Chadwick and Parker are sometimes patronizingly consigned to the pre-history of American serious music: sons of Boston who sought enlightenment in Europe (both studied with Rheinberger in Munich) and returned to impose an irrelevant second-hand Germanic romaticism on the patriots of New England. Only when Parker's pupil Charles Ives began to kick over the traces, the argument continues, did a genuinely American music begin to emerge.
Germanic, or Bohemian, this music certainly is; but for its time—Chadwick's symphony was completed in 1886, Parker's Ballad in 1899—that is scarcely to be wondered at. Chadwick hardly breaks the conventional symphonic mould: Dvorak, with perhaps a hint of Tchaikovsky in the slow movement, is the model. Melodic ideas can run out of steam, formal changes of gear can be awkward, and the music is far too heavily scored. Yet the total result is less ponderous and amateurish than such criticisms may suggest. There is genuine vitality, resulting from an eager embrace of what was then an up-to-date and still evolving mode of expression. Written some years before Dvorak arrived in New York with his New World, Chadwick's symphony is by no means inferior to many second-rank European symphonies of the same vintage.
Parker, a pupil of Chadwick's, seems on the basis of his more modest piece to be a better composer. The influences sound loud and clear here, too: Dvorak, Brahms, even a premonition of Vaughan Williams. But the music has a vigour and an eloquence that make its evident debts (and relative conservatism) irrelevant. Only the ending seems a touch contrived. These are acceptable performances, recorded (apparently in one day in the Troy, NY, Savings Bank Music Hall—see June ''News & Views'', page 7) with a certain lack of clarity in the many thickly orchestrated passages. This disc is nevertheless of more than merely academic interest.'