe melody (track 1, 2'03'') has a distinctly American rhythm and there are identifiable blue notes, even with this New Englander, in the clarinet and flute solos early in the Adagio. Piston works within limits as a well-behaved Boulanger pupil whom I've sometimes compared to Sir Lennox Berkeley. The Adagio builds to a spacious climax which is well sustained in the performance. The finale has plenty of go, but the muted trumpets fail to come in at 2'53''.
Paul Zukofsky's recording of the Schuman Violin Concerto has some wonderful mystic moments, matching the composer's individual type of rapt stillness (track 7, 3'57'' at the centre of the first movement, or the violin solo entry in the second movement, after the timpani solo). But the two-movement work has a very chunky structure which gave the composer a certain amount of trouble with various revisions. Zukofsky's playing is occasionally rough, but the performance has the measure of Schuman—who else would have accompanied the soloist with three trombones (track 8, 9'55'')?'